I've had an open tab for a few weeks (link in comment) that AWS added RDS and Aurora instance type recommendations to the AWS Compute Optimizer. It's pretty wild that you can save somewhere around 10% across a big variety of database instance types.

Used Electrify America L3 charger for the first time and wow is that nice. Usually we charge at home, but this was fast, convenient, and not very expensive while we were far from home.

I believe in user-controlled privacy. I'm very disappointed in the lack of privacy laws in the United States. I love seeing this update from Google that they have open sourced a Zero Knowledge Proof library that can be used in support of technology standards that preserve privacy.

Last week Cloudflare launched Containers, which is a significant update to their serverless compute offerings. Cloudflare Workers support is limited to JavaScript and WASM, and this new Containers offering let's you bring a container to their global compute runtime.

I tried Wispr (wisprflow.ai) as a voice input method today on my Mac and it works really well. I really like the UX. They've done a nice job with it. MacOS Dictation also works decently so they'll have to be a lot better than that for it to really catch on.

Citing your sources is so important. I researched cloud network pricing and ChatGPT confidently told me that Azure charges from cross-AZ traffic within a Virtual Network. I thought changed, so I checked. Azure made cross-AZ traffic free in May 2024! Check the citations of these chatbots!

There are some amazing new images of a galaxy named NGC 253 that is 11.5m lightyears away that is generated from data captured with with the Very Large Telescope.

An Incredible read from my former colleague Jack about his experiences trying an alternative job to engineering after being on the HashiCorp rocketship from the beginning. A Year in EMS www.jackpearkes.com/posts/a-year...

Want to hide annoying cluttered menu-bar icons in MacOS? Hidden Bar is a simple, free, and OSS utility that hides menu bar items behind a simple expander. When you don't need to use the icons, they are hidden from view. youtu.be/Y8OmjbySFao

Ever needed to describe personas and roles involved in cloud decisions? I met the FinOps.org team at a conference and after looking around their website, I found that they had mapped out the Personas really effectively for various people at organizations that work on cloud.

It’s really common to use Postman to try and test APIs. Thanks to Corey Quinn’s weekly AWS newsletter to highlight this article. Be careful what you share with Postman because they are logging your secrets. anonymousdata.medium.com/postman-is-l...

🚀 Heading to @AI & Big Data Expo next week? I'll be @Vultr booth 152 🎤 I’ll be speaking about Move to Vultr in Minutes, Not Months, highlighting how FluidCloud and Vultr are working together to power cutting-edge AI infrastructure. 📅 Stop by to learn, connect, and explore what’s next in AI. #AIExpo

This Bill Gates interview is a fascinating read on the state of global philanthropy.

Today's Gemini let-down inside Google Sheets is expected, but still pretty disappointing.

Redmonk's Rachel Stephens has a great post describing how the job and expectations of the Product Manager is changing with AI. Recently, Toby from Spotify shared a company letter to employees that said AI is now part of their evaluation criteria. (1 of 2)

Today I transfered a domain name from Namecheap to Cloudflare. The name says it all, they should be cheap, but they charge 70% more than Cloudflare for a .com! Even though I had to divert time to do it, it's a principles thing to me. The internet, cable, and phone providers all do it.

Intercom posted about their big benefits (availability, sharding simplicity, cost) from switching to Planetscale DB Metal from AWS Aurora. Learned about this from Corey Quinn's newsletter.

Got my first local MCP server example running today in Claude Desktop. The tutorial is pretty straight-forward. modelcontextprotocol.io/quickstart/s... I've seen some criticism from people I trust that MCP will be like SOAP and ws-*, but so far looks like it's enabling some cool integrations.

I'm super impressed with PlanetScaleDB's latest metal offering and website design. The performance numbers are incredible. Their main landing page is primarily text and super developer friendly. Kudos to them!

LastPass breach is so damaging years later. Recent news is that hackers have cracked LastPass Vaults from the hack over a year ago. I'm savvy enough to change passwords on my own, but people in my orbit that I'm helping struggle with the basics of changing passwords.

Have you ever wanted to create a short YouTube clip from a much longer live-stream or much longer YouTube video? I wrote a GDoc (kind of like a blog!) that covers some options.

Friend asked for a computer backpack recommendation. Many years ago Adam Jacob swore by the GoRuck GR1 so I decided to spend the money on it. I'm pretty sure I've had it for a full 10 years and taken it all over the world and back.

Google Sheets with Gemini is...not killing it. 🤦‍♂️

Incredible write-up form someone really on the pioneering edge of pragmatic use of AI tools for coding assistance on practical everyday projects.

this haptic display absolutely rocks. basketball is for everyone.

