[webfinds] ML and security, Pixel Fire and your best work time

As people complained that I post too many links to follow on Twitter (it is my stream of consciousness – as I find it, I post it), I’m starting to release these link lists every few days now. Hopefully that helps.

Security

• Machine Learning to Detect Software Vulnerabilities discusses the nearer future of software being checked by Machine Learning to avoid malware before it can execute
• Extreme Cybersecurity Predictions for 2019 on the other hand has some worrying predictions
• Uncaptcha2 uses Google’s own speech2text API to crack, well, Google’s ReCaptcha challenges, with 91% accuracy

Tools

• Automatic visual diffing with Puppeteer is a simple explanation by the amazing Monica Dinculescu
• Blobmaker is a tool to create organic shape blobs and save them as SVG (saving doesn’t work in Edge, at the moment)
• RRWeb is an open source web session replay library, which provides easy-to-use APIs to record user’s interactions and replay it remotely.

Misc Tips

• How to highlight code lines in GitHub as a URL by Marius Schulz explains a more resilient way to show someone a part of a GitHub file

Geek shit

• How the fire effect in Doom was built – on a C64, I’d have used sprites, as it is much faster

Inspiration

• UI Sounds is a collection of sounds used in various apps. More info in this article by by @graeme_fulton
• The Kubernetes source code has a very interesting comment in it . I really think there is a need for us to take our work as developers more serious and work for the people to take over from us. It isn’t about being the cleverest, it is about being someone who leaves a clean plate.
• Superhero logo templates in SVG and such

Books

• Algorithms by Jeff Erickson – This web page contains a free electronic version of my (soon to be) self-published textbook Algorithms, along with other lecture notes I have written for various theoretical computer science classes at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign since 1998.

Mental health and working

• New Office Hours Aim for Well Rested, More Productive Workers – one of the big new(ish) topics is that of personalized biological rhythm known as “chronotype”. Basically this means that we all tick differently – some of us a more effective in the morning and others in the wee hours of the morning. That leads some companies to put people on different shifts. More information about the chronotype is also in the morning lark or night owl article of the World Economic Forum