Data Viz Project
A comprehensive collection of data visualization techniques
Niche InternetVideo Game History Foundation Library | Video Game History Foundation Library
I still don’t think companies serve you ads based on spying through your microphone
Crucially, this was never proven in court. And if Apple settle the case it never will be.
Let’s think this through. For the accusation to be true, Apple would need to be recording those wake word audio snippets and transmitting them back to their servers for additional processing (likely true), but then they would need to be feeding those snippets in almost real time into a system which forwards them onto advertising partners who then feed that information into targeting networks such that next time you view an ad on your phone the information is available to help select the relevant ad.
Why would Apple do that? Especially given both their brand and reputation as a privacy-first company combined with the large amounts of product design and engineering work they’ve put into preventing apps from doing exactly this kind of thing by enforcing permission-based capabilities and ensuring a “microphone active” icon is available at all times when an app is listening in.
In the past three days, I've reviewed over 100 essays from the 2024-2025 college admissions cycle. Here's how I could tell which ones were written by ChatGPT : r/ApplyingToCollege
An experienced college essay reviewer identifies seven distinct patterns that reveal ChatGPT's writing "fingerprint" in admission essays, demonstrating how AI-generated content, despite being well-written, often lacks originality and follows predictable patterns that make it detectable to experienced readers.
Seven key indicators of ChatGPT-written essays:
- Specific vocabulary choices (e.g., "delve," "tapestry")
- Limited types of extended metaphors (weaving, cooking, painting, dance, classical music)
- Distinctive punctuation patterns (em dashes, mixed apostrophe styles)
- Frequent use of tricolons (three-part phrases), especially ascending ones
- Common phrase pattern: "I learned that the true meaning of X is not only Y, it's also Z"
- Predictable future-looking conclusions: "As I progress... I will carry..."
- Multiple ending syndrome (similar to Lord of the Rings movies)
MANAGING FINANCIAL INSTABILITY IN 2025
Managing Financial Instability Risks in 2025
Summary
- The analysis positions itself as a warning about economic warfare, not financial advice
Key threats identified:
- Alleged Russian influence over key US political figures including Trump and Musk
- Strategic goal to dismantle US through internal turmoil and financial destabilization
- Bitcoin characterized as an economic weapon in a zero-sum game
- Christian Nationalist alignment with plans to destroy dollar/Fed system
Immediate financial risks for 2025:
- Potential government shutdown due to no budget passage
- Proposed $2 trillion budget cuts by Musk
- US debt default risk as leverage for cuts
- Strategic Bitcoin Reserve proposal threatening dollar stability
Critical timeline identified:
- January 2 2025: Government runs out of money
- January 3: New Congress installation
- January 20: Treasury transition period
- May 2025: Potential default date ("X-Date")
Recommended defensive measures:
- Diversify holdings across bonds, real estate, gold/silver ETFs
- Avoid Bitcoin/crypto investments
- Contact representatives to oppose extreme measures
Additional considerations:
- Moving to another country unlikely to help financially
- Social Security potentially at risk
- Banking system likely to hold but spreading funds recommended
- Resolution depends on mainstream Republicans recognizing and countering these threats
Document context:
- Living document subject to updates
- Written by Dave Troy, presented as analysis of warfare operations
- Includes extensive bibliography and related articles
- Last updated November 16, 2024
thOS.computer
Website with innovative narrative design using drop-down menus.
Frustrated with science denial : r/QAnonCasualties
The art of the pivot, part 1: The definitive list of successful pivots
Pricing of Webflow freelancers : r/webflow
Some good questions to ask:
Can they show you some examples of past projects they've built in Webflow? Do some checking if their work looks good on smaller devices (Webflow cascades styles down from desktop, so mobile design can sometimes get overlooked)
Are they using a class framework (e.g., Client-first, Mast, Lumos, or custom)? And are they comfortable building the site with a level of modularity that enables easy reuse of sections, components, and styles? This approach simplifies future design updates and makes it easier for your team to manage and expand the site after the handover.
What's their approach to SEO in Webflow?
What do they do to ensure performance and loading speed are optimized?
Do they have a process QA and testing before launching a site?
How do they handle client feedback and revisions?
Do they have a process for educating you on how to use and manage the site they built?
Styling links based on their destination
WebGPU Fundamentals
Calculating Empires: A Genealogy of Technology and Power since 1500
ivanreese/visual-programming-codex: Waypoints to the past and future of visual programming.
Can Footage Like This Be Shot On an iPhone? : r/cinematography
Vertical Politics Spreadsheet - Google Sheets
CMV: I Don’t Feel Empathy For People With ADHD
Explanation of adhd symptom
Thoughts on Perplexity, the pros and cons. : r/perplexity_ai
Remember, you can ask it much more complex questions than Google (best GPU under $1000) vs "I have a budget of $1000 and want a GPU for gaming. I like to play x, y and z and it has to be compatible with my system that has the following specs". If you turn on Pro mode it'll even clarify your query if need be.
I was skeptical until I saw the ending
fried chicken recipe demonstration
A Collection of Design Engineers
Design Engineer is the latest label we're chucking onto the pile of obfuscatory design titles alongside interface designer, interaction designer, software designer, web designer, product designer, design systems architect, UI/UX designer, UX engineer, UI engineer, and front-of-the-front-end engineer.
