Tech Enthusiast Weekly (Issue 254): Life Is a Longboard Problem

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cover picture

Jacaranda is rarely used as a street tree on Jiaochang Middle Road in Kunming City. It entered the flowering period at the end of April, and the road turned into a sea of ​​purple flowers. (via）

This week’s topic: Life is a long board problem

You may have heard of”bucket principle“: The capacity of the bucket is determined by the shortest piece of wood.

What it means is that the key to some systems is not to develop the strongest point, but to avoid the weakest point. 99% of the places are fine, as long as there is a problem in 1% of the places, the whole system will fail.

Human health is like this. If there is a serious problem with one organ, even if other organs are completely normal, life and even life will be affected.

Such problems determined by short boards are collectively referred to as “Short board problem“There are many such examples in daily life. In addition to human health, there is also food safety. As long as one ingredient is unclean, you may get food poisoning.

The same is true for consumer products such as automobiles, televisions, and mobile phones. As long as one component fails, the product has quality problems.

However, this is not today’s topic.I recently readan articleI realized that in addition to the short board problem, there is also a long board problem.

The “longboard problem” means that the key to the problem is not the weakest point, but the strongest point. As long as one point is particularly outstanding, the matter will be successful, and it doesn’t matter whether the other points are good or bad.

This is the case with literary and artistic works. You buy an album and don’t like to listen to other songs, but if there is one song you really like, the album is worth it. Movies and novels are successful as long as there is one character or plot that is particularly touching.

The same is true for venture capital. As long as you invest in a particularly successful project, you can make up for all your losses.

the most important is,Life is a “long board problem”. In life, failures and setbacks are not important, and it doesn’t matter how many times, as long as there is one big success, life will be successful.

The biggest success determines the achievement and height of your life. Many Nobel Prize winners have made an important scientific discovery in their lifetime, which is enough to become a great scientist.

It doesn’t matter how much code a programmer has written, as long as he has created a major influential software, his career will be successful.

We must learn to distinguish between “short board problems” and “long board problems”, and their solutions are completely different. To solve the short board problem, we need to focus on the weak link and make up the shortest board; to solve the long board problem, we only need to promote the strongest link, and don’t care about other things.

There is no need to care about those unimportant things in life, and there is no need to be frustrated by setbacks and rejections, it will pass. What you have to do is to look forward, to strive for a big success, make it big enough and bigger, just once is enough.

bright data

You may have heard that Israel’s software level is very high, but it feels far away from us, and it is usually out of reach in China.

Who would have thought that before May Day, an Israeli company would contact me. Their software has entered the Chinese market, and they want to introduce themselves to Chinese programmers in the weekly magazine.

The company is called Bright Data (English official website), the Chinese name is “Bright Data” (Chinese official website), established in 2014.

their products areinternet data service, the homepage reads “The World’s No. 1 Internet Data Platform”. It seems that the business is doing very well. Many Fortune 500 companies and famous universities in Europe and America are their customers.

According to them, as long as the Internet has publicly accessible data, it can provide it. Regardless of e-commerce, or AI training, what kind of large-scale data set you want, they will help you solve it.

I took a look. In fact, to put it bluntly, what they do is data collection business (commonly known as “crawlers”), but they are top-notch. You can see what the top reptiles look like.

The products they enter into China are divided into three levels to meet different needs.

(1) Self-service: You run reptiles yourself on their infrastructure. They provide you with the following capabilities.

• More than 72 million IP addresses, switch countries and cities at will.
• The infrastructure of different operators covers 195 countries and regions around the world.
• CAPTCHA unlocker, bypassing the real person verification of the website, 99.99% success rate, no fee for unsuccessful.

You can write your own scripts, call their API, or use their web scraping tools Web Scraper IDEas long as you fill in a few settings, you can grab data on a large scale.

they also provideBright data crawler browserencapsulates the various functions above, and has built-in automatic unlocking, allowing you to capture large-scale batch data in the browser.

（2）data set: For users who don’t want to grab the data themselves, they provide the latest data that has been grabbed.

The following are their ready-made data set products (parts), you can also specify parameters, and they help you filter out subsets on demand.

（3）Bright Data Insight： You don’t even have to process the data yourself, their machine algorithms help you process it, provide real-time commodity intelligence, and dynamic tracking. For example, data analysis of own products, data analysis of rival companies/competing products, buyer data analysis, etc.

Above is their product introduction. It should be noted that they are mainly for corporate users. Individual programmers are also available if needed.

