Links (71)
cf. Coding for humans, Forbes Marketplace, Hacking Kias, Boats, Armenia
It's hard to write code for computers, but it's even harder to write code for humans
I think it's worth restructuring your entire product to enable fast onboarding. Get rid of mandatory config. Make it absurdly easy to set up API tokens. Remove all the friction. Make it possible for users to use your product on their laptop in a couple of minutes, tops.
Forbes Marketplace: The Parasite SEO Company Trying to Devour Its Host
In 2020, a completely different company from Forbes partnered with Forbes to run their SEO affiliate business. They created a new company, made it look like it’s part of Forbes (it’s not), and then went to town exploiting every last corner of Google.
They refer to themselves as Forbes Advisor publicly but the official entity is Forbes Marketplace.
In fact, this Forbes affiliate frankenstein has gotten so big and so successful that I found claims that Forbes Marketplace is trying to buy the actual Forbes company.
Friends don’t let friends use “cf.”
Cf., in contrast, is probably best seen as currently in a state of rapid semantic drift, with no consensus about its meaning. As a result, it doesn’t matter whether you use cf. in its “correct” sense or its “incorrect” one – some readers will misunderstand.
Hacking Kia: Remotely Controlling Cars With Just a License Plate
We built a tool to demonstrate the impact of these vulnerabilities where an attacker could simply (1) enter the license plate of a Kia vehicle, then (2) execute commands on the vehicle after around 30 seconds. These vulnerabilities have since been fixed, this tool was never released, and the Kia team has validated this was never exploited maliciously.
I built Maslow’s pyramid thing, but it’s a total ripoff - it’s only providing 20% of my needs.
The SS United States' magnificent red, white and blue funnels remain the tallest ever to be installed on a ship — at 65 feet they are themselves as tall as a six-story building. Their design includes distinctive "wings" in the rear that serve to deflect engine exhaust away from passengers on deck.
How the Pumpkin Got on the Tower
Day after day of these long, cold, Instagram-free-walks have a way of getting to you; eventually you find yourself getting lost in your own mind, and inevitably you ponder life's deepest mysteries. And in the fall of 1997, as you looked off into the distance every morning and kept catching that gourded steeple, one such mystery had to be, "Wait, how the hell did they do that?"
Just so, Yerevan is the kind of city where proprietors and town planners think that it is not good enough to simply install a fine coffee shop at the entrance to a park, but that said coffee shop should be sunk under the shade of sprawling sails, misted and greened like a rainforest floor, and whose entrance ought to be marked out with a traditional Caucasian coffee pot the size of an artillery unit.
Indeed, NIH told Science it does not routinely conduct such reviews, because of the difficulty of the process. “There is no evidence that such proactive screening would improve, or is necessary to improve, the research integrity environment at NIH,” the agency added.
Gandy disagrees. “It has to be part of the process now,” he says.
