Issue 167🖥️🚨 Employee monitoring app leaks 21m screenshots. AI support bot causes subscription exodus. Developer renaissance coming despite AI hype.
Hey there Bizarro readers! Welcome to the May 2025 issue of your favorite quirky tech newsletter. We’ve got all sorts of interesting stories for you, ranging from AI-powered police robots in Thailand to the latest innovations in zipper technology. Bet you didn’t think that zippers could somehow be made next-level, did you? Well…keep reading. But first, let’s begin with our top stories this month:
Thanks for being here. We appreciate you. 📰 From the Newsroom🖥️🚨 Employee Monitoring App Leaks 21M ScreenshotsWorkComposer, a surveillance tool used by over 200,000 companies worldwide to monitor employee productivity, suffered a massive security breach when researchers discovered more than 21 million employee screenshots exposed in an unsecured Amazon S3 bucket. The leak has raised serious questions about workplace surveillance practices and the security risks they pose.
WorkComposer has since secured the exposed data, but the damage may have already been done. José Martinez from the Electronic Frontier Foundation summed up the incident as follows: "If a worker committed the kind of incompetence that WorkComposer did, this data might be used to fire them. WorkComposer, too, should be out of a job." I can’t say I disagree. 🏃♂️💬 AI Support Bot Causes Subscription ExodusAI coding assistant startup Cursor, which has recently been valued at nearly $10 billion, faced major backlash last month after its customer support bot went rogue. The company suddenly found itself at the center of a PR disaster in the latest example of AI replacing humans only for it to backfire.
Other companies like Air Canada, Chevrolet, and DPD have faced similar issues with their own AI chatbots. So the question now is - are any companies going to change course? Or will they just double down and hope that the problems will iterate themselves away as the technology continues to improve? My guess is that their quarterly earnings calls will push them towards the latter. 🚀👨💻 Developer Renaissance Coming Despite AI HypeA little over two years ago, developer Josh Comeau published a blog post titled "The End of Front-End Development." In that post, he addressed the anxiety that existed at that time (and hasn’t fully gone away) about AI taking over developer jobs. Last month he published a new post that serves as an update to that original piece and that examines how things have changed.
Despite continued improvements in AI models, Comeau remains convinced that coding is still an incredibly valuable skill with a bright future. I happen to agree and I’ve been saying for months now that the same applies to many other jobs (see previous story). I’m hoping that voices like Comeau get elevated high enough that decision makers begin to realize that the path forward is human + AI collaboration and not AI replacement of humans. ⛓️ Ten Must See Links of the MonthSponsored by Optimole, the best image optimization tool on the internet.
🎤 It’s How They Said It“Cybertruck will be waterproof enough to serve briefly as a boat, so it can cross rivers, lakes and even seas that aren’t too choppy.” – Elon Musk’s tweet about Cybertruck’s capabilities has resurfaced after a Cybertruck owner from California took him at his word and decided to test his own Cybertruck. 🧮 The Numbers Game
⚒️ Tools and ResourcesWordPress Development Course: This modern, opinionated, and project-driven course is designed to take you from “WordPress user” to “WordPress developer” who can confidently design plugins, create custom block themes, automate workflows, and ship production-ready code. All in only 10 weeks. https://wpshout.com/wordpress-development-course/ Embla Carousel: This is a dependency free, lightweight carousel library that helps solve the hardest technical challenges with building carousels. It leaves the rest up to you, with features like a highly extensible API and various plugins. It works in all modern browsers. https://www.embla-carousel.com/ Simple Parallax: This is an easy-to-use JS and React library that adds parallax animations to any image. Its notable for its simplicity and impressive visual effects. The parallax effect is applied directly to image tags, eliminating the need for background images. Any image can be used, including next/image component. LivePortrait: This fun tool lets you upload a still image of a person or animal and then create a talking video out of it. It does have a lot of limitations, but nonetheless, it’s enjoyable to play around with. Here’s my review / mini-tutorial of it. Or you can head straight to a Hugging Face implementation of it below. https://huggingface.co/spaces/KwaiVGI/LivePortrait JS Font Picker: A versatile, flexible, and lightweight Javascript Font Picker Component for System fonts, Google fonts and custom (woff/ttf) fonts. It features dynamic font loading, favorites, keyboard navigation, fuzzy search, advanced metrics filters, property sorting and more. It’s also open source, free, and available in multiple languages. 🖼️ What Am I Looking At?
This humorous AI-generated comic strip has been making the rounds on X. It was created in response to the trending debate about whether you should thank LLMs in your interactions with them. If you count yourself among the AI thankers, there’s one thing you probably haven’t considered: the cost of your politeness. One X user pondered this question publicly when he posted: I wonder how much money OpenAI has lost in electricity costs from people saying “please” and “thank you” to their models. To which OpenAI’s CEO responded with: Tens of millions of dollars well spent--you never know. I suppose it’s a small price to pay for future protection from our AI overlords. 😉 💬 What’s the Word?無為 (Wu-wei) is a Chinese Taoist concept that translates into "non-doing" or "non-action," but actually describes acting in perfect harmony with the natural flow of things without forced effort or interference. For developers, 無為 is achieved when your code emerges organically from deep understanding of the problem space. It's those moments when you resist overengineering a simple feature, elegantly refactor complex code into something surprisingly minimal, or choose the perfect existing library instead of building from scratch. When's the last time your code felt like it wrote itself? 📊 Results of Last Month’s Polls
Although there weren’t that many voters on this poll, I was still surprised to see that the never trieds beat out the of coursers. Personally, I think vibe coding is fun but I also recognize its limits and don’t think it can fully replace programmers for any serious larger projects. 🧑🏻💻👨🏽💻👩🏼💻 Pledge Your SupportWe recently turned on the pledges ask in Substack. Here’s why: Bizarro Devs has been a free publication for 167 issues, but none of those issues have been free to produce. As a company, we have absorbed the cost because we wanted to give back to the developer community that we are also a part of. Unfortunately, Google’s algorithm changes in the past year have put a significant dent in our revenue, which has made it more challenging to continue operating “as is.” There is a very real possibility that we will no longer be able to sustain the publication of Bizarro Devs on our own past the summer. We turned on the pledges to see if our community here would be willing to help us keep the newsletter alive. Regardless of the response, we don’t plan on immediately converting the newsletter into a paid publication, but the next two or three months will determine how we chart our course and the pledges will play a role in that. Thanks for considering, and as always, thank you reading! If this is the first time you're here at Bizarro Devs and you enjoyed the content, then sign up here to join us on the first Tuesday of every month. Until we see each other again, Bizarro Devs is free today. But if you enjoyed this post, you can tell Bizarro Devs that their writing is valuable by pledging a future subscription. You won't be charged unless they enable payments.
|
Selasa, 06 Mei 2025
Issue 167
Sharva B | Selasa, 06 Mei 2025
Tidak ada komentar:
Posting Komentar