Categories
Artificial Intelligence Humor Reading Material

The best damned intro to a book on machine learning ever…

…appears in Vasily “vas3k” Zubarev’s Machine Learning for Everyone, which begins with:

Machine Learning is like sex in high school. Everyone is talking about it, a few know what to do, and only your teacher is doing it.

Categories
Career Humor

What researching a company on the “Blind” app feels like

“Noodles, this was Mr. Whiskers, our previous cat. Mr. Whiskers was very bad.
You’re a GOOD cat, aren’t you, Noodles?”

While you do your job search, you may want to get a sense of what it’s really like at a given company by looking them up in the Blind app. It’s not a bad idea, but remember that Blind’s users tend towards negativity. A lot of negativity.

As I wrote in an earlier post:

The Blind app will kill your soul if you use it too often. It’s an ugly agglomeration of late-stage capitalist cynicism, career despair, envy-inducing discussions of total compensation, and occasionally a place for sexually frustrated tech bros to vent.

But like that lemonade they’ve been serving at Panera, while it’s toxic if you consume the full serving, Blind is useful for keeping you awake and aware if you keep your dosage small. As nasty as its content can get, if you really want to get a sense of what’s going on in the business world or get the inside scoop on what it’s like inside a given company, you should download Blind and peruse it occasionally.

Categories
Career Humor

Laid off in 2024, part 17: The only social network that matters

Tuesday’s Facebook outage didn’t bother me in the slightest — in fact, I hadn’t visited it for most of that day. However, as someone who’s been recently laid off and looking for their next gig and as the force behind Tampa Bay’s tech blog, I most certainly was concerned by LinkedIn’s outage.

Also in this series…

Categories
Artificial Intelligence Humor

When you ask ChatGPT for a word that begins with “i”

Screenshot of ChatGPT conversation:

Me: I need a word that begins with "i" that is a synonym for speech or presentation

ChatGPT: A word that begins with "i" and is a synonym for speech or presentation is "address."

Me: "Address" doesn't begin with "i."

ChatGPT: Apologies for the oversight. A word that begins with "i" and is a synonym for speech or presentation is "oration."

Me: That doesn't begin with "i" either.

ChatGPT: You're right, my apologies for the oversight. A word that begins with "i" and is a synonym for speech or presentation is "interlocution."

Me: There you go. Nicely done.

Here’s your daily reminder that large language models don’t actually “understand” the world — at least not in the same way that we do. They’re stochastic parrots.

Categories
Humor Process

The first stand-up of the new year

4-panel comic — “Design Thinking!”

Panel 1. Scrum Master says “Here we go! First standup of the new year! You go first, Derek.” Derek says “Okay...”

Panel 2: “Yesterday I was stuffing leftover mince pies into my face and falling asleep on the sofa watching back-to-back James Bond films. Today I’m going to spend at least 4 hours trying to figure out what I was doing this time 2 weeks ago. No blockers.”

Panel 3: Another person starts. “Yesterday I got shitfaced in a nightclub and woke up this morning in a strange flat cuddling a poodle. Today I’m going to take copious amounts of co-codamol and pretend I remember what I do for a living. Blockers: my bastard pulsating head.”

Panel 4: Another person says “I plead the fifth.” The Scrum Master says “Welcome back, everyone.”

For more comics like this, see the Design Thinking! site.

Categories
Humor Programming

How coffee works

Graphic: “How Coffee Works,” showing that a person drinks coffee, the coffee turns into magic in their stomach, and code shoots out their fingers like wizard lightning.

100% accurate.

Categories
Artificial Intelligence Current Events Humor

That happened more quickly than I’d expected…

See my previous post for context.