Zagaja.com

• How a Coding Error Caused Rogers an Outage that Left Millions Without Service is an account of the Canadian Internet outage earlier this month.
• America’s Lawyerless Courts is a grim overview of how the lack of lawyers involved in a surprising amount of civil cases is impacting the legal system. The fact this article has not been in more mainstream publications is a bummer.
• Code for America highlights its first impact sprint cohort. The Urban League Heat Pump Accelerator project I am helping with is a part of this.
• A lengthy critique and analysis of Getting Things Done. Although it is a bit dated, I still use many of the methods from the original book. The most controversial seems to be inbox zero. I still follow this, but the most maddening thing is most external sources treat your inbox as if you do not, so everything gets multiple reminders now, making it harder to achieve inbox zero. I am ruthless at unsubscribing.
• Congress passed the CHIPS Act which hopefully will be a good hedge against future chip shortages.

Casey Newton interviewing Adam Mosseri:

I think what is happening is people think of us as a feed app, because we started as a feed app. When we launched Instagram, there were no stories, there were no DMs. What’s happened over the last decade is that how people share with friends has changed. It has shifted to stories, and it has shifted to DMs and to group chats. More photos and videos are shared in DMs in a day, then are shared into stories. And more photos and videos are shared into stories in a day than are shared to feed. I don’t think connecting people with their friends and family is any less important to us than it was two years ago, or five years ago, or eight years ago. But how that works, and how we try and meet that need, has changed as how people communicate with their friends has changed.

I am a fan of fish shell for my coding work. It has a lot of features that bash and zsh lack. However the tools I used to pick my Ruby and Node versions. This saved me typing every time I switch apps. Fortunately it was easy to write my own. I have shared my configuration change on GitHub. Just drop the function files in your ~/.config/fish/functions directory and then update your config file to source them using the template I linked.

A couple years ago I tried Grammarly as an improved spell check tool. The promise is to use AI to give you a better check for spelling and grammar. However the integration options were limited and I was a bit concerned with their privacy practices. So yesterday was excited to discover Language Tool. It started as an open source project and the base engine remains open source. They have a clear privacy policy and you can run a copy of their engine locally. I am also impressed with the number of integrations.

Ed Flynn via Caught in Southie:

I talked with Eversource executive about the power outages in City Point (and other areas in South Boston). Equipment is stressed and overheated due to extreme heat and length of this historic wave, with ACs cranked high to stay cool. The work crews continue to work to repair damage to the system and restore power as quickly as possible. I will continue to communicate with Eversource. Please check on our South Boston seniors and persons with disabilities. If anyone needs to reach me for assistance, please let me know.