If you are interested, what datasets do you want or use their infrastructure, welcome to visitChinese official websiteyou can also scan the QR code below to learn more and register. New users have7-day free trial period。

Technology dynamics

1、wooden transistor

Electronic components are difficult to recycle and pollute the environment. Linkoping University in Sweden has invented an environmentally friendly electronic component for this purpose.

Unbelievable as it sounds, what they invented is a wooden transistor, which is a dehydrated hollow wood fiber that is injected with a conductive polymer called PEDOT:PSS to make it conductive and control the current.

Due to performance and size, this transistor has no practical value at present, but it proves that an environmentally friendly circuit is feasible. Perhaps one day, such circuits could also be implanted in living organisms.

2、NBA Drone Live

During this month’s NBA game between the Boston Celtics and the Philadelphia 76ers, a drone was broadcast live.

The drone flies over the basketball court and transmits the footage back to the TV station. Fans are generally disgusted, thinking that it distracts them from watching the game.

The TV station believes that this can capture shots that were not available before and improve the live broadcast effect. Other sporting events, such as F1 racing, golf and extreme sports, are already broadcast live using drones.

3、the end of the earth

Recently, astronomers observed for the first time a dying star devouring its planet.

The star, 12,000 light-years away from Earth, has entered the late stages of its life cycle, rapidly expanding in size by a factor of more than 1,000, becoming a red-giant and devouring the planets that approach it.

Astronomers think the same is true for Earth. When the sun ends, the earth will end with it.

4、Amazon Warehouse Monitoring

American media revealed that when workers in Amazon warehouses move goods, they are monitored by cameras, and machine learning algorithms will judge whether workers have misplaced goods.

The problem is that the accuracy rate of this model is only 95%, and many times it will make wrong judgments. As a result, Amazon hired many outsourced workers in India and Costa Rica to conduct a second review of surveillance videos that were not well understood to provide model accuracy.

So a very sci-fi scene appeared: a group of workers worked in the warehouse, and another group of workers remotely monitored them through cameras. A software model is used to determine whether both groups of workers are doing their job properly. The situation of the labor force in the high-tech era is probably like this.

5、battery-free underwater camera

Traditional underwater cameras require batteries and cannot work for a long time. The Massachusetts Institute of Technology has invented a brand new underwater camera that can take pictures and transmit without batteries.

It creatively uses sound waves as an energy source, taking advantage of the sounds of passing ships or marine life. Sound waves hit the sensor, which generates an electrical signal that drives the camera.

Since there is no light on the bottom of the sea, in order to save power, it uses three red, green and blue LEDs as lighting, one light at a time, and a total of three monochrome negatives are taken, which are then synthesized later. Finally, it transmits the digital photo bit by bit to the receiver by bouncing sound waves.

article

1、Midjourney 5.1 Update(Chinese)

The image generation model Midjourney released version 5.1 on May 7, and the effect is amazing. This article introduces it in detail.

2、The story of Redis and author antirez(traditional Chinese)

Redis is the most commonly used key-value database, it is the work of Italian programmer antirez.This article presents his story, antirez himself saw this article and gavesome corrections。

3、My thoughts on Svelte(English)

Svelte is currently a popular front-end framework abroad. The author talked about his experience in detail, both positive and negative, which is more objective.

4、Even Amazon Can’t Understand Microservices(English)

The Amazon Prime Video team announced that it would abandon the microservice architecture and change it to a monolithic application. The main reason is that it is too expensive. DHH, founder of the Rails framework, commented on the matter.

5、Restrictions on .dev Domain Names(English)

The author described a strange problem encountered, and finally found that the reason was the use of the .dev domain name.

The domain name is managed by Google, and Google strictly stipulates that all .dev domain names can only be accessed with the HTTPS protocol. The same is true for other Google-managed domains .app, .day, .dev, .page, and .new.

6、Options for self-hosted projects(English)

The author decided to self-host several services: visitor statistics, mailing list, no-code tools, calendar. He analyzed the open source products available for these services one by one.

7、Introduction to HTTP Multipart(English)

This article explains what the “multipart/form-data” mode of file uploads is all about.

8、AI’s hardware bottleneck(English)

The author explained in detail that an important reason why it is difficult to make AI models larger is that there is a bottleneck in hardware (mainly memory), which makes it difficult to handle particularly large models.

tool

1、Instant Logo Design

Enter the English name of the product or company, and this website can automatically generate dozens of Logos for you to choose from.

2、Accessibility

A JS library for enhancing the usability of web pages. As long as this library is inserted, a toolbar will appear on the web page, allowing users to choose to increase font size, darken contrasting colors, increase spacing, read text, and more.

