This records the weekly technology content worth sharing, released on Fridays.
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Cover image
Tuen Mun Ferry Terminal in Hong Kong, the night view by the sea.（via）)
Information is addictive like sugar.
One consequence of the Industrial Revolution that is rarely mentioned is that humans can mass-produce sugar.
In ancient times, sugar mainly came from sugarcane and honey, and it was difficult to produce in large quantities. Therefore, ancient people did not add sugar to their dishes, relying mainly on the natural sweetness of the food itself. It can be imagined that most of the food in ancient times, especially daily food, must have been unpleasant to eat.
Once sugar was mass-produced, humans fell madly in love with itWe like sugar, and now most of the food we eat has to add sugar, such as drinks, pastries, dairy products, and even the ingredients in chicken cutlets contain sugar.
Addiction to sugar has become a common illness. Baidu Baike has an article titled "Sugar addiction"Item, the explanation for addiction is that sweetness brings a sense of pleasure."
Scientists believe thatSugar increases the secretion of dopamine, exciting the brain and making you feel full. In layman's terms, sugar makes you enjoy eating, making you want more even after you're already full.
Excessive sugar intake is the root cause of weight gain. Sugar itself is just a sweetener with no nutrients, only calories , which ultimately turn into body fat, making you fatter and fatter. The World Health Organization has been urging people to eat less sugar.
However, what I want to talk about today is not sugar, but an article I recently read article, which presents an interesting point: Information is like sugar, it's addictive.
The author listed the similarities between information and sugar.
(1) Mass production at low costAfter the information revolution, humans produce information like making sugar, in large quantities.
Information not only has low production costs but also lower distribution costs, reaching consumers with costs close to zero.
(2) Addiction mechanisms are the sameIn 2019, a study by the University of California, Berkeley found that information can also stimulate the brain to produce dopamine, with the same mechanism as sugar.
So, seeing an attractive piece of information is like eating a sweet dessert, bringing you the same sense of satisfaction. You'll become addicted to the information, wanting to see more, which specifically manifests as being unable to put down your phone and swiping endlessly.
(3) Spam泛滥Just as with the popularity of junk food, the consequence of human addiction to information is the massive supply of junk information.
Producers discovered that the most dopamine-stimulating content has the highest reading volume and can earn more money. As a result, junk information is mass-produced and becomes ubiquitous.
Humans have fallen into a situation where the easiest food to access is junk food, and the easiest information to encounter is junk information.
(4) Thinking "becomes fat"Just as junk food makes the body fat, junk information makes the mind fat.
Junk information lowers your thinking level, fills your brain with meaningless content, distracts your attention, blocks your thinking, slows down your mind, and reduces your judgment.
In summary, information addiction is as harmful as sugar addiction and requires active prevention and treatment. A healthy lifestyle not only involves eating less sugar but also reducing exposure to junk information.
But just as you can't avoid sugar, life offers no chance to avoid junk information. We can only restrain ourselves, constantly reminding ourselves to stay away from junk information, and prevent information addiction.
Tech News
CCTV cameras at British train stations are using a new technology to monitor the stations.
It doesn’t perform facial recognition but emotion recognition.
It determines each person’s emotion—whether happy, sad, or angry—based on facial expressions.__JHSNS_SEG_227af89d_59__If your emotion is unusual, it indicates suspicion, and the system notifies staff to investigate.
This reminds us to be mindful of our expressions in public places to avoid trouble.
Currently, inside a computer, the CPU and peripheral devices communicate via PCIe interfaces.
Data is transmitted between PCIe interfaces and devices using copper fingers.
However, copper fingers have physical limitations, and beyond a certain point, the transfer rate cannot be increased further.
Earlier this month, an American company announced a prototype of the PCIe 7.0 interface, abandoning copper fingers and switching to fiber optic data transmission, which is eight times faster than the current mainstream PCIe 4.0 version.
The yellow line in the image above is the fiber optic cable, connecting the device to the motherboard. In the future, for high-bandwidth communication, it is likely that copper will no longer be used, and fiber will be adopted instead.
