2024.08.05 - 40 Thoughts At 40

Title: 2024.08.05 – 40 Thoughts At 40

Good human interface & Third‑party cookies & GitHub Models & 生活主线 & 七分养 & 饿一饿

This Week’s Highlights

40 Thoughts At 40
https://bradfrost.com/blog/post/40-thoughts-at-40/
Well, holy shit, I’m 40! How do I feel, you ask? Great! Better than great. Fantastic even. Life’s a wild ride; I’ve had many many many utterly amazing experiences as well as some really truly capital‑S Shitty experiences. After it’s all said and done, I’m so incredibly grateful to be here. So grateful for the people in my life. So grateful to have the perspective I have. So grateful to be where I’m at in life. So excited for what’s to come.

1. Family is everything. Find your people;
2. Everything is temporary…

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What makes a good human interface?
https://thesephist.com/posts/dm/
A good engaged interface lets us do two things. It lets us:

• see information clearly from the right perspectives, and
• express our intent as naturally and precisely as we desire.

To see and to express. This is what all great engaged interfaces — creative and exploratory tools — are about.

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52 Reasons to Fear that Technological Progress Is Reversing
https://www.honest-broker.com/p/52-reasons-to-fear-that-technological
Now is a time for brutal realism and here's what it tells us.

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Third‑party cookies have got to go
https://www.w3.org/blog/2024/third-party-cookies-have-got-to-go/
After reading Google’s announcement that they no longer plan to deprecate third‑party cookies, we wanted to make our position clear. We have updated our TAG finding “Third‑party cookies must be removed” to spell out our concerns.

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Introducing GitHub Models: A new generation of AI engineers building on GitHub
https://github.blog/news-insights/product-news/introducing-github-models/
We are enabling the rise of the AI engineer with GitHub Models—bringing the power of industry‑leading large and small language models to our more than 100 million users directly on GitHub. Related:

• How Does OpenAI Survive?
• Instead of restricting AI and algorithms, make them explainable
• Embedding.io: Turn websites into knowledge bases
• DeepMind: Mapping the misuse of generative AI

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In‑Depth Reading

How the Paris 2024 Summer Olympics has impacted Internet traffic
https://blog.cloudflare.com/paris-2024-summer-olympics-impacted-internet-traffic
This blog post focuses on the opening ceremony and the initial days of the event, examining the associated impact on Internet traffic—especially in France—the popularity of Olympic websites by country, and the rise in Olympics‑related spam and malicious emails.

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Movable tree CRDTs and Loro's implementation
https://loro.dev/blog/movable-tree
This article introduces the implementation difficulties and challenges of movable‑tree CRDTs when collaborating, and explains how Loro implements them and sorts child nodes. The algorithm has high performance and can be used in production.

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50 Years of Queries
https://cacm.acm.org/research/50-years-of-queries/
A discussion of the evolution of the database industry over the last half‑century, and why the relational database concepts introduced by E. F. Codd have proven so resilient over several decades.

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Patterns for Memory‑Efficient DOM Manipulation with Modern Vanilla JavaScript
https://frontendmasters.com/blog/patterns-for-memory-efficient-dom-manipulation/
Let’s continue the modern vanilla JavaScript series!

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Unified Grid: How We Re‑Architected Slack for Our Largest Customers
https://slack.engineering/unified-grid-how-we-re-architected-slack-for-our-largest-customers/
All software is built atop a core set of assumptions. As new code is added and new use‑cases emerge, software can become unmoored from those assumptions. When this happens, a fundamental tension arises between revisiting those foundational assumptions—which usually entails a lot of work—or trying to support new behavior atop the existing architecture. The latter approach is usually advised, to save time and reduce risk.

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Meet Chrono, our scalable, consistent, metadata‑caching solution
https://dropbox.tech/infrastructure/meet-chrono-our-scalable-consistent-metadata-caching-solution
Efficiently storing and retrieving metadata has long been a core focus for metadata teams at Dropbox, and in recent years we've made significant improvements to our foundational layer. By building our own incrementally scalable key‑value storage, we’ve been able to avoid a necessary doubling of our hardware fleet. As we scale, our evolution continues—but there are still challenges we cannot ignore.

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Running One‑Man SaaS, 9 Years In
https://blog.healthchecks.io/2024/07/running-one-man-saas-9-years-in/
Healthchecks.io launched in July 2015, which means this year we turn 9. Time flies! Healthchecks.io is an online service for monitoring regularly running tasks such as cron jobs. It uses the dead‑man’s‑switch technique: the monitored system must “check in” with Healthchecks.io at regular, configurable time intervals.

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How Google handles JavaScript throughout the indexing process
https://vercel.com/blog/how-google-handles-javascript-throughout-the-indexing-process
MERJ and Vercel's research to demystify Google’s rendering through empirical evidence.

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Fresh Finds

2024 Stack Overflow Developer Survey Deno: What we got wrong about HTTP imports Russ Cox passing torches to Austin and Cherry FastHTML – Modern web applications in pure Python

JS‑PyTorch: A PyTorch‑Like Library for JavaScript Introducing Replit Projects Yet More New Ideas and New Functions: Launching Version 14.1 of Wolfram Language & Mathematica

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Products & Others

Have you found the main thread of your life?
https://mp.weixin.qq.com/s/2a5-l6QvhOzkthvKLbX3eg
“Clarify the main thread of life” has recently become a hot public topic. Some say their main thread is growth—no matter how fierce the storm, they press on. Others claim it’s health, viewing wealth and fame as peripheral. Some feel that after thirty years they’re just handling side quests. Yet many netizens say, “My main mission is to find the main mission,” a sentiment that resonates with the sense of helplessness in their words.

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Busyness may be a façade of stupidity
https://mp.weixin.qq.com/s/dVjseyauSu_jqPHFmpN_eg
In an era of rapid change, instead of filling every minute with work, it’s wiser to pace yourself—some tasks require deep thinking, and you also need time to recharge and recuperate.

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Cai Zhizhong: Don’t let work become our whole life
https://mp.weixin.qq.com/s/NAMH3h9f6amR81grwSHpRA
Work happily, learn to rest, and blend work and leisure harmoniously—that’s the best way to live.

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Liu Lihong | Three‑part treatment, seven‑part nurturing, how to thrive in a summer of three months
https://mp.weixin.qq.com
(content truncated)

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Originally written by Ping Xia (平侠) and published in Chinese on Web技术周刊 (Web Tech Weekly). Translated and adapted for DriftSeas with permission.