Throwing this extra label onto the pile feels necessary though. Design engineer captures something simple, important, and worth distinguishing: a person who sits squarely at the intersection of design and engineering, and works to bridge the gap between them.
They're people who know how to run a design process to decide how something should work, look, and feel, and have the engineering chops to implement it. They can quickly iterate on ideas by cycling between design exploration, research, and live code. The skillset is ideal for prototyping, exploratory interaction design, and building robust design systems.
Most from a small set of companies like Vercel, Linear, The Browser Company and Replit, known for their attention to interface design detail and slick product interactions, who are clearly encouraging and cultivating design-engineer hybrids.
People are incentivised to only share their sexy, shiny, flawless creations, rather than their messy process or shameful failures. Some of the especially tedious and labourious work isn't easily shareable, such as advocating for robust design systems and cleaning up legacy code.
I am not under any illusions that these public works constitute the entirety of what design engineers create or spend all day making. I'm sure some spend their days “aligning stakeholders,” buried under a mountain of strategic documents and trapped by heirarchical approval chains. Say a small prayer for them.
339 - The Smorgasbord of Relationships — Multiamory
Profile: haswell | Hacker News
For most of my career, I've been a full-stack dev, tinkerer, technologist, jack-of-all-trades type of person. Currently on sabbatical while I pivot to something...different.Consequentialist-ish, currently worried about the state of tech and its impact on society, and figuring out how to do something useful about it, mostly focused on personal/individual habit change.
Toward Parsimony in Bias Research: A Proposed Common Framework of Belief-Consistent Information Processing for a Set of Biases - Aileen Oeberst, Roland Imhoff, 2023
Here we argue that several—so far mostly unrelated—biases (e.g., bias blind spot, hostile media bias, egocentric/ethnocentric bias, outcome bias) can be traced back to the combination of a fundamental prior belief and humans’ tendency toward belief-consistent information processing. What varies between different biases is essentially the specific belief that guides information processing. More importantly, we propose that different biases even share the same underlying belief and differ only in the specific outcome of information processing that is assessed (i.e., the dependent variable), thus tapping into different manifestations of the same latent information processing.
OpenSecrets
Nonpartisan, independent and nonprofit, OpenSecrets is the nation's premier research group tracking money in U.S. politics and its effect on elections and public policy. Our mission is to track the flow of money in American politics and provide the data and analysis to strengthen democracy.
Products seem sustainable with less-saturated colors
Our research disentangles the direct and indirect impact (via consumers' perceptions of materials' naturalness, product authenticity, and product durability) of low-saturation colors on the perceived eco-friendliness of consumer products. Furthermore, the results reveal that, by fostering perceptions of eco-friendliness and green trust, such colors favorably influence consumers' behavioral intentions (i.e., their purchase intention and intention to pay a premium price for the product). Ultimately, the paper provides useful insights for companies and marketers interested in leveraging the meaning of color saturation to elicit perceptions of environmental compatibility.
On Covering Webcams
Leveraging ChatGPT as a PM: part I (designing A/B experiments)
Tucker Carlson’s chief writer resigns over racist and sexist posts, the latest trouble for Fox’s most controversial star
r/books - Cixin Lu's Three Body Problem trilogy. Am I missing something?
And that a core portion of book two was about how wartime footing caused famines and death and hardship, and then there was an explosion of freedom, innovation, and overconfidence. He critiques both the East and the West. I liked that.
I’ve only finished Books 1 and 2, and truth be told, I read them because I wanted to know what would happen. So I’m definitely more into it for the big concepts and ideas than the stories. But I did find some of the stories very interesting, moving, or sad, or surprising, and I really liked the fact that during the first book, he talked about the Cultural Revolution, and censorship, and stifling political pressure, and as a Chinese insider rather than a critical outsider.
The strength of this book is scale and innovation. The 'writing' is not necessarily the best quality. The author is an engineer, not a professional writer, so you can only expect so much. In return, the ideas are much wilder than the typical sci-fi.
For scale, there are two aspects. First is the depth: you start in the cold war era and literally go the end of the universe, with all the major steps in between. Compare this to other sci-fi, like star trek, that happens in an advanced but static universe. There really aren't any game changing tech coming out through the course of star trek, but happens like 10 times in TBP. You can critique the actual science, but the consequences for each technology felt impactful.
At no point where the human and trisolarians even remotely on even grounds. This is in contrast with many other sci-fi works where aliens things had human equivalents (cars, jewelry, etc.) and they interacted face to face.
Chinese literary convention tends toward less emphasis on the individual and a preference for that which is larger scale. In Chinese literature, putting a lot of emphasis on the internal monologues of characters, expounding on their motivations and detailing the minutiae of events are seen as formal and stylistic faults that make a work tedious.
The highly divergent ideas about narrative and sense of aesthetics can make Chinese literature very difficult to read for us in the west, which is why the most popular ‘translations’ of Chinese literature tend to be abridged adaptations that interpret the spirit of the work rather than the actual contents, this is why Arthur Waley's Monkey: A Folktale of China is by far the most widely known and read version of Journey to the West in the English speaking world and the only people reading actual verbatim translations of the full work by Wu Cheng’en are scholars.