TLDR 2024-02-05

Google is killing off its cached links feature. The company says that the feature was designed as an alternative way to load websites when people couldn't depend on a page loading, but technology has improved to the point Google feels it can retire it. While users can currently still create cache links manually, all of Google's support pages about cached sites have been taken down. Deleting cache data will free up an uncountable number of petabytes of data for Google, which is currently in an era of cost savings.

Reddit's Vision Pro subreddit is filling up with experiences from people who decided to take the plunge and spend $3,500 on a new platform. The reviews are mixed, with some saying it's the best piece of technology they've ever experienced while others express disappointment over the device's limitations. The device is apparently unable to play certain types of 3D movies. This thread contains some of the reviews from the subreddits, with photos, videos, and criticisms included.

Biotech company Loyal has launched a study that will test a daily anti-aging pill in senior dogs. The pill is designed to help dogs live and stay healthy longer. Dogs must weigh at least 14 pounds, be at least 10 years old, and live near one of 55 participating vet clinics to enroll in the study. Loyal plans to enroll 1,000 senior dogs in the study, which has already begun. A link for dog owners to sign their pets up for the study is available in the article.

The drugs classified as GLP-1 receptor agonists have been shown to reduce inflammation in the liver, kidneys, heart, and brain. These drugs include semaglutide and tirzepatide, which are marketed as treatments for diabetes and obesity. This effect is leading scientists to hope that they could be used to treat Parkinson's and Alzheimer's diseases, which both involve brain inflammation. More than 20 clinical trials are now exploring the drugs as therapies for the two conditions.

Companies everywhere are launching copilots, AI assistants that leverage large language models to assist with tasks. This article looks at the process of building these products, the pain points, and the opportunities for AI tools. The information was gathered from semi-structured interviews with developers from a variety of companies that are working on copilots. It is still very early in the field of product copilots and it will be interesting to see how software engineering will evolve over the next several years.

Pkl is a programming language for producing configurations that are declarative and simple to read and write. It features capabilities borrowed from general-purpose languages like classes, functions, conditionals, and loops. Pkl can build abstraction layers to meet many different types of configuration needs. It can produce static configuration files in any format or be embedded as a library into another application runtime. Pkl code can be shared by creating packages and publishing them.

If you have an idea, you should test your hypothesis as soon as possible. Being afraid that your hypothesis may be wrong can lead you to spend time working on something that won't pay off. Early testing can validate an idea - you will know straight away if something is worth building. Procrastination can sometimes be a sign that you subconsciously know a project isn't going to work out the way you thought it would.

The iPhone proposed a new kind of tradeoff for the software industry - it put security, privacy, and reliability over the freedom to change anything and do anything. While this tradeoff is right for almost everyone, Apple uses its control for selfish reasons that are not about security, privacy, or reliability at all. The DMA appears to be trying to stop gatekeepers from abusing their control over competitors while also requiring them to control all sorts of other policy objectives. Apple's response to the DMA suggests that nothing much will change.

The truly hard parts of being a software engineer largely happen before code generation - things like requirements clarification, negotiation, technical design, and tradeoff analysis.

Dep Tree is a tool that helps developers keep code bases clean and decoupled by creating a 3D force-directed graph that visualizes the entropy of a code base.

Amazon now charges $0.005 per IPv4 address per hour for all public IPv4 addresses.

This post discusses an independent contractor's struggles with being a generalist software engineer yet having to market themselves as a specialist.

Most investments won't work out - you don't want to spend the next five years doing the wrong thing.

This mathoverflow thread discusses how people successfully overcame whatever was stopping them from extracting the information they were interested in and how long it took.