Good Things Weekly Roundup - 2024-07-22
Things I read, watched, and enjoyed this week
(data saved to/pulled from Readwise Reader)
Youtube Videos
LinkedInTechTalks - John Ousterhout - RAMCloud: Scalable High-Performance Storage Entirely in Dram
The Daily Show - Jon Stewart Tackles the Rnc And Trump Assassination Attempt | the Daily Show
Articles
Articles I Finished
How to Pwn a Billion Dollar Vc Firm Using Inspect Element
kibty.town
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The author discovered sensitive credentials for a16z’s portfolio management site by using a tool to scan for secrets in their JavaScript files. These credentials could potentially allow access to their database and other services. Despite reporting the issue, a16z did not offer a bug bounty because the author made their findings public first.
Short and amazing writeup about how a16z shipped their secrets into production then refused a bug bounty when it was reported.
Why I Don’t Buy 538’s New Election Model
Nate Silver
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Nate Silver criticizes 538’s new election model for relying too little on polls and being unclear in its predictions. He believes Joe Biden’s chances of winning are likely overstated, and the model’s focus on “fundamentals” is misleading. Silver argues that the model’s uncertainty could lead to incorrect interpretations of Biden’s polling situation.
Pretty good article about current state of election prediction models, notably comparing Nate Silver’s new model vs 538’s (538 being Nate Silver’s previous company). Overall, I found Nate’s main point pretty compelling. The 538 model is overindexing on “historical trends/fundamentals” and underindexing on current poll results. The “historical trends/fundamentals” make Biden look better than he is. The current polls indicate Biden is very likely to lose.
Ar Art | the Visceral Glitch
The Visceral Glitch
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The Everlasting Glitchstopper is a unique token created by The Visceral Glitch. It gives you access to monthly glitch art NFTs and AR prints. Only 108 tokens are available, so get yours while you can!
Website of an artist I met at an event in NYC. Pretty interesting! Had a good convo about how he manages his online payments, which is especially interesting now that I work at Square.
Details That You Should Include in Your Article on How We Should Do Something About Mentally Ill Homeless People
Scott Alexander
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The author discusses the challenges of addressing mental illness among homeless individuals and the complexities of involuntary commitment processes. The text explores the limitations of current approaches and the difficulties in ensuring consistent treatment and support for this vulnerable population. Suggestions for solutions, such as social services and housing initiatives, are also considered in the article.
Good article poking the liberal notion that “some unnamed institution” can be set up to solve the problem of homelessness. Asks that people who espouse this claim address specific challenges facing any institution that would be set up to solve this problem. A reminder that these political questions almost always benefit from being specific as possible. And if you can’t get that specific, then you likely don’t understand the problem well enough to reasonably have strong feelings about the solution relative to other plausible options.
Gradle / IntelliJ Memory Leak
Pierre-Yves Ricau
100% completed
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A memory leak in Gradle/IntelliJ was investigated by a team led by Tony Robalik, who found that the heap size kept growing to over 60 GB. The issue was traced to a Finalizer object retaining most of the memory, leading to a fix implemented by Pablo Baxter that resolved the problem and was merged into the IntelliJ master branch. Further investigation revealed a ZipEntry for a jar causing delays in finalization, prompting continued exploration of the issue.
Article from a new coworker at Square, published a while back. Goes into tremendous detail about tracking down a performance bug in Android Studio. Was very impressive/inspiring to see how an engineer can dive into parts of their tech stack that are generally treated as “black boxes”.
Articles I Saved for Later
Panic! at the Job Market
matt.sh
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The text discusses challenges faced by employees in the tech industry, such as working for underperforming companies and being undervalued. It highlights issues like hiring practices, lack of specialization, and the impact of executive decisions on company success. Ultimately, it questions the industry’s shift towards social status over experience and the impact on product quality and employee agency.
Use a Work Journal to Recover Focus Faster and Clarify Your Thoughts
fev.al
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The text discusses the challenges of maintaining focus and productivity while working on multiple tasks. The author suggests using a work journal to help clarify thoughts, recover focus faster, and prevent distractions. By writing down tasks, thoughts, and plans, the author found that they could resume work more efficiently and effectively.
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