🏷 "[Life's] a journey, and you're not done till you’re done." - Fran Drescher

Hey friends!

I hope you had a good one this week! I'm feeling all warm and fuzzy myself because I got to see a bunch of family and friends. Anyway, time to surf!

Was this forwarded to you? You can subscribe here!

Web links of the week

The history and legacy of Visual Basic
Creating a Clock with the New CSS sin() and cos() Trigonometry Functions
How Discord Stores Trillions of Messages
Are you making these five mistakes when writing alt text?

Something that interested me this week

Did y'all see the GPT-4 announcement? My team at work (as a reminder, I work at Contenda, an AI startup) got access and I've been playing with it a bunch this week.

I admit, though the output is definitely more "human-like" than its predecessors, there's still a lot of "hallucinations" that occur (AI hallucinations are when an AI gives a response confidently that is fully made up... also known as robots lying, heh). I asked it for artsy things like guitar tabs and art instructions, and the stuff it gave me were very cool looking but definitely not accurate to what I asked for. I was really excited about a technical tutorial that it output for me at one point, but after a couple hours of following it, I realized that it was teaching me a very outdated practice with the API I was learning. Oops.

That being said, asking for smaller things work really well. Here's an example of a function I asked it to write, and it's pretty amazing to see how it wrote the code, commented it, and also included instructions on how to use it. Our jobs are still secure, but it's cool to think about the potential, here!

Sponsor

Join Dario Amodei (CEO @ Anthropic), Erica Brescia (Managing Director @ Redpoint Ventures, former COO @ GitHub), Simon Marlow (Engineer @ Meta) and other leaders in the AI space for a series of talks around the intersection of AI and code intelligence and what it means for the engineering world. Register here for the March 23rd event hosted by Sourcegraph.

Interview question of the week

Last week, I had you do fraction math, and y'all did great! Awesome work Miguel, Muhammad, Alfonso, Saad, Fraol, tlgreg, Alvin, Jesper, Will, Ángel, Kyle, Ten, Christian, Josef, Stefan, and Will!

This week's question:
When you're representing colors in a program, you typically use HEX, RGB, or HSL. Write a program that converts between the different formats.

Example:

$ convertColor('rgb', 'hex', '(255,0,0)')
$ '#FF0000'

$ convertColor('hsl', 'rgb', '(65,80,80)')
$ '(238,245,163)'

$ convertColor('hsl', 'hex', '(65,80,80)')
$ '#EEF5A3'

Cool things from around the internet

En dash, em dash and hyphen; what’s the difference?
Is science about to end?
It's time to build: A New World's Fair
Libra Mini 40% with PBT Haku

Joke

Me: "Happy Pi Day!"
My friend: "Aren't you a few days late?"
Me: "Oh right, sorry, I was being irrational."

That's all for now, folks! Have a great week. Be safe, make good choices, and compliment your friends!

Special thanks to Gabor, IceSloth, Alaska, Josh, Conor, Ezell, Karthic, Ximena, Paige, Zev, Sebastián, Ben, Sema, Kinetic Labs, Vadim, Bailey, Carmina, and Faisal for supporting my Patreon and this newsletter!

cassidoo

website | twitter | patreon | github | twitch | codepen | polywork | mastodon