👨‍🍳 Adventures in the HTTPs Underbelly

This has been a very strange week for travelers of the underbelly.

We had great highs and brutal lows. I knew it was going to be a good week when I read one group of scientists saying "Only our stupidity will lead to killer robots"
And then another group of scientists saying "hehehe. Guess what we just did?".

I round it out with a hearty selection of tools, articles, and productivity tips. They are guaranteed to cleanse your palette after the naughty droids.

But for now, let's start with satire (the highest form of wit).

🕸️ The Cool Side of the Web

Scarfolk Council is one of the best satirical websites ever. 🤭

I lifted this from Warren Ellis, and I am going to lift the blog description also:

"Scarfolk is an English town forever time-locked in the 1970s. It might also run parallel to the present somehow because there are ‘leakages’: shared ideas and events occur in both times simultaneously. Scarfolk is what we might have become or maybe it’s where we’re heading."

The coolest PC case mods from the coolest computer show of the year: Computex 2018.

The passport index is an interactive website that ranks the passports of the world. 🛂

Every cover from every passport from every country. Pretty, pretty, pretty, pretty cool.
Compete with your friends over your passports' "Visa Power".
For the serious, you can do some quick research on global mobility and visa requirements for all listed countries.

Instagram is making poetry cool again.

There is also a deeper dive into the poets of Instagram if you'd like more context.

[Long read] Deep dive into psychographics and how it is used across industries. 📈🧠

🤖 Robots et. al.

MIT scientists with zero ethics to give created an AI psychopath. 😰 Thanks?

The AI was trained from comments on an 'infamous subreddit'. The good side is that the site will allow you to try and help Norman fix himself.
So, you know, we should probably get over there before our stupidity gives birth to the first killer robot.

But hey, at least we know where Rick went to university. And, by MIT standards, he seems like a light-weight, humanist, conservative thinker.

You may have seen Norman in Versioning or the superb Noticing from Jason Kottke.

The true story of how popcorn butter brought the curious robots to their knees. 🍿

giggle

⚒️ Tools and Resources

Edabit is Duolingo for programming languages.

This is my tool of the week. I'm a simple man, if a tool makes programming slightly easier, then I'm in love.

8 choices from C#, C++, Java, JS, Ruby, Python, PHP, and Swift. Responsive to how the platform is used, so get involved and help add resources, improve challenges, and provide interesting solutions. 🤗

Instagram in your terminal.

Sure, why not? The added bonus is that all your friends look Matrixed.

Learn a little Golang and build a backup tool for GitHub and GitLab repos.

SVGator is an online tool for animating SVGs.

Recommended by our dev team, so it must be useful.
This is a great tool if ye prefer not to code. All the code is created automatically but you can still edit it if tweakin' is yo thang.
I hate to say it, but this might even be a better option than using GIFs.

Sing app is an admin dashboard template built with NodeJS, React, and Bootstrap.

It sure looks nice and can be integrated with a lot of different software packages. I could see this being particularly useful if you have a ton of different metrics to follow.

A nice snippet of impatient fingers. 🖐🏾

So, I guess you don't want to encourage impatience. I kind of liked it tho.

🕷️ Design & Development Arena

A fresh batch of tech comics on AI, GDPR, evil devs, client traps, and the tarot.

Essential software license: "The Good Luck With That Public License".

This is pretty funny.
Designed to protect you when you forget just what you were trying to achieve with a project.

Meet 3 teen women who won Apple's 2018 WWDC scholarship.

👩‍💻 Misc Tech

New Zealand scientists are breeding sheep to fart and burp less.

Drones are being enlisted in the age old profession of whale snotting.

Drones are collecting whale snot to help identify the various whale viruses. You'll be happy to see it is a video link too.

Outro

And that's the end of that chapter.

I only have 275 newsletters until I reach the magic 300. Let's hope Norman doesn't find his way into my...anything.

If you're in danger from psychopathic AI then tweet your mayday in my direction.

You can always share the love with a forward 🤗

If you are the recipient of a forward, then join us and we'll go whale snotting together.

Well, the drama's done for another week,

Chris

👨‍🍳 Adventures in the HTTPs Underbelly 12th June 2018