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Dilbert
Here's my time sheet, filled out in increments of fifteen minutes.
As usual, I coded the useless hours spent in meetings as "work," whereas the time I spent in the shower designing circuits in my mind is "non-work."
Interestingly, even the time I spend complaining about my lack of productivity is considered "work."

CAPTCHA cathode

Cult members make similar observations before committing mass suicide.

What draws developers into Python is the same as what draws people into anything fringe, wizardry.

Oh please, all the good names were taken long before Futurama.

http://dilbert.com/strip/2018-...

http://dilbert.com/strip/1995-...

First result for "dilbert bug bounty minivan"

You think you're funny but you're not.

Company wanted to downsize.

They gave monetary incentive, essentially "get out of here, take some money, so we don't have to do lengthy negotiations".

Only problem was that the end result was this:

http://dilbert.com/strip/2001-...

When I worked in power plant construction the company I worked for decided to downsize. All the very senior staff were told they could get a very generous severance package plus retirement; so the all bailed. Not surprising - they were engineers and good at math. Trouble was none of us had any clue how the turbine control system worked, none of us worked for the turbine division. So when the client came to our office and said "we have a problem with the turbine" all we could do is say, "Sorry, there are no turbine engineers on staff." They wound up getting consulting gigs making more than they did before plus had full retirement benefits such as medical.

It's not just companies, I had a friend that left the Navy when they offered a bonus to leave active duty, then went back a few years later when they were offering pilots bonuses to return, and keep the original bonus as well.

Company wanted to downsize.

They gave monetary incentive, essentially "get out of here, take some money, so we don't have to do lengthy negotiations".

Only problem was that the end result was this:

http://dilbert.com/strip/2001-...

(+ a new job waiting right outside for all the competent folks)

Dear Google,

Please indicate on the attached screenshot where I can click to drag the window around.

The next improvement will be requiring the user to reboot if they click wrong.

http://dilbert.com/strip/1994-...

Until that nation's AI takes over as ruler of the world, that is.

If you follow Scott Adams, you're an idiot.

Fixed it for you.

I've been wondering lately whether I'm the subject of cognitive dissonance.

If you follow Scott Adams, he talks about cognitive dissonance as two people watching the same movie and seeing different plots. When called to describe the plots, the two views are wildly different, sometimes polar opposite.

And so for many people Trump is a racist, blowing a dog whistle that racists and liberals can hear clearly. For others, Trump is a practical leader doing what's best for the nation.

Which is the correct view? At this point, probably no one knows - there's no unbiased source of information. Best we can do is get unbiased statistics and raw facts (such as immigration numbers, unemployment, reputable polling) and come to our own conclusions.

Which brings me to the Mueller investigation, which I have always believed to be based on nothing. It seems perfectly obvious that the *amount* of Russian involvement in the election is well into the noise - to the tune of something like $13 million over several months, compared to $3 billion (-ish, depends on what you count) spent by Clinton and Trump.

Am I (and half the country) dismissing something important because of cognitive dissonance?

We might just find out.

The Mueller indictments will be based on evidence which can be examined, and accuses specific Russians of hacking and leaking the DNC through wikileaks.

On the other side, Julian Assange has stated several times that the leaks didn't come from Russia. Julian never identified the actual leaks, speculation has it that it was Seth Rich.

Julian Assange is a sufficiently trustworthy source not to be dismissed out of hand, and the US justice system should allow the evidence to be combed through by the media.

This could turn out to be a good touch-stone for validating one side of the cognitive dissonance claim.

I look forward to the public investigations of the evidence.

It will be good to finally see which movie we're actually watching.

http://dilbert.com/strip/2012-...

or the dilbert solution

Oops. Real life isn't like Star Trek. Who knew.

Scott Adams knew.

"Dev-Ops" is just another buzzword for "do more with less people".

Dilbert already covered this

Yeah, this has been known for a while.

Every time I see a thread about the latest/greatest in computers or graphics, I always think of this Dilbert from 1995.

http://dilbert.com/strip/2018-01-30

Complaints about Trump have nothing to do with she subject of Rocketry.
Go have the Trump discussion on Scott Adams Blog

Sorry, just because something makes Trump look stupid doesn't mean it's biased against him. That he lacks basic knowledge on a wide range of issues is simply a fact, and a very big problem considering his job. Surprised you didn't go with "fake news"... is it because Trump himself admitted that what he calls 'fake news' is simply anything that portrays him in a negative light?

Scott Adams has an interesting insight on the two views of Donald Trump: one view has him as stupid and incompetent, and the other one has him as brilliant and capable.

His point being: each of these is a model of reality, so which is the better predictor?

Look at the predictions made about Trump using the "stupid incompetent" model:

Trump will never win the presidency
The economy will tank if Trump wins
Trump will get us into a nuclear war
Trump will start WWIII
End of the world
Numerous Hitler-like situations

There are even specific things that people have said about Trump:

"Every taunt back and forth between Trump and Kim Jong Un maked deescalation and diplomacy less possible" -- Ben Rhodes, via twitter

"Poll: What one thing will work with North Korea? a) Military strike (9%), b) Embargo or blockade (1%) c) A grand bargain w/China (4%) d) Trump has no idea (86%)" -- Bill Kristol, via twitter

So we're scientists here, we know that science works by making models and predicting outcomes, and when we have two models we throw one out and keep the one with the better predictions.

Which model is the better predictor for Trump?

