Hey everyone! In my latest blog round-up, I’m diving into a variety of fascinating topics. Discover why the Stanford Internet Observatory is being shut down, learn to replace brake pads on a Toyota Highlander, and explore natural alternatives to GLP-1. Plus, find out how to integrate ChatGPT in iOS 18, unlock the power of unstructured data, and so much more. Check it out!

• The Stanford Internet Observatory is being dismantled: House Republicans attacked the lab’s reports on misinformation and election integrity — and now Stanford is pulling the plug
• Toyota Highlander Front Brake Pads Replacement Guide – 2008 To 2013 Model Years – Picture Illustrated Automotive Maintenance DIY Instructions: How to change the front disc brake pads on a second generation Toyota Highlander SUV with photo illustrated steps and replacement part numbers.
• What To Know About GLP-1 Natural Alternatives: Boost your health naturally with the top five GLP-1 alternatives. Discover the foods and supplements that you might consider including in your diet.
• Integrate ChatGPT in iOS-iPadOS-macOS w/out the official support: A few days ago, I watched the latest WWDC event from Apple, and I was overall positively impressed, especially with the “Apple Intelligence” segment. The integration of ChatGPT in iOS 18 seems to be very well done! …but it isn’t available for all devices and at the moment I’m writing is not yet available in the beta.
• Unlocking the power of unstructured data with RAG: Unstructured data holds valuable information about codebases, organizational best practices, and customer feedback. Here are some ways you can leverage it with RAG, or retrieval-augmented generation.
• Building Generative AI apps with .NET 8: Learn the latest news and announcements about the state of generative AI development with .NET 8.
• LLMs and Creativity: Complements, Not Substitutes: Explore the role of AI in the creative process. Understand how AI tools like LLMs can enhance, not replace, human creativity
• [Scheme’22] Programming is (should be) fun!: Programming is not coding! Programming a medium for creative expression. Composing a good program can be an esthetic experience similar to writing a story, a piece of music, or poetry,
  A good programming experience is an exploration of abstract design. A successful design requires careful choice of the levels of detail for each layer of a programming project. Some of these choices involve classical issues of philosophy, such as the status of referents of expressions, the meaning of quotation, the problems with negation, the power of self-reference, and the use (and danger) of abstraction. Well-composed programs can be effective at expressing emotional content as well. There are the beauties of symmetrical design, and the horrors of ugly kludges.
  All programs have bugs, even ones that meet given specs (because the specs are always incomplete or inconsistent). Bugs are inevitable because the creation of buggy approximations is a crucial part of the design process. Thus, it is more effective to make systems that are debuggable than to try to make systems that are correct by construction.
  In any case, we must keep the fun in programming and not allow it to become a tedious job.
• Why you’re seeing lime green all over the internet: Charli xcx released her new album ‘brat,’, and now the internet is full of lime-green memes.
• Develop your own C# Obfuscator: Obfuscation is an important technique used to protect software from Man-At-The-End (MATE) attacks. Its purpose is to modify the code of a software application in order to make it more difficult for an attacker to understand, analyze or manipulate wile preserving its original semantics. The original idea was to provide technical protection against software theft and thus protect intellectual property. The advantages of software obfuscation are not only used for benign software to e.g. hide a sophisticated algorithm considered a trade secret, but also by adversaries to thwart static analysis techniques employed for detection.
• How Stripe’s document databases supported 99.999% uptime with zero-downtime data migrations: In this blog post we’ll share an overview of Stripe’s database infrastructure and discuss the design and application of the Data Movement Platform.
• The efficiency trap: dishwashers and business metrics: Summary: One type of efficiency often leads to inefficiency in other areas. It’s important to maintain a balanced perspective on different types of efficiency and to relate them to your overall goals. Dishwashers frequently have an efficiency label on them. Those labels irritate me because they imply there’s only one kind of efficiency that matters…
• Clients Buy Words: Rob Schwartz on the simple secret to selling whether a pitch, product, or brand.
• Serious Engine Networking – Dive-in Analysis: Personal website and blog.
• the Gilbert–Johnson–Keerthi algorithm explained as simply as possible: The GJK algorithm is a weird way to do a simple thing.
  We have shape A and shape B, and we’d like to determine if they overlap.