Introduction

2024 was a tough year for me. Continuing my layoff from the year before, I put a lot of pressure on myself to find a new job. With all the extra time I had, I was able to think about to do what I wanted to do, and not just what I needed to do. So my “What I Leanred This Year” post is back in top form with all the fun and interesting reads I found this past year.

Articles

800% Detail: Tweaking Stunt Island’s 30-year-old 3D Engine: This jumped out at me because of their usage of LLMs to simplify the reverse engineering process.

Bot Spotter: ShotSpotter but for music.

Grifters, believers, grinders, and coasters: I’ve had a similar ideation with certain personalities at work falling into certain stereotypes (argumentative, head down, people person). I enjoy how this article better forms this idea of mine. This also aligns with the 4 types of officer.

Harder Drive: Hard drives we didn’t want or need: Making a storage system with ICMP pings via ping latency.

How I Built an NFC Movie Library for my Kids : A dad make their child a psudo home VHS collection with NFC movie cards.

How I won $2,750 using JavaScript, AI, and a can of WD-40: The JavaScript was for calculating his odds before making an entry, after that it was straight forward and enjoyable seeing the outcomes.

Inside the “3 Billion People” National Public Data Breach: This caught my eye since it shows the behind-the-scenes work done by Troy Huny to validate various leaks.

LinkedIn is now using everyone’s content to train their AI tool

Somehow i feel sad for this AI model. All the others are trained on authentic content and this boy gets socialised on the most shallow content imaginable. Poor, socially awkward AI.

O2 unveils Daisy, the AI granny wasting scammers’ time: An AI “grandma” that chats with phone scammers to keep them busy and protect real people from scams.

Show HN: If YouTube had actual channels: A YouTube browser that’s like a regular TV. I use this at least once a day.

The shortest, strangest engineering interview I’ve ever done: What started as a normal staff engineer interview process turned into a candidate just being nasty for no reason.

We did it🏴🏴🏴: Getting hacked after checking if a cracked game would work.

Why does HTML think “chucknorris” is a color?: a holdover from the Netscape days with missing digits treated as 0.

Collections

LLMs for praising and roasting your GitHub profiles

Github funnies

Google Sheets Emojis: Me and my partner use Google sheets, so when I was looking for a fix I found these.

IMG_XXXX

  • IMG_0416: Apple’s “Send to YouTube” feature created an archive of raw, unedited personal videos with default names like “IMG_XXXX” that remain online today, and created an archive of raw, unedited personal videos forming a unique time capsule of life during that era.
  • IMG_0001: Inspired by Ben Wallace’s article, this is a “TV viewer” of the videos.