Stones Turned 2021-06-19

I learned about a python library named Arrow that makes time stamp handling better

I stumbled on a new web app called Utopia that seems a lot like a modern DreamWeaver

I read “Modern Python Developers Toolkit and found a lovely page of VSCode plugins

I’m all in with the new Loki series from Disney and CNet had a good explainer for The Variant

I sure hope FLoC is a flop but I feel weird rooting for Amazon

Who among us hasn’t gone along with a scheme to weaken security of a public a utility?

I think I find the most truthful and enlightening stuff on comedy-news sites.

I’m sure this won’t get any more embarrassing for our Humpty-headed pal Marc. It does seem useful for reporters to know that A16Z will straight up lie to you, in service of what Ed Zitron rightly called “coordinated, anti-democratic, anti-free press propaganda.”

I’m starting to think that social networks are a bad technology

Marwick finds that “networked harassment is a tactic used across political and ideological groups and, as we have seen, by groups that do not map easily to political positions, such as conflicts within fandom or arguments over business.” Everyone across social media is constantly signaling affiliations with their desired groups. And each of those groups are trying to enforce a social order of their own based on their preferred moral codes. Dogpiling abounds.

I love that some emojis are basically results of emoji math

The emoji you (hopefully) saw is actually defined in terms of other emojis, spliced together with an invisible codepoint!!

Hey, all of my fellow mortgage debtors had their data leaked by a company that should no longer be in business but definitely is.

The SEC said the 800 million+ records had been publicly available on First American’s website since 2013. In August 2019, the company said a third-party investigation into the exposure identified just 32 consumers whose non-public personal information likely was accessed without authorization.

I found a bunch of new unix tools. I was already using a few of these, like ripgrep, but some of these are mind blowing. Then I found “gron” which is magic for JSON with a crappy trumpish slogan.

I re-read a good article about how Amazon focuses on documents to the point of starting meetings with document reads. I’ve worked with AWS engineers and managers and they are among the most efficient and even-tempered people I’ve met. Their methodologies seem to work.

Even with areas that could use improvement I can’t think of a place I have worked that wouldn’t benefit from document-based meetings. I’m sure with more practice I will get better at writing with a more Amazonian style.

I was not surprised to read that the Brave browser is considered a scam. I liked the plain language of the article but I think there’s a point where the number of badges in your footer is a sign you’re spread too thin.

Amazon made a push into low-code. I’m only surprised that it took them this long to figure it out.

The information war between corporate American and their workers continues so I read a pointless article about people leaving their jobs.

Holy moly, DNA jumps between animal species without cross breeding. What a bizarre and wonderful world.

I looked for a good code snippet manager that works across platforms, including iOS. It was not productive research but here’s some stuff that did not hit my requirements:

massCode

Codespace

Cacher

Snipit.io

SnippetsLab

The final link in this list was just a lovely and adorable explanation of Kafka. I wouldn’t want many more explainers like that but it’s such a treat to be surprised with something adorable.