I finished this book about how the FBI created their own encrypted messaging app called Anom and tons of criminals world-wide to use it giving them full access to their messages. Really has made me ponder the foundations of trust.

A friend reached out frustrated getting Gemini to parse table data out of a PDF spread out over 7 pages and put it into a Sheet. I tried it with ChatGPT and it worked like a charm. I used screenshots, but probably could have tried giving it the full PDF. Big time-saver for stuff like this.

I've often thought conceptually about this, pretty cool to see that someone formed a company called EchoMark that can uniquely identify the source of leaked sensitive information.

Interesting study showing that physicians using Chat GPT-4 were scored slightly better than those that used conventional only sources (6.5% better, using about 2min more per patient) to diagnose conditions that were incrementally revealed.

Tried the new iCloud Invites service and it works well. https://www.icloud.com/invites/ In a few moments I created an invite with an image and got a publicly accessible invite link to give out. Not a promising development for evite.com

. @evanphx.dev is one of the most talented engineers I worked with at @hashicorp.com and this new company with @aphoenix.bsky.social is an ambitious vision towards better development and deployment. Keep your 👀 on this!

I typically really enjoy rooting against the Celtics and Lakers, but seeing Luka take this challenge on will probably make me root for him, and I guess that means the Lakers too. https://youtu.be/_Js-i-KYz1s

Google Flights is a fantastic way to compare flight options. I love the way they show the $ cost directly in the calendar dates. I suspect this will be the main way I explore flights going forward.

I've been trying Safari as my primary browser, primarily because of iCloud Private Relay, but I keep encountering little rough edges that I don't like such as tab navigation and difficult rendering animated gifs on serious web pages (not just memes).

Starting that crappy cycle with Xfinity Internet where they do a price-raise and it frustrates me enough to shop around. Really impressed with the FTC template for doing plan comparisons. The government made things better here for sure. Much easier to compare providers than prior.

So impressed with Jen Easterly, the outgoing Director of CISA. If you're involved or interested in CyberSecurity, this is a valuable 1/2hr talking about topics like Secure By Design and recent China hacking like Volt Typhoon

Wanted to create an icon (a signature) for slides. I found the OSS Inkscape.org program which creates SVGs. This YouTube tutorial that I skimmed through helped. Got a passable icon really fast (had to convert to png to use in Google Slides). https://youtu.be/eOd1RYjZXxg?si=wJZ1Q4Mw-66FHjGD

"A stranger is just a meal you've never eaten." (Cannibal proverb)

Pretty cool to see the advances in Nuclear Fusion. This latest milestone came out of China, but at the end of the article they discuss how the US, France and others are also part of an international cooperation to work on Fusion. https://www.newsweek.com/energy-clean-unlimited-nuclear-fusion-east-c…

Funny, I just deleted Audible from my phone yesterday because I find no utility in having it on my phone. There probably are some books I'd rather listen to than read, but there is no pricing competition for Audible, so it's a relatively bad deal for content creators. https://www.linkedin.com/posts…

I’m super excited to dig into the “Dark Wire” book by Joseph Cox about the true crime story of how the FBI infiltrated a private messaging app to go after criminals.

Just watched the videos of the new OpenAI Agent Operator. It's impressive. $200/month ensures it isn't a mass-market thing yet, but if DeepSeek model progress is any indicator of how fast prices lower, this is right around the corner of affordability & everyday UX. https://openai.com/index/introduc…

The auto-manufacturers connected car applications do NOT have good security and privacy protections in-place. This example is Subaru, but there have been multiple examples from other manufacturers too.

Security researchers discover that a Flipper Zero (cheap widely available security tool) is enough to manipulate significant parts of the German electrical grid.

Really loved this description from Scott Belsky https://www.scottbelsky.com of the importance of the "1st mile experience" when building products. It's both important initially and essential to long-term have ongoing investment into it.

Ever wonder what the heck is Nix and why should I care? I really enjoyed this @forrestbrazeal.bsky.social post describing how you can use it to set up reproducible software environments. newsletter.goodtechthings.com/p/notes-on-n...

If you enjoy learning from people playing with the latest in AI models, definitely follow @simonwillison.net This post shows how some new models work when asking them to create a joke and draw things.

Unsettling that former startup employees that used "Sign in with Google" could have their former SaaS apps and data compromised because someone buys a now defunct domain that is available again. Great explanation of the issues by Dylan at Truffle Security: trufflesecurity.com/blog/million...

After doing some world travel throughout the last year, I'm convinced the Chinese automakers are going to put much more pricing pressure on the traditional auto manufactures. The Australian market is a great example of this. I saw it first hand last summer. www.abc.net.au/news/2024-06...

Railway shares how they are making a big investment to run their own infrastructure in co-location facilities and all of the work involved in that. blog.railway.com/p/data-cente...