Interesting Things #19 — Learning and the treadmill
Hi,
This is Beng Tan and welcome to Interesting Things, a curation of interesting stories and links from tech, work, biz, science, life and stuff.
Happy reading!
#tech
Keeping Up — The more you know, the more you will realize you don’t know. How will you learn it all? You won’t.
How To Thrive As An Average Programmer — I go to bed happy to have a job that I love. It’s a comparatively good life.
I Regret Being a Hipster in Tech — Being a good, happy and healthy developer is not knowing everything but understanding what you need to know. (hn)
WTF is WebAssembly? — Is it possible this is the future of computing as we know it? (hn)
An amazing error message if you put more than 2^24 items in a JS Map object — When working with big data, you can often hit weird limits with a system.
Now that machines can learn, can they unlearn? — Can sensitive data be removed from an AI without retraining from scratch? (hn)
What scientists must know about hardware to write fast code — For non-developers.
Cloudflare thwarts 17.2M rps DDoS attack — The largest ever reported. (hn)
Zoom RCE from Pwn2Own 2021 — We not only explain the bugs and our exploit, but provide a log of our entire process. (hn)
How to write fast Rust code — Focusing more on advanced tools and techniques rather than how to avoid noobie mistakes.
GitHub Apps - How to avoid leaking your customer’s source code with GitHub apps — Default settings may put you at risk of leaking data between installations. (hn)
Gentle Guide to Get Started With tmux — We go through managing panes, windows, and sessions in this blog post.
CSS Animations: A Complete Guide in 7 Levels of Difficulty — Do some magic in plain CSS.
Fun with regular expressions: part I — Some years ago, when i struggled to understand regular expressions, I found these experiments useful.
#work
Why is it so hard to decide to buy? — Engineers the world over continue to build non-core products instead of buying them. (hn)
Replace Your To-Do List With Interstitial Journaling To Increase Productivity — A new tactic that immediately kills procrastination and boosts creative insights. (hn)
Idealist or pragmatist? For a successful job search, know your priorities — Finding work that helps the world and meets your practical needs is possible. (hn)
Work Is a False Idol — Tired workers are opting out of careers and capitalism. (hn)
#business
My Leadership Document — 2021 Edition — Core leadership beliefs and behaviors that I lean on and practice. (hn)
Marc Benioff’s grand strategy: Salesforce, Slack, and the future of work — The future of business as a combination of chat, data analysis, and systems of record. (hn)
The Power of Product Thinking — Knowing what makes a product useful and loved by people. (hn)
#science
How giraffes deal with sky-high blood pressure — Giraffes require scarily high blood pressures yet they escape the massive health problems associated with hypertension. (hn)
Tagged with tracker, Asian giant hornet leads state to nest — North of Seattle near the Canadian border not far from a sighting. (hn)
Scientists Are Proposing a Radical New Framework to Redefine Life on Earth — As the union of two energetic and informatic processes that can encode and pass on adaptive information. (hn)
Neuroscientist Anil Seth: ‘We risk not understanding the central mystery of life’ — Work on developing a scientific explanation for how the brain conjures consciousness. (hn)
The Fundamental Link Between Body Weight and the Immune System — Inflammation plays a critical role in determining how we digest food, and it’s only now starting to reveal itself.
Why People Who Brush Still Get Cavities — If it’s the types of bacteria in your mouth that matter, could you fix your teeth by getting different bacteria?
Baby bats babble, much like human infants — The behavior could shed light on human language learning. (hn)
‘Green steel’: Swedish company ships first batch made without using coal — (hn)
World’s biggest wind turbine shows the disproportionate power of scale — They’re scaling up to ludicrous proportions. (hn)
Mathematical model predicts best way to build muscle — Researchers have developed a model that can predict the optimum exercise regimen. (hn)
How Big Can the Quantum World Be? Physicists Probe the Limits. — How large can an object be and still act like a quantum wave? In theory, any size at all. (hn)
Famous Einstein equation used to create matter from light for first time — Two colliding light particles were used to create a matter-antimatter pair.
2D ‘Supersolid’ That Flows Without Friction Has Been Made For The First Time — And it’s incredibly weird. (hn)
The mysterious origins of Universe’s biggest black holes — New telescopes and techniques are giving us a new way of looking at these giants. (hn)
Cocoa-free chocolate comes from “precision fermentation” — What if a chocolate bar could be made from other plants instead?
#life
Apple’s Double Agent — He spent years inside the iPhone leaks and jailbreak community. He was also spying for Apple.
I was diagnosed with ADHD as an adult. Now I realize how misunderstood this condition is — Misunderstandings and myths may hinder diagnosis, treatment and acceptance that people need. (hn)
The Beauty of Crossed Brain Wires — Synesthesia makes ordinary life marvelous.
Don’t Let Power Corrupt You — Having power can erodes a leader’s effectiveness and also undermine their team’s. (hn)
Vendor, Vidi, Vici! — People sometimes lose sight of the idea that we’re all just trying to get through the day. (hn)
‘Mind blowing’: Grizzly bear DNA maps onto Indigenous language families — Both bears and humans may have been attracted to the same resource-rich regions. (hn)
Hanging By A Thread — Chance encounters lead to both magic and mayhem in ways that are impossible to predict. (hn)
Why it’s OK to let friendships fade out — It may feel awkward, but you don’t actually have to rekindle every relationship you once had. (hn)
China’s digital yuan is a warning to the world — The digital yuan was born as China’s answer to Facebook’s Libra. But it’s much more than that. (hn)
Human shielding and how things impact a person — Reminding myself and others that we don’t all start from the same place every morning. (hn)
#random
The British shipwreck that changed the world (Jul 2021) — Two acts of parliament and the establishment of longitude. (hn)
#end
If you liked these stories, please share them (or this newsletter) with your friends. I would appreciate it if you help me spread the word. 🙏
Enjoy your reading and have a good day, Beng
