mercury_craze

With duchamgpt-v2.3 you can generate as many images of banana and banana-esq items affixed to surfaces as you can imagine, or, rather, not imagine.

So much of the media we consume has been focus-grouped, sanded down, moderated, de-fanged and otherwise diluted into bland corporate mush that it makes sense that we'd want to be able to skip the creative process altogether.

Generating images through software hooked up to statistical models trained on enormous amounts of other people's intellectual property is a cool trick, but it's not art.

My wife's floristry business has been blocked from being able to access facebook advertising and permanently restricted in how she is able to interact with her customers in part because a bot flagged and suspended her for trading in trading exotic animals. The exotic animal she was accused of trading? Aphelandra Squarrosa - The zebra leaf plant.

There's no way of getting this ban reversed, there's no way of invoking any human to perform a manual review on the ban. It is a permanent restriction that impacts her ability to communicate with her customer base.

I'll stick my head above the parapet and say that as a content consumer I really like Instagram and it genuinely is my favourite social media platform. I'm probably an atypical user but now that I'm well out of my 20's the friends I still connect with online I have real connections with so it's a joy to see what they're up to. My interests (food, 70's sci-fi, cats, modern art) are well catered to and I've done a good job of curating the accounts I follow to get a good mix of interesting content. Even my promoted posts are mostly local restaurants and businessess so I've never really felt aggrieved that I'm getting controlled by big corporates. I've also found my experience mostly apolitical with the advantage that because commenting is so tacked on I don't feel the urge to interact with anything beyond liking images or sharing the ocasional post with my friends and family

I understand it's mindless, but I dont want it to be anything else. It's a toy platform for looking at device sized images and short videos on my mobile and that's all I want it to be.

Facebook was doing this for a while on business pages, but it looks like they've backed out of it now. Around 2 years ago you were only permitted to see content 'above the fold'. Scroll down to the second page of content and you saw an undismissable modal covering the entire page. Happily(!) you now have the option to dismiss the modal and continue scrolling, but the modal is shown for every new business page you visit.

That series has always been a joy to read. Whenever I want to know what the established wisdom in making a classic dish are I'll check to see whether she's covered it first and use that as my starting point.

It never seemed important to the CEO of a previous company I worked for that we had something to say, only that we gave off the impression that we had something to say. We hired an outsourced blog writing service to fill our wordpress instance with generic, inoffensive platitudes and listicles poorly cribbed from Wikipedia and the ONS. Squint a little bit and you could convince yourself there was value to it, but nobody with any experience in the problem space would treat it as anything more than marketing fluff. His hope was always that one day we would get rewarded by the great Google algorithm and appear on the first page for search terms we were convinced our users were looking for, but the end result was that our blog was largely designed to be read by robots.

It's the same thing as the tweaks you have to perform for SEO optimisation, some have questionable value to the end user but you jump through the hoops anyway because it's what is done, by pleasing the robots you're rewarded with a higher search position.

Yes, you're out of touch. Access to the internet is seen as a luxury when you're relying on charitable donations to put food on the table.

This isn't totally related to infrastructure but figuring out what you should build, from what you could build is something I've struggled with as I've moved about the engineering management ladder. My current role is a stone’s throw from solo developer (only developer at 4 person start-up) and while I've got total autonomy in the work I complete and the approach I take, it’s a terrible feeling discovering that you're not super-human and you need constraints like almost every engineer that's come before you.

Like the author there's been a number of times where I've felt self-satisfied completing a piece of technical work, only to scratch my head a week later and wonder whether it was worth it. I can say with certainty that having a solid CI/CD pipeline has saved my bacon a few times so I'd probably recommend that as an early investment to make, internal tooling for some of the customer registration was a bit of a mistake and not as critical as I thought it would be which now feels like a waste of 3 weeks.

I am yet to come up with any meaningful advice to pass on to developers in the same position. With time you get better at spotting when you can get away with hacking solutions together and when to put the time in, having a forward vision for a product really helps on focusing your thought and attention and time spent on making things visible to the rest of the business is rarely time wasted. Awareness of what’s going on with the rest of the industry is useful, but don’t obsess over the new hotness, build with what you know works and save your innovation tokens for a rainy day.

I've not encountered this format before, it looks really interesting, certainly much more human friendly than JSON. Thanks for sharing.

The story I've heard a few times is that students who are expected to perform poorly in their GCSE's or A-Levels get expelled for minor behavioural infractions prior to their final exams so their poor grades don't risk bringing down the average.

Seems fine to me. As this has been encouraged but not mandated by your organisation it seems pretty benign. From what I understand about this sort of initiative it's about creating an environment where people feel comfortable sharing their preferred pronouns and helping, (e.g.) non cisgender people to feel like an outlier for doing so.

I found the Planet Money episode Big Rigged surprisingly moving. It covered the business model of American trucking company Prime through the story of Kimberly. It was the all too familiar story of employee rights being eroded through a shady business model. Prime were exploiting workers by encouraging them to operate as independent contractors with an exclusive contract whilst also loaning them their truck, setting their rates, assigning their jobs, and asking them to pay for the training they delivered if they left within their first year of operation.

https://pca.st/episode/3740fbb7-654a-4031-ab64-a994b085560e

I enjoyed playing around with this and I got real value out of it as a discovery tool when I filtered to showing aclaimed fiction. I know its survivor bias, but I dont want to waste my time on something both terribly written and outside my echo chamber.

