It’s Not You, It’s Me: What It Really Means When Budget Is The Reason For The Breakup - Something that’s not useful isn’t worth paying for.

The Works of Mars, 1671 - Fortification engineering.

Dangerous Dimensions: Mind-Bending Tales of the Mathematical Weird - Looks like fun, right?

Here’s Something Past Its Expiration Date: the Expiration Date Itself - “Food experts broadly agree that the expiration dates on every box of crackers, can of beans and bag of apples waste money, squander perfectly good food, needlessly clog landfills, spew methane and contribute to climate change.” // And, they’re gone for the most part in the UK.

Texas’s Biggest Barbecue City Is Attracting a New Crop of Exciting Restaurants - Lots going on in Lockhart.

Favorite coffee-making setups from the Ars Technica staff - I made coffee with a Chemex for a few years. The coffee was good, and the overall ritual of it was just fantastic.

Books Recommended With Uncommon Wisdom and Tender Care - “Over and over, Aoyama demonstrates how it’s done. In her Hatori ward, good fortune is not arbitrary or unearned; it is never a gauzy gift from the universe. It arises instead from action, experience and wisdom. Her characters appreciate each other; they are grateful to each other; they recognize in each other quality and potential. (Put these folks in a laboratory dish with the dramatis personae of a cynical HBO show and they’d annihilate each other, matter and antimatter.)” And: “You’ve got to be careful with novels about libraries and bookstores… The risk, in all these cases, is flattery. It feels nice to be assured that the places you find appealing are, in fact, wonderful. It’s also boring. The standard for such novels, therefore, is that they reveal something interesting and true about these environments."

What VMware’s AI Vision Means for Your Job - Figuring out how AI will affect tech stuff.

Survey finds relatively few Americans actually use (or fear) ChatGPT - 30% to 40% (for young adult males) seem like a lot too me. // “Ongoing polling by Pew Research shows that although ChatGPT is gaining mindshare, only about 18% of Americans have ever actually used it. Of course that changes by demographic: Men, those 18-29 and the college educated are more likely to have used the system, though even among those groups it’s 30-40%."

The Ultimate Guide to Developer Counter-Productivity - Focus on outcomes, not activities…mostly. So long as the activities are good and lead to outcomes. // Yes, and…many tasks may not seem directly tied to value, but they are. If you don’t measure where a shelf goes on a wall, when you hang it, there’s a good chance it will look shit. If you don’t take your compliance training in a bank, the bank could be operating illegally. If you don’t take time to meet with other teams (people), when it comes to needing to work with them, it will be harder. Also, if the outcomes you’re unproductive developers are getting are greats, who cares about LoC.