Links (63)
Photographs, Katherines, Stealing Airline Wifi, WALL·E, Incompetent Management
Photographs of Roadside America
This collection of Marogolies’ photographs offers an invaluable tour of the diverse vernacular architecture and signage of North America. Some of these wonders remain, while others have gone the way of the dinosaur — which, as it happens, remains one of the American roadside’s most frequent denizens.
The science of naming has a long and illustrious history that we didn’t bother to look at. Instead, we arbitrarily assigned a new(?) model to describe how parents ought to name their children - namely probabilistically. This model has interesting implications, most interestingly that all naming strategies are futile. We also print some plots, for both educational and entertainment purposes, which further emphasize these points and have some nice dinosaurs. But overall, we find only one rule really matters when naming a child: when in doubt, name it Kate.
PySkyWiFi: completely free, unbelievably stupid wi-fi on long-haul flights
Here’s the basic idea: suppose that I logged into my airmiles account and updated my name. If you were also logged in to my account then you could read my new name, from the ground. You could update it again, and I could read your new value. If we kept doing this then the name field of my airmiles account could serve as a tunnel through the airplane’s wi-fi firewall to the real world.
In my experience, very few working developers have a good mental model for Git. Instead, they have a handful of commands they have learned over the years: enough to get by, and little more. The common rejoinder is that developers ought to learn how Git works internally — that everything will make more sense that way. This is nonsense.
If a board is calling the shots, you don’t have much optionality. If your margins are thin, or non-existent, you don’t have much optionality. If the public owns a piece, you don’t have much optionality. If you rely on investment to pay the bills, you don't have much optionality. If you’re too big to change direction quickly, you don’t have much optionality.
The Backrooms of the Internet Archive
Supporting this explosion of creativity and storytelling was the continued fact that nobody knew where the photograph came from. This situation, of a core image having a completely shadowy and unexplained origin, is arguably the foundation of its power.
That changed, recently.
With God as my witness, you grotesque simpleton, if you don't personally write machine learning systems and you open your mouth about AI one more time, I am going to mail you a brick and a piece of paper with a prompt injection telling you to bludgeon yourself in the face with it, then just sit back and wait for you to load it into ChatGPT because you probably can't read unassisted anymore.
Typography and Design in WALL·E
Our hero’s name is not, as you might think, WALL-E. Moreover, it definitely isn’t WALL•E. His name is WALL·E, and that dot is an interpunct, not a hyphen or a bullet.
We need visual programming. No, not like that.
But every time one of these visual programming systems come out, we think "oh neat!" and never try them. I have never seen any of these visual programming systems even be mentioned while trying to solve problems. Why? Why do we keep circling back to visual programming if nobody ever uses it?
The rules are the same as normal tic-tac-toe, but each square has a different probability of a good (smiley face), neutral (meh face), or bad (frowny face) event happening when selected.
Advantages of incompetent management
Competent management sets goals to achieve. Whatever can’t be made into a goal cannot be achieved by definition. Whether this sounds trivial or absurd, it has many surprising undesirable consequences which are surprisingly hard to avoid.
Occupation and Salary Rankings, Each Decade Since 1970
I’m curious about photographers starting at the upper half and move closer to the bottom in later years. Is this because it’s gotten cheaper to process digital photos? Are there just more people who call themselves photographers with easier-to-access equipment?
