OzCrimson

Isn't it more complicated than that? "Ouch" can be a lot of things, and that's where a lot of problems crop up in the AI world.

If one of my friends insults another friend, I might say,"OUCH!" I'm not in pain but I might want to express that the insult was a bit much. If someone tries to insult me and it's weak, I could reply with a dry, sarcastic "ouch."

Combine that with facial expression and tone of voice and 'ouch' is highly contextual.

One problem with some of the tools used to take down offensive comments on social media platforms is that they don't get context.

Let's say that 'ouch' is highly offensive and you got into trouble for calling someone an "ouch." If I want to discuss the issue and agree that you were being offensive, I could get into trouble with the ML/AI tools for quoting you.

One story that still haunts me about the culture onboard the submarine.

We were dropping the trash and one requirement is that an officer be present. I was told to go get an officer. I found the Chief Engineer sitting in his room reading his Bible. I asked if he could come and be the required officer. He said, "sure."

When people saw the Chief Engineer behind me they mocked, "Hey! Couldn't you have gotten someone more senior?"

I didn't know that "officer" in this role meant to go find an Ensign or Lieutenant JG, not the officer who's 3rd in command of the whole boat. Folks got a lot of laughs out of that one.

Overall, though, life on a submarine is infinitely better than a surface ship. I served on a fast attack sub and a frigate. The people on a submarine help make life better because most of the jobs on a submarine are advanced and require clearances that people can't get if they're on drug waivers or dropped out of school.

There's one part of the article that I think deserves more attention. I see Netflix in a big disjointed mess of entertainment.

I've got Netflix and then someone will tell me about something very interesting on Hulu, Amazon Prime, HBO, or Showtime. I'm not gonna sign up for Hulu just to watch 1 movie or a series. I'm not gonna give Comcast more money just so that I can get HBO and a whole lot of other channels that I don't want.

And the marketplace is so complicated. I can pay Comcast to get the History Channel (and a lot of channels that I don't want) or, I could go to another steaming service and get History Channel, but you've gotta look into the details to discover that the "new" episodes are actually 1 season behind.

So, when I think about dropping Netflix, it's not because Netflix in and of itself is lacking or too expensive. It's more about throwing up my hands and quitting the madness of the whole marketplace.

Excel is constantly being improved. Are you aware of Power Query? And how about the 14 news functions that were released to Insiders a few weeks ago? Excel Online is far behind the desktop version of Excel but it's making fast progress.

YUP! And too often a company claiming to have something better than Excel isn't a direct equivalent. It's a way to market their whizzbang solution.

Domo was claiming it could get companies off of spreadsheets. But it turns out that they're an enterprise level reporting system that's a minimum of $30,000. That's not a viable option for a 5-person non-profit, but they'll get swept up in the conversation only to find out later that no, Domo and Excel are not equivalents.

The question is more about the trade-off.

1. I see an ad for some really nice pens. COOL! 2. I go to a website that allows me to opt out of tracking but I'd have to opt out of their 300 affiliates one at a time. 3. The privacy policies that state: we do not honor do-not-track signals because we don't know if it was the user or a browser default.

For me: not worth the tradeoff.

Which never should have been the default.

I don't want to be included in something that I never asked to be part of, and then have to put in the effort to get out.

This is one of the things that is so upsetting: most of the industry puts it on the consumer to get out rather than come in. I often look at the list of third-parties when a website says I can opt out. There are often over 300 third parties that I would have to opt out of one at a time.

That's just plain abusive.

One thing that's good to see is how Excel can be applied. I was a host when the challenges were: 1. Roulette 2. Biathlon

And, no. It's not heavy on tips. The rounds are timed and each of the contestants have their own methods. It was interesting to see some people use formulas and some people use conditional formatting for the same solution.

This depends on the evidence you want to highlight.

There are a lot of truly amazing things people use Excel for. And they work. There's no denying that.

WOW! Excellent perspective. And I've never heard the term "citizen programmer" before.

You're right. "I did it myself" and "I understand how it works" are definitely undervalued. And that plays into a lot of the empowerment/disempowerment conversation.

I had a client who would have me build prototypes in Excel, then he'd hand them over to his in-house development team. I asked him why he uses me in the middle. He explained that he can guide me and kinda understand what I'm doing, and we can test and tweak formulas really easily. He can stop me and ask questions if I start doing something that seems wrong.

Then he said, "but, when my devs open that code editor, I don't know what the hell I'm looking at."

That was a different kind of disempowerment that he felt vis-a-vis his own devs.

A lot of comments are criticizing Excel users as if we are resistant to learning more about other programming languages. Resistant as in hard-headed or lazy.

One thing to remember is that the vast majority of Excel users aren't fully in IT or tech. We have to deal with data but the roles aren't primarily data roles.

- Customer Service Reps

- Admin Assistants

- Warehouse Managers

- Non-profit Fundraisers

- Sales Reps

- Realtors

- Inventory Managers

- Insurance Agents

I've taught at non-profit conferences and saw how people were torn. The fundraiser who uses Excel every day has to decide: do I spend 4 hours in an Excel session or 4 hours in a session on fundraising trends?

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So many roles require some kind of data use, and Excel is immediately accessible, even if all it is is typing numbers into a cell, hand-coloring certain values and getting a sum.

Here's the question: WHEN is a person best served to put in the time and effort required to learn Python, JavaScript or another formal programming language? WHEN should a Warehouse Manager be sent to a Python class? What would that situation look like?

