The Rundown: August 16, 2023

• Caslon, Baskerville, and Frankin: Revolutionary Types: “Both copies of the declaration were printed using Caslon. Think about it: the first two printed copies of the Declaration of Independence were printed using type from a British designer. Doesn’t that make the ideas just slightly more subversive?“

• We come to bury ChatGPT, not to praise it.:” The nature of ChatGPT as a bullshit generator makes it harmful, and it becomes more harmful the more optimized it becomes.”

• The evolution of Facebook’s iOS app architecture: “The app’s codebase reflects 10 years of evolution, spurred by technical decisions necessary to support the growing number of engineers working on the app, its stability, and, above all, the user experience.“

• AMAZON BEGS EMPLOYEES NOT TO LEAK CORPORATE SECRETS TO CHATGPT: “After catching snippets of text generated by OpenAI's powerful ChatGPT tool that looked a lot like company secrets, Amazon is now trying to head its employees off from leaking anything else to the algorithm.“

• Is there a Correlation between the Use of Swearwords and Code Quality in Open Source Code? (pdf): “We find that open source code containing swearwords exhibit significantly better code quality than those not containing swearwords under several statistical tests. We hypothesise that the use of swearwords constitutes an indicator of a profound emotional involvement of the programmer with the code and its inherent complexities, thus yielding better code based on a thorough, critical, and dialectic code analysis process.“