Five Finds: The Worst Year to Be Alive

The worst year to be alive, lofi anime, and overachieving kids.

Fabulous Friday to you, friends. Here’s my catch for this week — hope you’ll like it!

Year 536 was the worst time to be alive

I'm willing to bet you've seen somebody write that it is the worst time to be alive recently. Next time you meet one of those overreacting people, you can send them this article. 536 is scientifically proven to be the worst year ever.

For 18 months, a strange fog dimmed the sun, triggering the coldest decade in 2,300 years. Chronicles from Ireland to China record years of crop failures and famine. In 541, the Justinian Plague began (the estimated death toll is between 25 and 50 million people).

A supervolcanic eruption covered the light. Together with the plague, it stalled civilization’s growth for a century. Only in the frozen ice of 640 do we finally see rising lead levels, which means the industries started recovering.

Despite all these findings, we still don’t know where this supervolcano was. Most likely somewhere in Iceland.

How Lofi Girl Became a Chill Beats Empire

There are countless website and YouTube streams of lofi music for work, focus and meditation. Most of them were directly inspired by the Lofi Girl and simply want to achieve a small fraction of its success.

Lofi Girl has built a chill beats empire through their 24/7 YouTube livestream, and created a massive, engaged community around the ambient music. They now own a full-fledged record label and a vast merchandising line as well.

I'm cursed with being unable to do focused work with music, and Lofi is literally the only thing I can listen when I'm working. Although, I prefer Lofi.cafe.

Profile of a curious engineer

In 2003, Addy Osmani spent two years coding “XWebs”, a self-described “megabrowser” written in hundreds of thousands of lines of C++. XWebs was packed with advanced features, including support for download management, built-in media players, a a web page editor, and even an animated assistant that could read web pages aloud. Osmani’s browser also loaded pages faster than any other browser at the time.

The fun part is that Addy was 16. It was his school project. As you can imagine, with these mad skills, he joined Google to develop Chrome in 2012 and eventually became the Head of Chrome Developer Experience.

And he didn't even have to attend a bootcamp.

Legendary hacker news comments that aged like milk

The people on Hacker News are often, well, hackers, and have a quite specific and technical view of the world.

It's interesting to read what people once said about now-billion-dollar companies.

Kagi News

Kagi, a subscription-based search engine, just launched its AI-powered news summaries, and I love them!

It’s the best automated way to keep up with specific topics, and I use it daily. Of course, the second webpage I open is Techmeme.