One of the most gorgeous, magical scenes I’ve ever seen is footage that accidentally got captured and miraculously recovered of some dolphins swimming.

This a capella performance from 2008 is gorgeous. Their more recent stuff seems much more complicated but it’s nice to see this organic stuff working like gangbusters.

See also Flume on acoustic guitar and toy piano and Skinny Love in a living room of beaming smiles.

I used to love these Blogothéque videos. They’re still making them! Amazing.

“An ode to female programmers” by Dale Chase.

The vibes in 2009 were immaculate.

This is the funniest article on the internet: https://www.mcsweeneys.net/articles/e-mail-addresses-it-would-be-really-annoying-to-give-out-over-the-phone

I bookmarked this video on Pinboard about ten years ago. I don’t remember doing that, or what the context was. I like to think it was just a little seed I planted for myself because I knew it would make me smile one day.

And it did!

This is one of those songs where the covers are better than the original. See also this charming father daughter cover that I haven’t seen in even longer but stuck in some recess of my brain.

I’m planning to shut down my pinboard account. I had spurts where I shoved links in there, but I never actually looked at it that much. Some of those are becoming blog posts. A ton of the links are now broken. The shelf life of the internet is not that long.

This recent SNL sketch, starring Andrew Dismukes, Heidi Gardner, and host Jack Harlow, had me cracking up.

It kinda runs out of steam halfway through but it starts so strong.

I feel like repetition and yelling are always funny to me…

This is a quick tribute to and summary of xargs, the glue that holds together most of my shell scripts.

Imagine you have a file called fruits.txt:

$ cat fruits.txt
apples.txt
oranges.txt
bananas.txt

It’s a file with fruits all listed out on separate lines. xargs lets you squash that list down into a single line:

$ cat fruits.txt | xargs
apples.txt oranges.txt bananas.txt

What it’s doing is taking a list of things and turning them into arguments.

What do I mean by “arguments”? Let’s look at this example…

$ rm apples.txt oranges.txt bananas.txt

In that statement, we’re passing three arguments to the rm command, which will remove the files. In order to pass multiple file names to rm, they need to be written as arguments, meaning they’re all on one line and separated by spaces.

So… what if we have a fruits.txt that contains a list of filenames, and we want to execute the rm program, and pass it that list of files as arguments?

We can do it like this:

$ cat fruits.txt | xargs rm

In English, you might read this as “Take the contents of fruits.txt, turn that into arguments, and then execute the rm command with those arguments”.

This kind of problem comes up all the time when writing shell scripts. For me, it comes up most often when I’m writing one liners that I’m executing at the command line. Here are a few real examples I found in my shell history:

$ git ls-files | grep -E "\.(rb|jbuilder|ru)$" | xargs rubyfmt --write

In other words: “Find all of the ruby files in my git repository and format them with rubyfmt.”

$ git ls-files app/assets/javascripts/checkout | grep -E "\.js$" | xargs code

In other words: “Find all of the JavaScript files in a particular folder of my git repository and open them in VS Code.”

$ git ls-files | grep "test.jsx" | xargs grep -l  enzyme | xargs rm

(This one has a double xargs 👀)

In other words: “Find all of the react tests in my git repository and then search just those files for the word enzyme, and then print out the list of those file names, and then pass them as arguments to the rm command.

That last example is a pretty good category of problem that xargs solves. I often search through a codebase to find source code that matches a pattern. It’s easy enough to do that with a simple grep (or the search in your preferred editor). But I occasionally want to narrow down the search to a subset of files, and that’s not always easy to do with a single statement.

For example, I might want to search for “Find me everywhere in this codebase that contains the string FOO but narrowed down to files that happen to also contain the string BAR”. That’s easy enough to achieve once you’re comfortable with xargs:

$ grep -lr BAR . | xargs grep FOO
./app/models/human.rb:    puts FOO.inspect

Note: in my day-to-day life, I’m generally using ripgrep, not grep, but I wanted to keep the examples simple by using more standard things. But once you’re using ripgrep, the command gets a bit simpler and faster too:

$ rg -l BAR | xargs rg FOO
app/models/human.rb
22:    puts FOO.inspect

All right, that’s all I got. Have fun.