American scientists conducted an experiment, letting parrots have video calls.
The scientists placed a tablet in the cage, and two parrots met through the tablet, talking to each other (squawking).
The scientists found that parrots really enjoy video calls and can interact with the screen for hours on end.
The most amazing thing is that once they learn how to call each other, they will open the closed tablets themselves and actively look for each other to chat.
Does this incident suggest that social animals can all be internet addicted?
Epilepsy is a common neurological disorder characterized by involuntary convulsions and loss of consciousness during an attack.
The reason is abnormal brain waves, which means there are abnormal currents in the brain, passing through the nervous system, leading to disordered consciousness and behavior.
Recently, the UK completed the world's first brain implant to treat epilepsy. The patient is a young boy who suffers from severe attacks several times a day.
The doctor implanted a 3.5 cm x 3.5 cm neural stimulator inside his brain, connecting it to brain nerves via electrodes.
This device continuously discharges into the nervous system, interfering with abnormal brainwave signals, thereby reducing the frequency of seizures. It is said that after the boy's surgery, the number of seizures decreased significantly.
Thinking of Musk's ongoing "brain-computer interface," I feel that the physical connection between the human brain and a computer might soon become a reality.
Article
1, GitCode Full Copy of GitHub (Chinese)
The domestic code hosting service GitCode has fully copied GitHub, placing the latter's repositories exactly as they are on its own website.
While open-source code can be copied, it's too much to also copy the authors' accounts.
2, new URL() Issue (English)
JS's URL() is used to parse URLs and throws an error when encountering illegal strings. The author considers this a very poor design and provides a solution.
3, t test origin (English)
An article in the Scientific American magazine about how a British brewery contributed to the birth of the statistical t-test and what it means. It might be a bit tough to read, but it's well-written.
4, HTML attributes and DOM attributes (English)
A beginner's front-end tutorial explaining the differences between HTML element attributes (attributes) and DOM node properties (properties), which is a common point of confusion.
5,Bun's JavaScript tail call optimization（English）
The server-side runtime environment for the JS language currently has three: Node, Deno, and Bun. The first two use the V8 engine, while Bun uses Safari's JavaScriptCore engine.
Their "tail call optimization" (TCO) behavior is inconsistent, only Bun supports it, and the author of this article conducted tests.
6、Visualization of malicious IP addresses（English）
The author's server receives thousands of malicious accesses every day. This article tells how he visualizes the physical locations of these IP addresses.
7、Python command-line utilities
Python comes with many practical little tools, and you can use them directly in the command line without writing scripts.
Tools
A new slide-making tool released by Figma.
2、Planka
An open-source alternative to Trello, which can be self-hosted for project management.
3、Flow
A browser-based Epub reader that can be self-deployed.
4、Librum
an open-source desktop software for managing e-books.
5、 Plasmic
a no-code/low-code development tool for the React framework, visualizing the creation of websites and applications.
6、 Notesnook
an end-to-end encrypted open-source notebook with a web version and cross-platform desktop version.
7、 LogoFast
a logo design tool.
D3.js team released a new chart library for creating line charts, significantly simplifying the syntax.
9、Wasp
A full-stack Node.js framework that wraps React + Prisma (an ORM library for databases), with the design goal of being as user-friendly as Rails.
10、Oxlint
A JS Linter code checking tool that can replace ESLint. It's written in Rust and claims to be 50-100 times faster than ESLint.
AI-related
Free Online AI Logo Maker. (Submitted by @ddewfrefref)
2. AI Generator for React Components
An open-source web application that quickly generates React components for previewing frontend effects. (Submitted by @bravekingzhang)
An open-source Windows desktop application that integrates various AI models, offering chat, text-to-image, text-to-speech, and machine translation. (Submitted by @Richasy) Submission)
Resources
This article details the multi-user real-time collaborative algorithm CRDT with code examples.