3、immersive translation

The browser’s bilingual translation plug-in can specify a translation engine (more than 10 options), and can translate pdf and epub e-books. (@theowenyoung post)

4、ChatLLM-Web

The open source browser LLM model can be used as long as you visit the webpage that the author has deployed, and all data is trained locally. (@Ryan-yang125 post)

Note that users need to meet three usage conditions.

• Chrome 113 and above browsers.
• Download about 4GB of training data (you only need to download it once).
• The graphics card should preferably have more than 6.4GB of video memory.

5、1Panel

Open source Linux server operation and maintenance panel. (@maninhill post)

6、PyQt-Fluent-Widgets

A component library for the Python graphical interface framework PyQt. (@zhiyiYo post)

7、VizGPT

A conversational visual chart generation tool, users use natural language to tell AI what kind of chart to generate, which can be adjusted in multiple rounds. (@ObservedObserver post)

8、Vue DevTools

A Vue developer tool implemented by netizens. (@webfansplz post)

9、Dify.AI

A developer tool to help you quickly generate AI-based applications. (@Panmuse post)

10、dnrm

The npm image source switching tool implemented by deno, each switch is within 100ms, and the speed is super fast. (@markthree post)

resource

1、Bird’s Nest

A foreign netizen set up a bird’s nest in his barn, and immediately a pair of jackdaws lived in it.

A few years later, a pair of owls drove the jackdaw out, occupied the nest, and laid eggs in it. The Jackdaw was determined to retaliate, and the two sides launched a big battle.

This netizen put cameras inside and outside the bird’s nest, and explained the “Bird’s Nest War” with pictures and texts, which was very exciting.

2、AI tool website navigation station

A collection of AI tools collected by netizens. (@Jordonwang post)

3、Machine Learning Diagram

This English website provides graphic tutorials on machine learning, and the content is quite a lot.

4、HTML with Superpowers

Web Components English introductory tutorial, source codeopen source。

5、circuit course

This site provides free electronics tutorials, in English.

pictures and videos

1、Art Bird’s Nest

The Brooklyn Botanic Garden in New York, USA held a bird’s nest design exhibition, inviting 33 artists to design artistic bird’s nests.

2、AI robot playing football

Google DeepMind released a video of two AI-trained robots playing soccer.

They will adjust their movements according to the opponent’s movements to form a confrontation, which is really amazing! The age of robots may indeed be upon us.

abstract

1、why i don’t like big cities

I recently moved from my hometown to Delhi, the capital of India. When I am in my hometown, I want to go to Delhi. When I did come to Delhi, I became homesick again.

I find myself disliking big cities for three main reasons.

(1) The bigger the city, the faster the pace of life.

(2) You will be surrounded by a large number of peers and feel more and more competition.

(3) Big cities have big people. The more powerful they are, the more attractive they are. My friends in Derry were busy with their own big goals, and I got into those things willingly or unwillingly.

Eventually, I hope to move back to a small town where I can be closer to nature and be closer to myself than anyone else.

2、Signs of Premature Optimization

There is a famous saying in software development: “Premature optimization is the root of all evil”.

Here are some examples of premature optimization that I have seen in startups.

(1) The backend of the web application is Kubernetes.

(2) An application is developed using multiple languages. The backend uses Golang, Ruby, and PHP at the same time, or the frontend uses frameworks such as React and Vue at the same time.

(3) Instead of using cloud services (such as Heroku, Vercel, Netlify, and Fly.io) to host applications, have an operations or infrastructure team and use the infrastructure they maintain.

In general, if you have your own infrastructure team, you’re over-engineering the solution.

With the above examples, it’s as if you start spending a lot of time and money picking the best gear for a hobby before you actually start it.

remarks

1、

A study found that friendships are easier to form and last longer in small groups than alone.

Because small groups often have regular activities, it is easy to generate more contact opportunities. So if you want to make friends, join some small groups.

—“It’s So Difficult To Make Friends As Adults”

2、

Why AI will eventually replace human jobs Because when you are the slowest part of the production chain, replacing you will increase the productivity of the entire chain.

— “Why “Tip the Engineer” Is Nonsense”

3、

Money is like a vaccine, it can save a lot of pain, but it doesn’t necessarily make you happy.

— “The Ways the World Works”

4、

AI development to the end, nothing more than two results. One is that the human soul is proved to be only a prediction mechanism based on probability algorithms, and the other is that AI has undergone a qualitative change, producing autonomous consciousness and possessing a soul similar to human beings.

— Twitter users

this week in history

The auto industry’s peak may be behind it（2022 #207）

KK’s advice to young people（2021 #157）

Get Rich and Leverage（2020 #107）

Is sharing knowledge against humanity?（2019 #57）

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