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Kent Sharkey wrote: That sound you hear is my "Oh, Really?!" alarm going off
Oh, Really? 
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The second annual AI Index report pulls together data and expert findings on the field’s progress and acceleration. "We cannot quite know what will happen if a machine exceeds our own intelligence, so we can't know if we'll be infinitely helped by it, or ignored by it and sidelined, or conceivably destroyed by it."
I hope this isn't a dupe - I thought we posted something about this report recently, but I couldn't find it
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"Dammit, our grants for 4GL dried up and blockchain is getting there... ooh, suckers, er, investors still like AI."
"But the AI they're talking about is just trivial sh*t with a new name, not the stuff of dreams."
"Shut up and fill out the application."
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What we really need is an AI that is trained in identifying important topics, structuring information, and delivering it coherently.
Then we can get rid of the monkey who made such a mess of that article.
I wanna be a eunuchs developer! Pass me a bread knife!
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Oh, phew. I thought you wanted to have me replaced. 
TTFN - Kent
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Novunn iss indisspensible, mein freund.
(note to self: remember to talk to the dentist about getting vampire-fang caps)
I wanna be a eunuchs developer! Pass me a bread knife!
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Transcendence
=====================================================
The grass is always greener on the other side of the fence
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Microsoft is working to bring a consumer version of its Microsoft 365 bundle to market, which could include Windows 10, Office 365, Skype, Cortana, Outlook Mobile and/or other services. All the Microsoft you can bear with, for one low monthly charge
Your life in the cloud. What could possibly go wrong?
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I thought they already had that.
Were it not for MSDN, I would have bought the Office family pack subscription. As it is, my kids get whatever old, legal, copies of Office I still have.
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Yeah, probably just a semi-regular: "Change what's in the box and rename it"
TTFN - Kent
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As long as they have new icons...
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The article said: which could include Windows 10
No thanks.
The article said: Office 365
No thanks.
The article said: Skype
No thanks.
The article said: Cortana
No thanks.
The article said: Outlook Mobile
No thanks.
The article said: other services
No porn, thanks.
I can't wait to not sign up!
I wanna be a eunuchs developer! Pass me a bread knife!
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Increasing one's level of physical activity may be an effective way to boost one's mood, according to a new study from a team including scientists at Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health in collaboration with the National Institute of Mental Health Intramural Research Program. I'm not risking it
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I'll avoid the point that it's yet another piece of research that is a complete waste of time, effort, and money -- but only because it's bleeding obvious (especially the part that they missed, i.e. that 80% of the effects they're talking about are a result of being outside in daylight).
Instead, I'll affirm its conclusions, by adding my own observations about people who spend all day in their mothers' cellars, sitting at computers.
... Or maybe I won't. I can live without flame wars.
I wanna be a eunuchs developer! Pass me a bread knife!
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Anyone who gets regular exercise could have told them this.
Software Zen: delete this;
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Automated tests are immensely useful. Once you’ve started writing tests and seen their value, the idea of writing software without them becomes unimaginable. G.I.G.O.
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I'm broken record in this regard; the purpose of testing isn't to show the software works, but to prove it doesn't. Thus, the challenge of a tester is to break the software. On the other hand, the purpose of automated tests is to show that your software [mostly] works to spec (even after changes.)
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I don't get what he's saying.
Is it "typos can break tests", or "if you don't know what you're doing, you'll write bad tests"?
Sorry, but typos can break anything that's typed, and if you don't know what you're doing, no matter what it is, you'll do a bad job of it.
So he's either letting pointless words flow from his keyboard, or he's being extremely insulting to devs and professional QA people.
Either way, he's done a bad job of article writing.
Maybe someone should write an article to tell him the obvious.
I wanna be a eunuchs developer! Pass me a bread knife!
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It could have been comfortably compressed to "Don't always assume that software that passes tests actually works."
But writers get paid by the word, not by the point, so that's what he's doing.
I'm not sure that he's actually insulting anyone, simply eating whitespace.
Whenever you find yourself on the side of the majority, it is time to pause and reflect. - Mark Twain
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Today, we are announcing the beta release of Clarity, an analytics product that empowers webmasters to visualize user behavior at scale to make data driven decisions on what exactly they should change and improve on their sites to optimize conversion, engagement and retention. Because your web pages don't already have enough trackers on them
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A pillock at bing blogs wrote: Building a compelling and user-friendly website requires a deeper understanding of user behavior
No, it abso-**cking-lutely doesn't.
It requires you to put your @rse in your seat, and produce quality material for as many hours as possible.
Overriding user behaviour = "This is a cr@p site/tool/whatever, I'll look up a more useful one."
If I had a penny for the number of times I've had to pound that simple fact into the heads of morons who want to spend all their time "working" on things that are of no practical use to the product or its users, I'd be lots of pennies better off.
I wanna be a eunuchs developer! Pass me a bread knife!
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Mark_Wallace wrote: morons who want to spend all their time "working" on things that are of no practical use to the product or its users
You've just described the bulk of web programming 
Look! A carousel! And spinny widgets! Our buttons have rounded corners! etc.
TTFN - Kent
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Kent Sharkey wrote: Look! A carousel! And spinny widgets! Our buttons have rounded corners! etc.
Bang on.
Engaging the user is not synonymous with "adding useless bells and whistles". It means putting as much time and effort as possible into producing content that interesting, useful, and usable/readable.
I have a rule for web pages:
If you can't do it with bare-bones HTML, and the content doesn't blow me away, you're fired.
I call it the KIFSS rule (you might be able to guess what the third letter is for).
Fruggin' javascript kiddies* are one of the banes of my existence.
* Some of whom have been close to retirement age
I wanna be a eunuchs developer! Pass me a bread knife!
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A dozen years ago, I worked with a guy who was a wizard at HTML and CSS. For one demo, he took a common, very heavy, page from our company's site and redid it with minimal code, fully separating the UI and business logic. There was only one (inconsequential) element in the menus he couldn't reproduce. The results were amazing. A sluggish page became lightning fast AND he could change it drastically without changing back-end logic. Unfortunately, he was ignored.
(FWIW, I'm a desktop/embedded guy. At worse, I've had to scrape web sites or, in one case, hijack the DOM parsing and change it.)
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