|
I always said to my family: there is no privacy in Internet. Once the data "leaves" your device and go in a server, well... goodbye.
|
|
|
|
|
Berkeley researchers have now made a major advance in realistic computer animation, using deep reinforcement learning to recreate natural motions, even for acrobatic feats like break dancing and martial arts. Realistic? Still looks like a balloon animal to me
modified 13-Apr-18 0:54am.
|
|
|
|
|
|
Oh, bother. Thank you.
TTFN - Kent
|
|
|
|
|
No matter what language or technology stack you use, if you can describe your code with these adjectives, good code should follow But of course, you already knew you were
|
|
|
|
|
11 signs InfoWorld articles are pointless garbage.
- I
- N
- F
- O
- W
- O
- R
- L
- D
10 and 11 are missing because InfoWorld authors can't count that high.
|
|
|
|
|
I found the missing signs and a few more beyond them.
- I
- N
- F
- O
- W
- O
- R
- T
- H
- L
- E
- S
- S
Did you ever see history portrayed as an old man with a wise brow and pulseless heart, weighing all things in the balance of reason?
Is not rather the genius of history like an eternal, imploring maiden, full of fire, with a burning heart and flaming soul, humanly warm and humanly beautiful?
--Zachris Topelius
Training a telescope on one’s own belly button will only reveal lint. You like that? You go right on staring at it. I prefer looking at galaxies.
-- Sarah Hoyt
|
|
|
|
|
Bad news for "night owls": Those who tend to stay up late and sleep in well past sunrise are at increased risk of early death, a new study from the United Kingdom suggests. If my choices are getting up at 5am or dying sooner, I'm still hitting the snooze bar
|
|
|
|
|
Oh marvelous!
I started the day hearing from some other bunch of boffins about how I'll die early because I drink more than a pint of beer a day (surely the only alternative to death by hydration).
And now this.
I was looking forward to the weekend but now I'm not convinced that I'll be around to see it.
98.4% of statistics are made up on the spot.
|
|
|
|
|
Yes, but night owls have a hoot more fun, so it's worth a few minutes less of life. 
|
|
|
|
|
There was a previous study that found exactly the opposite.
|
|
|
|
|
Of course there was - I'd be surprised if there weren't. And if there weren't a new one next week that contradicted this one, and another, and another... 
TTFN - Kent
|
|
|
|
|
ad infinitum...
I suspect one could find a study that confirms just about any hypothesis you might want to propose.
|
|
|
|
|
Work on the AV1 (AOMedia Video 1) codec started in 2015, when Google, Cisco, and Mozilla+Xiph.org pooled together three codecs —VPX, Thor, and Daala— into a new project that aimed to create a royalty-free codec that they planned to make freely available to anyone on the video market. Just in time to kill the radio star
|
|
|
|
|
A team of academics has successfully developed and tested malware that can exfiltrate data from air-gapped computers via power lines. The team —from the Ben-Gurion University of the Negev in Israel— named their data exfiltration technique PowerHammer. Beware of hackers with volt meters
Of course, the first step is, "install malware"
|
|
|
|
|
This isn’t a job title you should accept, unless you have your back against the wall For discussion purposes
|
|
|
|
|
Having worked my way up through working in a shop selling plastic gifts to working as a warehouse worker shifting lorry loads of heavy boxes I am still amazed at how some people think that their first or even second job should be well paid or even interesting.
Having a PhD in AI from Stanford does not mean that you are competent at working in a business with all that it involves - therefore your first job should be as a junior role as you still have a lot to learn in your first 10 years of employment.
Rant over... for the moment...
...well not quite over...
Learning can be summarised in four stages:
Unconscious incompetence
Conscious incompetence
Conscious competence
Unconscious competence
The chap who wrote the article seems to still be at the Unconscious incompetence stage 
“That which can be asserted without evidence, can be dismissed without evidence.”
― Christopher Hitchens
modified 12-Apr-18 8:24am.
|
|
|
|
|
The owner of the company had an objection at the time that infuriated me. He worried that giving them good job titles would make it easier for them to work elsewhere and wondered if we shouldn’t sandbag them a little. Make them “coders” instead of “software engineers” or throw in a “junior” at the lowest level.
I subscribe to Richard Branson’s wisdom related to this matter (which I think post-dated the conversation anyway). “Train people well enough so they can leave, treat them well enough so they don’t want to.” You keep people by partnering with them and making them feel valued, not by sandbagging them.
