09OCT2023

Goooood Monday Evening, all! Typically, I post on Sunday night, but given the long weekend here, I decided to keep my posting to the last night of the weekend, instead. Rather short round up this week as I was waylaid with COVID and rather grumpy and lethargic. Fortunately, much better by the weekend, and we got to partake in our annual tradition of taking pictures of our babies looking rather annoyed at being abandoned in a field of pumpkins.

Here are a few fun things I came across this week-

• 🧹 Cleanup Buddy - Mac security researcher and developer, Guilherme Rambo, released this fun little app/utility that locks your keyboard and mouse so you can clean your keyboard and trackpad without inadvertently typing a bunch of nonsense or deleting your entire Photos collection. It even includes a little snarky animated character to encourage you as you clean.
• 🎬 Argylle Trailer - Fun trailer for a new Apple TV+ movie coming later this year from Matthew Vaughn, creator of Kick Ass and Kingsman (comics + movies). It's a fairly generic spy thriller with a really fun twist you only discover about a minute in to the trailer. Looks hilarious, and killer cast.
• 🗺️ Etymological Map of Africa and the Middle East - Simon linked to this fascinating map made by the University of Amsterdam and Leiden University that reveals the Etymological History of the names of all the countries (and capitols) in Africa and the Middle East. I wish there were hot links to sources for these, because I want to know a lot more.
• 🤖The New Turing Test - I won't capture it as well as this short post did on Mastodon, but the idea blew my hair back a bit: In short, we've historically thought that the way we'd be able to stump AI's was to ask them about art and emotions that they couldn't possibly understand. But LLM's are surprisingly good at pretending to speak about those things because they're trained on people writing about them. This post suggests a different twist on Turing Tests. Part tongue in cheek, but it's got my head spinning a little thinking about other ways to break the machine.
• 🍞 Olfactory Task Management - The Verge had a fun piece on various apps and tools that their staff use to stay organized and on top of their complex tasks. A lot of the usual suspects (Notes Apps, To-Do Apps, etc) were mentioned, but this hack used by an audio engineer on the team had me rolling. This is literally insane and I love it!

That's it for this week, thanks and stay healthy everyone!