Many of the professional sport leagues in the United States claim their league winner is a world champion. The hockey league maybe possesses thr best claim as many teams are in Canada and often win the league. But, plenty of near Artic countries also field professional leagues that could compete. In the 1960s when many…
A thought about treating employees well on Labor Day. With minimum wage not keeping up with inflation, people in too many jobs are falling further behind. Seems like a potential fix to something like SNAP could come from taxing the companies who pay so little their workers end up on it. They include the employer…
At two parties the weekend, people learned I work in IT and wanted to talk about AI. When non-IT people found out I work in IT and asked me about making a website, buying tech stocks, social media, podcasts, or cryptocurrency, those technologies were at peak buzz. People for who this stuff is hitting the…
From Screenage Wasteland: May the 4th be with you, screenagers! It’s Star Wars Day, and while we do have a new list (or three) in the works for the franchise, they won’t be ready until The Mandalorian and Grogu hits theaters later this month. Instead, we thought we’d throw out a real softball of a question to get some discussion…
Anthropic accidentally released their Claude source code. There are humans checking out this code and upset about how the terrible nature. I’m 27 years into working in IT. I’ve seen open source programming code and proprietary programming. Sometimes it’s thoughtful, well documented, and clear what’s intended. Most of the time, I’m amazing the junk actually…
Your friendly reminder to minimize the WordPress plugins you deploy to what you actually need. BleepingComputer has an article: A critical-severity vulnerability in the Advanced Custom Fields: Extended (ACF Extended) plugin for WordPress can be exploited remotely by unauthenticated attackers to obtain administrative permissions. ACF Extended, currently active on 100,000 websites, is a specialized plugin…
When seeking assistance, the questions we ask inform the thinking of the machines or people giving answers. My initial work experience involved helping people research information. How to find books. How to search the internet or databases. One of the most important skills we taught was to locate salient terms as they influence the answers…
I see of late this blog gets weird traffic spikes. They are for older posts, so unlikely to be from subscribers or RSS fed. No referrer traffic, so not from search engines. Gotta be AI scraping the content. All the past week it was mostly China. Today, it’s the USA.
I’m sure my coworkers get tired of me. For someone who works in a bureaucracy, I often question the process. I want to balance efficiency and consistency and accuracy. There are tradeoffs, and navigating them through hashing out (debate and data) the way they function and dysfunction is why I like my work. Why things…