Personally, I hate true programming--and I've done a lot of it. But true programming is a whole different mindset. I like the visual aspect of Excel. But when I open a code editor and there's this wall of letters, numbers, indents, curly-brackets ... WOAAAHHHHHHH! No. HELL NO!

Even with WordPress and the templates that are supposedly drag-&-drop, I still found myself writing CSS and HTML.

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One other thing. Don't forget looking the opposite way. Too many coders don't know what Excel can do. I watched a presentation on 6 hours of JavaScript that someone wrote to accomplish a task. That same task would have taken less than 5 minutes in Excel.

Ok. Thank you. This does help. I can appreciate that.

I think of this stuff separately.

1. The government can always use the excuse of "public safety." However,

2. A company that's selling brooms shouldn't have all kinds of access to tracking people. The public doesn't benefit from that.

Matt, I'm curious to know why?

If a person has jumped through hoops to say they don't want to be tracked, why look for ways to still do it?

It's like putting up curtains to keep people from looking in my window, but then you realize you can still see inside if you crouch down really low and look through the 1/8" space between the bottom of the curtain and the window sill.

This puts me in a difficult position of supporting legislation that might be overly harsh like the Do Not Call list back in the 1990s. It pretty much killed off telemarketing for a while. Sad, but the public got fed up with an entire industry that showed it had no regard for the public.

I've got friends who are in marketing and ad-tech and I care about them, their business and success. But when I want to withdraw my consent to be tracked, I want that same level of care and respect.

I was with you until you made it political. I'm a member of a minority group and I'm fed up with wokeness.

People like John McWhorter have described wokeness as a religion. That's a characterization that I agree with, and a religion isn't countered by being a Democrat, Republican, Independent or apolitical.

I found the walk-away movement appealing when it first started. I agreed with the criticisms of the left. But the movement turned into switching uniforms ... walk across the field from the Dem side to the GOP side. It was more political than helpful.

One of McWhorter's suggestions is that more of us need to tell the people in the religion, "no."

This has me seriously thinking about paying the Apple premium and ditching Android.

I think there should be an opt-IN model. Opting out can be made confusing and difficult and time-consuming.

I've gone to websites that list over 300 3rd parties that they share data with. Opting out means going to every one of those 3rd parties one at a time and hunting for their opt-out link. And those come with a warning:

If you clear your cookies, you'll have to do this again. And the opt-out only applies on this browser on this device.

Suddenly, the consumer has a part-time job that they didn't ask for.

Fine. But when I opt out I want to be truly 100% opted out. Actually, I'd prefer the option to opt IN if I want to be tracked.

I think that's the real issue here. I know people who love targeted advertising. Great. Let them have it. But when I say I want no parts of it, my explicit withdrawal of consent should be honored.

RIGHT! Facebook has made it OUR problem that THEIR business model is based on selling ads. But it shouldn't be our problem.

This is very different from the slimy tactics around our privacy and data.

I agree with you about the 2 scenarios.

My concern, though, isn't about potentially pages and pages of explanations. It's more about the fact that I spend time opting out of that kind of stuff and some how still get the ad just because I was standing in an auto shop.

I've got a pi-hole on my home network, I've opted out of personalized ads on every site that gives me the option. I try to make it clear, "leave me alone."

But still I get ads that tell me I'm not being left alone.

The problem is these tools we're given to opt out, and we learn that they don't work; and a feeling that everyone in the world except marketers have to seek explicit consent.

BRAVO

You've got all the answers about a company in Chicago in 2005-2008 and how it should have been run.

Why didn't you jump in and help us?

BRAVO for you. And I mean that. You've got the tool YOU need and you haven't pushed YOUR tool on other people. Thank you.

How do you have so many answers to situations you haven't been in?

Do I need to say it again? My Excel skills were necessary because of garbage in databases.

I could sit at my desk; extract a data-dump of 50k rows of data; locate the fuzzy matches, identify which records needed to be kept and which ones deleted; merge it with the client's spreadsheet that they emailed to me and compare them; identify problems and report back to the angry client.

Why was the client angry? Because of inflexible garbage reports coming out of the database that people were blindly trusting.

Why was there garbage in the database? Not because of Excel.

100%

It's just unbelievable ... how people KNOW about situations that they weren't in and don't ask any questions. But since you brought it up I can tell you about my accuracy in Excel:

- The process involved 2 people checking my work before it was sent to payroll. And we did catch and correct mistakes. We were able to trace back where and how the mistakes were make, and build in ways to prevent or flag future mistakes.

- The job was necessary because of all the garbage in the database. Excel's data-checking and data-cleansing and flexibility was superior to the database.

- After 1 year all of my work was audited. For several dozen sales people, there was ONE person I wasn't 100% accurate with. And that one was off by 0.5%. SUCCESS!

- If we'd gone with the report coming out of the database, things would have been such a confused mess.

We're closer in agreement. And I'd never suggest that Excel was the best solution or even a good solution at times. (I hated the tedious error-prone things that I used to do in Excel.)

I'm just offering the context from which weird stuff happens. And the answer isn't always as easy as: put it in a database.

The context, the processes (or lack of processes), the decision-makers, budgets, timelines, they all play a part in the outcomes.

You go tell the Director of Customer Service that his people who are handling critical tasks need to learn Python. Good luck.

One thing I'm thankful for is my Excel skill.

Why do I even have Excel skill? Because of the garbage reports and data that I was pulling out of databases. I spent YEARS exporting data-dumps and cleansing them in Excel to help customers whose lives were turned inside out because of garbage in databases.

Not a negative word should be uttered about Excel until you can guarantee that databases and software are pristine and never fail due to human error.