One usability tweak based on how I interacted with it would be to add a 'I already like this' button to suggested books to save me from re-adding them. It also suggested another H.P. Lovecraft novel despite me already marking At the Mountains of Madness as a liked book, I'm pretty sure that if you like one Lovecraft book, you'd like the rest.

The one recommendation I had a strong negative reaction to was by Jeffrey Archer which I guess means that its the book I should read next.

Fair point, overwhelmingly white was poorly chosen - should have left it as problem with diversity.

If it helps normalise the removal of problematic terminology in tech then this feels like a positive thing. Software development has a troubling history of being an overwhelmingly straight, white, male space, ridding ourselves of terminology that causes friction to new developers who don't fit the standard model has got to be a good thing.

I'm certain that most people would see renaming master to main as fairly benign. However. if a company like Github can be open to making a change like this, even if it is purely symbolic, it sends a message that changes to the status quo are possible.

I've also seen some comments complain about the technical difficulty of this change. If this forces developers to put some effort into updating tools that are hardcoded to refer to the primary branch as master then it's good from a purely technical perspective. Especially to help those of us following trunk-based development who already refer it as the trunk.

Ignoring the bad faith questioning, I dont have to provide a gold standard in order to criticise Amazon. Everything I've said is extremely well documented.

Amazon is a great evil.

It will not be remembered as a company that has had been a positive influence on the world but as a company that has treated its employees (both hourly and salaried) with contempt, driven independent stores out of business and refused to play on a level playing field both through its shady business practices or its refusal to pay tax.

Well done to Tim Bray for acting according to his conscience. Hopefully this sets an example to other Amazon employees and other tech workers working in similarly morally compromised organisations.

Planet money ran a typically excellent episode on why the Dow is a terrible mechanism for measuring the health of the economy. About the only redeeming feature it had was the length of time it has been running allowing it to be used to compare the state of the economy going back > 100 years.

http://www.npr.org/sections/money/2017/01/04/508261371/episo...

Mobile Developers (Graduate to Senior) | REPL Digital - http://www.replgroup.com/vacancy/#jobs-digital | Birmingham/Leeds UK | Full-Time, OnSite

We are currently looking for talented and creative mobile app developers to join our growing software team. We are working on a number of high profile projects for some of the world's biggest brands, and we need your help to build first class mobile applications using the latest technologies and development best practices.

You would be joining the company at an exciting time, as we are currently undergoing rapid expansion and you would have a chance to build your career in one the country’s leading suppliers of retail solutions.

Obligatory Skills and Experience

* C# Experience * iOS or Android mobile development experience. * Experience integrating with web-services * Experience of agile development methodologies

Desirable Skills and Experience

* Knowledge of Apple provisioning process. * Knowledge of Google Play Store. * Experience developing with Xamarin. * .NET Web Technologies - MVC, WPF, WCF * Good knowledge of the Software Development Life-cycle * Experience working in an Agile software environment.

I just successfully changed it, but it was a janky experience. Until I added an account to the mail app, the preference used to change the default email reader remained greyed out because I was being prompted to add an email account. Only once I added a fake account did the preference option become available and let me change the default mailto handler. Removing the fake email account caused the preference to become greyed out (but it retained Outlook as the default).

Here's another example: Try and change the right click -> search with google menu option to 1) not open in Safari and 2) search using another search engine.

Also try clicking a mailto link. I'm sure that about once a day I see the dialog asking me to add an account into the default mail app.

Basic integrations between MS Office apps also seem to be missing, I'll be damned if I can find the menu to send a copy of the document I'm working on in Word to a contact in outlook.

I read this as "If you need to use stack overflow then you're not a real programmer. " Was that your intention?

Quite a few times this week I've seen articles posted from Medium that read like the sort of low content marketing fluff you get on LinkedIn. I used associate articles posted there with quality and depth, this sort of blogspam is helping to dilute this association.

Ugh, not this guy again.

Absolutely check out Genymotion, it blows both the native android and Xamarin emulator out of the water. Xamarin studio sees it as a native device and any issues we've had with it have been minor annoyances rather than major blockers. Deployment time from the IDE is also pretty nippy.

I came from a pure C# background about a year ago and I found I was able to get up to be productive within a month and feel comfortable within about 3. The major sticking points for me have been understanding the iOS and Android development process and their respective APIs. I think if you've previously developed iOS applications and understand the view/viewcontroller and application lifecycle, the learning curve won't be huge. Xamarin does a great job of making you feel like you're developing natively in c#, but, as someone entirely new to iOS development, the native APIs just feel odd.

I was extremely surprised to read in the comments that this wasn't a parody.

SourceTree is obviously the exception to this rule.

I've found the traffic warning notifications extremely useful, they've given me prior warning of heavy traffic on plenty of occasions and saved me countless hours of sitting in traffic jams. I've been extremely happy with how integrated they've become into my daily routine.

I've also got the email integration turned on and I've been impressed with the integration with ticketmaster. It knew that I was going to see a concert, knew how long it would take to get there for its start time and knew how long it would take to get home.