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Emotional vocabulary, modern image formats, and an ethical networking app
Apr, 2025
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👋 This is The Pipette – a monthly newsletter for product builders with links so good their ideas warrant a reply, a forward, or even a discussion in real life.
- Art – Raven Kwok is a visual artist who creates videos and interactive art installations using creative coding tools like Processing. His multidisciplinary works combine math, programming, and design to generate ever-changing worlds in real time, interact with viewers, and showcase complex and beautiful patterns. His site and Vimeo page contain highly polished works, but even the sandbox-y code experiments are a delight to explore.
- Design (Video 📽️) – We love a good image compression comparison, especially when narrated by a cheery British chap. In all seriousness, file formats can impact a design’s quality perception, how quickly a webpage loads, and ultimately, how satisfied a client/boss is with the final product. Seeing a picture compressed to 1/10th its size while retaining all noticeable detail is also just plain fun. 👩💻 P.S. Regarding newer image formats, AVIF or WebP are currently the only widely supported options.
- Psychology – Have you ever found it difficult to explain why you like a TV show or an art piece? It could be because you haven’t built up a vocabulary to pinpoint your emotions. Also, neuroscience finds that the words you use to think about a concept or emotion influence how intensely you perceive it. You can build this vocabulary by reading commentary by critics and experts on the material. Inventing a few specific terms that only make sense to you is also a powerful tool to hone in on a feeling instantly and experience it more deeply.
- Networking – Clay is a tool to manage your personal and professional relationships, all in one place. It aggregates data points from integrations like your calendar, messaging apps, and social/professional networks like LinkedIn to give you a person-centric view of contacts, your touch points, how often you meet, when you last talked, and any important news about them. A clean, modern design and support for all major devices/platforms drew us in, but we were also impressed by its product team and ethical mission to improve how we interact with each other. Clay was inspired by the index-card system used by David Rockefeller to chronicle his interactions. By the time he passed, over 200,000 cards were part of his collection.
- Cybersecurity – North Korean IT workers are using sophisticated methods to fraudulently obtain US positions and funnel salary funds back to the North Korean government. They use various techniques to bypass interviews and detection, including leveraging a proxy person to perform the initial interview and using their data for verification in exchange for 30% of the salary. It’s estimated that since 2018, thousands of NK software engineers have been hired this way, generating hundreds of millions of dollars to fund weapons of mass destruction and ballistic missile programs. If you’re hiring, the U.S. Treasury has a document with steps to suss out any suspicious interview/working behavior.
- Engineering – K6 is a blazing fast, open-source load-testing tool with a great developer experience. Download a single executable file, and you’re ready to start writing tests in Javascript to put your infrastructure through the ringer and find performance bottlenecks. The program is so efficient that you can easily send more than 100k requests per second from a single machine. It’s also possible to run K6 on their cloud, your infrastructure, or both. A hybrid option lets you run the tests on your end but see and share results in a cloud dashboard.