054. Grass in the Stone

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Captured this weekend outside a house near Huanglong—grass growing directly out of stone. There was a certain “Zen” atmosphere that the photo only partially conveys.

Record the down-to-earth trending technologies seen every week, and publish them here after screening. If you find it good, you can follow this weekly to get update notifications.

Front-End Reading

Meituan’s Practice and Exploration in Knowledge Graph QA
https://tech.meituan.com/2021/11/03/knowledge-based-question-answering-in-meituan.html
How Meituan uses automated and recommended replies to help merchants respond to customer inquiries more efficiently throughout the entire service lifecycle.

The Dilemma of Modern Web Development
https://juejin.cn/post/7025868886914400293
A perspective (likely from the Bytedance team) on the complexities and frustrations of building for the modern web. Worth a critical read.

Decoding Strange Symbols in TypeScript
https://mp.weixin.qq.com/s/Y4TX0ACqyCoRCBfsas2qCA
Ever wondered what ?? actually does, or what the ! means in useContext(AppContext)!? This article clarifies the shorthand you see in modern TS codebases.

Record, Replay and Measure User Flows in Chrome
https://developer.chrome.com/docs/devtools/recorder/
A powerful new native feature in DevTools that allows you to record user interactions and replay them for testing and performance measurement.

Trending Open Source

nnn: A Blazingly Fast Terminal File Manager
https://github.com/jarun/nnn
Extremely lightweight and supports a ton of plugins. You can install it on Mac easily via brew install nnn.

Hasty: JS Performance Benchmarking Tool
https://hasty.dev/
A simple web-based tool for quickly comparing the performance of different JavaScript snippets.

Agora Flat: Open-Source Interactive Classroom
https://github.com/netless-io/flat
A beautifully designed, fully open-source platform for building interactive online educational experiences.

VS Code Theme Generator: Build Your Own Theme with Code
https://github.com/Tyriar/vscode-theme-generator
A programmatic way to define and generate VS Code themes using a simple JavaScript configuration.

import { generateTheme, IColorSet } from 'vscode-theme-generator';
const colorSet: IColorSet = {
  base: {
    background: '#12171F',
    foreground: '#EFEFEF',
    color1: '#399EF4',
    // ... more colors
  },
};
generateTheme('My Theme', colorSet, path.join(__dirname, 'theme.json'));

Fig: Autocomplete for Your Terminal
https://github.com/withfig/autocomplete
Adds visual, IDE-like autocomplete menus to your existing terminal. A huge quality-of-life improvement for CLI users.

Just Looking Around

Apple Introduces “App Privacy Report” in iOS 15.2
https://mp.weixin.qq.com/s/jo9sb2AfrnzZWpDDuqJnCw
Users can now see exactly how often apps are accessing sensitive data like location and camera, as well as which background domains they are contacting. A big win for transparency.

A Handbook of Cognitive Biases
Read on Feishu
An incredibly comprehensive document detailing the various mental shortcuts and blind spots that affect our decision-making.

Morris Chang (TSMC Founder) 1.5-Hour Keynote
https://zhuanlan.zhihu.com/p/432049382
At 90 years old, Chang shares insights from his legendary career, from Texas Instruments to founding TSMC at age 54.

Understanding “Survivor Bias” in Depth
http://www.woshipm.com/user-research/5205736.html
A 4,400-word deep dive into why we often focus on the “winners” and ignore the hidden data of those who didn’t make it, and how to avoid this common fallacy.

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