2、 IGloo
This is the homepage of a blockchain company, entirely made with 3D, very cool.
3、 Math Games (English)
This website collects various math games that kids can play.
Pictures
In 1995, Windows 95 was about to be released, and the user interface underwent a major upgrade, being completely different from the previous version, Windows 3.2.
To help users adapt to the new interface, Microsoft released a special application called "Microsoft Bob" to teach users how to use the new version of Windows.
When you open the program, there is a little dog that acts as a guide, leading you into a house.
In its living room, there are various objects.
The little dog will guide you to click on each object in turn, which will then open the corresponding program, helping you get familiar with its usage.
For example, clicking on a notebook on the desktop will open a text box where you can write a letter.
Below is the program that appears when you click "Calendar."
You can also enter other rooms; the game room has some small games.
This software is generally like this, but Microsoft made a mistake: it is not provided for free, but requires payment to purchase.
One can imagine, the sales and reviews of this software were very poor. To the extent that in early 1996, this project was canceled, with a lifespan of less than a year, possibly the shortest-lived Microsoft product ever officially released.
Spanish artist Concha García Zaera passed away last year at the age of 93.
She had always used the built-in painting program (Paint) in Windows to create her artwork.
Her works are delicate, fresh, and exquisite, making it hard for viewers to realize that they were all created by an elderly woman using a mouse, one pixel at a time.
Excerpt
1、 How to Become a -10x Engineer
There is a consensus in the internet industry that seeks 10x (10 times efficiency) engineers.
Such engineers are hard to find, and they may not be encountered in real life; instead, you might encounter -10x (negative 10 times efficiency) engineers.
A -10x engineer is someone who not only cannot save time for the team but also wastes 400 hours of team work each week.
-10x engineers have the following characteristics.
(1) They create a lot of unnecessary work. The most common is that they push for the establishment of meaningless processes, as well as keeping everyone busy with presentations, charts, reports, work order management, etc.
(2) They encourage the team to pursue elegance rather than pragmatism.
(3) They make it impossible for the team to make any decisions decisively.
(4) He writes lengthy messages/files and shares them as widely as possible, encouraging everyone to give feedback and participate in discussions.
(5) He writes slow programs, such as avoiding database indexes, running single-threaded programs on 16-core machines, and not compressing files.
(6) He writes scripts that only he can understand and without documentation.
(7) He writes slow builds and slow tests.
(8) He writes meaningless test cases.
(9) He adds dependencies that require a lot of time to maintain, forcing engineers to learn each library individually.
(10) He traps 10 engineers in a difficult project, attracting and wasting their talents.
(11) He makes management underestimate the project's difficulty while exaggerating its practicality, until the project is delayed or simply cannot be completed.
(12) He hired other unproductive engineers.
Statements
1,
PCRE is the regular expression library for the Perl language, and its author Philip Hazel created this library in 1998 when he was 54 years old.
Today, at 80, he is still maintaining this library. He is looking for a successor to prepare for handing over the work. He said that he never dreamed he would continue working on this project until 2024.
-- "How Free Software Hijacked Philip Hazel's Life"
2,
Both Kubernetes and microservices are heavyweight tools that will make your software heavier.
Before using them, make sure you think carefully about whether you can handle the additional weight, operating costs, and engineering expenses they bring.
3
If you are overly pessimistic, it means you will make unnecessary sacrifices, trying to mitigate risks that do not actually exist.
--Extreme assumptions may lead to even more extreme results
4,
Apple Inc. has found that most users own both Mac computers and iPads.
So although the hardware of the two is almost identical, Apple insists on not allowing the iPad to run the macOS system, because if it did, users might only buy iPads and no longer buy Macs.
-- "macOS will never appear on the iPad"
5、
The company's CEO talking about workplace culture is actually talking about workplace control.
-- "Why bad CEOs fear remote work"
Year in Review
Issue 259（2023 #259）
Who Are Programmers?（2022 #209）
Game Developer's Annual Salary（2021 #159）
The value of podcasts(2020 #109)
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