Issue #532

Tuesday 16th July’s issue is presented by Fingerprint

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Playing Defense: How To Control The Narrative If Your Work Is Being Questioned

— Wes Chow

tl;dr: “You’ll learn how to respond when stakeholders question your decisions or misunderstand you. We’ll cover: (1) Defending your thinking is normal. Embrace it. (2) Your response will either diminish or build your credibility. (3) Case study #1: A colleague from another team questions your decision. (4) Case study #2: Your CEO questions your strategy.”

CareerAdvice

Strategy For Directors: Tying It Together

— Anna Shipman

tl;dr: “Strategy is often set by the person with the loudest voice. One of the aims of this course was to teach techniques and models to allow robust discussion, surface ideas and allow everyone to be heard.” Anna discusses steps to do this: (1) Strategic analysis: Make a diagnosis of your current situation, external and internal. (2) Strategic choice: make a decision about what you want to do. (3) Implement. 

Leadership Management

What is Fingerprint Browsing And How Does It Work?

— Kelsey Foster

tl;dr: Cookies are great, but they aren’t reliable. That's where browser fingerprinting comes in. Visitor identification captures details like browser type, operating system, and screen resolution using advanced techniques like canvas and WebGL fingerprinting to create a unique digital fingerprint for each visitor. It goes beyond traditional cookies, offering enhanced security, fraud detection, and personalized user experiences.  

Promoted by Fingerprint

Management Security

Lessons Learned In 35 Years Of Making Software

— Jim Grey

tl;dr: (1) Do things in the most straightforward way possible. (2) There is no substitute for working software in Production. (3) Relationships matter if you want to advance. (4) Relationships matter if you want to see your vision come to life. (5) Never be invisible. And more. 

CareerAdvice

“If it's a good idea, go ahead and do it. It's much easier to apologize than it is to get permission.”

— Grace Hopper

Many Yes/No Attributes: Table Design Study

— Alexey Makhotkin

tl;dr: “I wanted to demonstrate the relationship between the logical model and a physical model. We’re going to design a commonly seen use case: many yes/no attributes of a single anchor (in our case, Restaurant). Then we’ll discuss how the physical tables would be designed. We’ll see that sometimes physical design strategy changes as the system becomes more mature. At the same time, logical design elements never change if the business requirement is still relevant.”

Database

Build A Team-Based Task Manager

— Brian Morrison

tl;dr: Testing LLMs is not simple. The probabilistic output makes failures hard to identify while running the models repeatedly tends to become very expensive quickly. In this blog post, QA Wolf engineer John Gluck covers 6 things the team learned about building automated black-box regression tests for genAI applications.

Promoted by Clerk

Guide

How Discord Uses Open-Source Tools For Scalable Data Orchestration & Transformation

— Zach Bluhm

tl;dr: “Until recently, we’ve been using an in-house orchestration system that’s provided the foundation for Discord’s data analytics over the last five years. As our data organization grew, it became apparent that both self-service and top-notch observability would be key for our ability to effectively scale as a team. The team embraced an ambitious project: to overhaul our data orchestration infrastructure using modern, open-source tools sharing the candid lessons learned along the way, and how our new system is powering over 2000 dbt tables today.”

Architecture OpenSource

Bringing AI-Powered Answers And Summaries To File Previews On The Web

tl;dr: From the team at Dropbox: "Both our summarization and Q&A features LLMs to find, compare, and consolidate the content of the file. An LLM works by ingesting content as text, transforming the ideas contained within it into a numerical representation, and comparing those numerical representations against both the input query and an internal corpus of knowledge to answer the question. This effectively enables a computer to consume and compare information semantically, rather than lexically.”

AI

PySkyWiFi: Completely Free, Unbelievably Stupid Wi-Fi On Long-Haul Flights

— Robert Heaton

tl;dr: “Here’s the basic idea: suppose that I logged into my airmiles account and updated my name. If you were also logged in to my account then you could read my new name, from the ground. You could update it again, and I could read your new value. If we kept doing this then the name field of my airmiles account could serve as a tunnel through the airplane’s wi-fi firewall to the real world.”

Hack

Most Popular From Last Issue

Leadership For Results And Peace Of Mind — Subbu Allamaraju

Notable Links

Crawlee: Web scraping and browser automation library.

LitGPT: 20+ high-performance LLMs.

NewPipe: Lightweight streaming front-end for Android.

Secrets Manager Agent: Read secrets and cache in memory.

Tau: OS distributed platform as a service.

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