[...] The job title, in spite of being a construct whose value I fundamentally question, is sociologically fascinating for an armchair dilettante like myself. Within a company, job titles mostly matter procedurally. [...] But then, when you go to interview somewhere else, they suddenly matter in a very economically tangible way. The loose title consensus across the broad spectrum of companies (and, quite often, the question “how much did you make at your last job”) is how your new company places you in its pecking order.
|
|
|
|
|
My experience has been that current or previous job titles have had absolutely no effect on my ability to get a job.
The two things that have made a difference were skills and current salary.
For some strange reason many employers seem to believe that the more you earn the more competent you must be.
“That which can be asserted without evidence, can be dismissed without evidence.”
― Christopher Hitchens
|
|
|
|
|
GuyThiebaut wrote: For some strange reason many employers seem to believe that the more you earn the more competent you must be.
Which is part of the problem. Let's say you accept a position as a "Junior Dev" with a bracket of 40-60k/yr starting at 45k/yr. You kill it and get a raise to 50k/yr. You earn more and more complex work over a couple years and continue killing it. But HR can't promote you. There are no positions. And the company doesn't want to give you a raise because it would shift you out-of-line with other "Junior Devs" on the team - even if the bracket still allows a 10k furtherance.
So you see yourself going nowhere and jump ship. Apply to a bunch of places; maybe some don't give you any attention because of your title; maybe some do. Let's focus on the ones that do. So they see your title as "Junior Dev" and see that you made 50k/yr. Let's say the position is a normal "Software Dev" position with a 55-85k bracket. What do you think they're gonna offer you?
Your previous position was not reflective in title or compensation to the work you ended up doing. But that same title and compensation data will be used to determine how "important" you were relative to the general baseline pay. Something that isn't consistent at all between companies. This could easily backfire into a 55-60k offer even though the value they might get is more in line with 70-75k.
HR doesn't know who you are. They don't look at your GitHub projects. You're just a group of statistics on a piece of paper. If you aren't mindful of how those statistics reflect on you, it could easily stunt career growth. Because as you said,
GuyThiebaut wrote: For some strange reason many employers seem to believe that the more you earn the more competent you must be.
I'm not saying this is always the case. It probably also differs from country to country and market to market. The point is that just because it might not have occurred to you currently does not make it any less of a topic worth considering for the future.
|
|
|
|
|
Yet, titles do mean something. I once worked with someone who was a "software engineer", but had the experience of a junior engineer. He got a job offer elsewhere. To match it, the company policies required that he be made a senior engineer. They did so. But, he still wasn't a senior engineer and it caused all sorts of real problems.
If I see a resume of someone with three years experience claiming to be a senior engineer, I suggest not even bringing them in, let alone giving them an offer. This isn't me being snooty about titles, but long experience of people claiming they are far more competent than they really are.
|
|
|
|
|
I wasn't claiming titles don't mean anything; exactly the opposite in fact. My point is titles are just as important for the employee as they are for the employer. It's definitely a complex issue. Both from an employer and employee perspective.
Your example points out a pet peeve of mine in company-culture - the idea that upward-mobility is inviolable. Not everyone has a position appropriate to their skills. I don't care if you've got 30 years of experience and are a senior developer. If you've refused to learn anything since C and your code is unmanageable like throwing spaghetti into a ceiling fan, maybe you've earned a bit of downward-mobility.
|
|
|
|
|
Unions have been trying to organize software engineers for decades, with little success. Here's a look at the organizing campaign that might turn things around. "Look for.. the union label..."
Also: worst D&D ripoff, evah!
|
|
|
|
|
Researchers have developed a method for generating numbers guaranteed to be random, through the use of quantum mechanics. The experimental technique surpasses all previous methods for ensuring the unpredictability of its random numbers and may enhance security and trust in cryptographic systems. D20 ought to be enough for everyone
|
|
|
|
|
It won’t lick your face, but a new artificial-intelligence system mimics canine behavior to make dog-like decisions. Other animals could be next. Who's a good AI? Who is? You is a good AI! Yes, you is!
|
|
|
|
General 
News 
Suggestion 
Question 
Bug 
Answer 
Joke 
Praise 
Rant 
Admin 
Submit an article or tip