This short film is so funny even while it kind of feels like a horror story the entire time.

Kate Berlant and John Early are usually so heightened and wacky that it’s almost disorienting to see them in a slightly natural mode.

You can read more about the true story that inspired this on Vulture.

Also: this reminds me I need to see Kate Berlant’s new show, Kate while I still can…

This new Miley Cyrus song is a bop:

I feel like Cyrus is pretty underrated. See also this recent performance:

If you work in the tech industry, you may get a lot of emails from recruiters, and maybe even the occasional cold call.

In times of abundance, we like to complain about this. It can be genuinely annoying to be spammed, even if it is a bit of a humble brag to complain that so many people want to hire you.

So, how to reduce the amount you get?

Let me back up a little and give some context for this story… Back in November 2013, I registered hardscrabble.net, signed up for an email account on Fastmail, and promptly tried to retire the gmail account I had been using since 2007. I was bought in to the idea that you need to own your own domain, and avoid being locked in to services that may not stick around.¹

But I had a problem… even if I want to stop using my gmail account, the rest of the world is still going to keep emailing me at that address, because it’s still in their address books. I was prepared to take on the tedious task of updating all of my own accounts on various services to use my fancy new custom address, but I had no way to update the address books of my aunts and cousins.

Over the years, emails to my old address mostly dried up. But I still got the occasional recruiter email there. This surprised me, because my new address was listed publicly in several places (linkedin, this blog, my github) and my gmail wasn’t listed publicy anywhere I was aware of.

So, several months ago, I started replying to any recruiter emails sent to my gmail with something along these lines:

Hi Molly,

I’m not currently interested in exploring new job opportunities, but I’d love to ask you a favor if you have a moment…

Where did you get this email address? I’ve been trying to retire it for a decade (I list a different email address on LinkedIn for example), but people continue to email it, so I assume it’s still listed somewhere. Or is it in some database? If so, would you mind telling me what service you’re using to source candidates? I don’t mind being in a database but I’d love to perhaps update my info there…

I’ve been curious about this for years and if you can help me resolve the mystery I would be in your debt and might even be able to refer some candidates who are actually on the market 😉

All the best, Max

I was basically lying about referring them candidates but I felt like I needed to offer a back scratch if I’m going to ask for one. And it worked! These recruiters were super nice, and were happy to answer the question, which I really appreciated.

Here’s an example reply:

Hahaha, thank you for the response Max and this is probably the most fun I’ve had with “not interested” emails!

We use GEM in addition to LinkedIn for our recruiting efforts - it is relatively newer compared to LinkedIn but I think it’s been a pretty popular software since a few years ago and to my knowledge a lot of companies are utilizing it. I managed to remove this particular email address from our database so you shouldn’t receive any outreach from my team (unless we switch for a brand new software maybe?) Unfortunately, I’m not quite sure where GEM pulled this email from, but it looks like they’ve listed a few more: redacted. Let me know if you’d like to remove all of them - happy to do so as well!

Here’s what I learned: there are a whole bunch of companies out there which are scraping the internet for data and then selling that data to companies. And they all offer a flow to opt out².

Here are some examples:

• https://www.gem.com/do-not-sell
• https://www.nymeria.io/do-not-sell
• https://www.interseller.io/do-not-sell
• https://contactout.com/optout
• https://www.peopledatalabs.com/privacy/opt-out-form

And then in the interest of naming and shaming, here are some services recruiters cited which do not seem to have a publicly-discoverable page to opt out of having your data sold:

• https://eightfold.ai/

Opting out on those pages reduced the amount of recruiter spam I’ve received.

And then here’s the punchline to this blog post: I got laid off yesterday and now I need to start thinking about a new job search, and my inbox is crickets. Whoops!