If you still believe in the "stupid and incompetent" model, what future predictions can you make based on that model? And what specific criteria can we agree on to determine when those predictions have failed or succeeded?

http://dilbert.com/strip/2011-01-07

Dilbert. http://dilbert.com/strip/2018-05-09

Tags
#hackers, #hacking, #api, #jargon, #obliviousness, #language

View Transcript

Transcript
Narrator: Dogbert The Reporter. Dogbert: How did hackers get access to your customer data? CEO: I'm told they used something called "our A.P.I." to suck out all the data. Dogbert: I'll just say you'er stupid. CEO: Why does everyone always say that?

I think you mean kill mode

Sounds familiar.

Wow, this weeks Dilbert seems especially relevant now.

Science which spawns jokes is good science.

http://dilbert.com/strip/1994-...

But the MBAs will hire them for key roles because AI is the new blockchain & everyone just must be doing it - whatever it is.

You want to 3-D print the blockchain, and HTML it into a Bitcoin

It would be funny, how sexy AI in general (and machine learning in particular) has become. Except for the fact that it's actually pretty sad. I've been in this area off and on for more than 30 years, and things really have not advanced all that much. The incredible advances in computing power mask the lack of progress in the "intelligence" and "learning" parts.

Read what Scott Adams has to say about "Cognitive Dissonance" it might be fairly easy using that technique to get some of these absurd positions to collapse of there own weight.

I have seen weeks where the entire 40 hours were all Agile/Scrum related meetings. This meant that there was no significant coding done whatsoever.

Then you weren't doing either agile or scrum. The only routine "meeting" should be the daily scrum; 15 minutes max - what did we complete yesterday, any problems (team blockers) that need to addressed, what are the priorities for today? If you are not spending 90%+ of your time working on producing the software, then you're doing it wrong.

In all of my IT work, I have never understood why some managers think that calling meetings will enhance productivity, and if that doesn't work, call more meetings. I don't know if this is incompetence, or an issue with ego. Either way, it hamstrings actual productivity.

Traditional management types really don't like agile because - budgets and time-sheets aside - there is not much for them to do. The team manages itself on a day-to-day basis; the scrum master is a facilitator, not a manager. And the staples of traditional management - like meetings, powerpoints and progress reports - are either eliminated or kept to the absolute minimum necessary. As a result, I've seen cases where traditional project managers deliberately set out to sabotage agile projects to show that "agile doesn't work".

But mainly whenever I've heard people say "agile is crap", what they have really been doing is this. I've worked on many well run agile projects that were both successful and good places for developers to work.

Another source of RNG is radioactive decay, though that's not terribly commonly used thanks to the hardware requirements.

Radioactive decay is fundamentally a quantum effect, which is why we cannot predict individual decays, only the macroscale statistics. So the article might have a new method per se, but simply using quantum effects wouldn't be new.

they "improved their data" by only looking at sequences where the bits were almost perfectly uniformly 50/50 1 and 0, which is precisely not the right way to ensure good randomness: true random sequences usually don't obey uniformity, except in the limit as the length of the sequence goes to infinity, and requiring uniformity (or near-uniformity) in a "random" sequence reduces the entropy. That tells me they don't really understand randomness, which does not bode well for their claims.

I've written a HWRNG for FPGAs, and it was frustrating to test and tweak it to pass the tests in rng-tools based on FIPS 140-2. One of the tests fails upon too long stretches of 0s or 1s, for example. I guess for practical purposes you want something like short-term randomness; if your 10-second sample of white noise is all DC, it doesn't Bode well for your frequency response curve.

Obligatory Dilbert: http://dilbert.com/strip/2001-...

Dilbert cartoons plaster my cubical - all of which reflect something I've had to actually deal with.

This is my favorite

Dilbert cartoons often show a lack of knowledge of technology by top management. The cartoons are somewhat exaggerated but usually have a strong element of truth.

For example, "We have only bad data...."

Dilbert cartoons often show a lack of knowledge of technology by top management. The cartoons are somewhat exaggerated but usually have a strong element of truth.

For example, "We have only bad data...."

Recommended Reading: "The Strategy-focussed Organisation". ISBN 1578512506. it's a biiiig book. you can read it, or you can use it to beat your CEO over the head. either way you will feel a lot better about strategy. or you could just subscribe to dilbert. http://dilbert.com/strip/2014-...

but seriously, this is a book that asks the right questions for anyone wanting to know about strategy within an organisation. it asks - and shockingly actually answers - the question, "why should anyone at any level of an organisation CARE about strategy?" and that's actually really really hard to do, because each person in a company has a completely different role to play. strategy therefore *legitimately* means different things to each person, so getting CEOs to care and understand strategy is *only 1/Nth of the company where N is the number of people in it*.

How am I supposed to write myself a new minivan now?!

Obligatory Dilbert: http://dilbert.com/strip/2017-...

This is what Scott Adams calls a 'hallucination' and now that I know how to spot them, they're fascinating to discover in the wild. He literally said, "What was I afraid of? things like extra-judicially executing american citizens." and you hallucinated that it was him saying he was personally afraid of being assassinated. I'm starting to think any comment that starts with "so" followed by a misstatement of the opponent's argument is the tell for this.

It happened bigtime in the Jordan Peterson interview with the BBC where the interviewer repeatedly says "so you're saying" followed by stating something he did not say. He repeatedly contradicts her and tells her again what he said, and it makes no impression on her. She was literally hallucinating and it's obvious to everyone.

This doesn't sound very Agile. Customers need new versions of software every few months. It doesn't matter if the software works, or is secure. The most important thing is to complete the Sprints to get to a release milestone and to a release. Customers really want that more than anything else.

That cries out for a Dilbert.

Well, we did have great productivity.

http://dilbert.com/strip/1995-...

oblig

Obligatory...

Squeal like a pig!

The ones before are very very relevant also
http://dilbert.com/strip/2017-...
http://dilbert.com/strip/2017-...
http://dilbert.com/strip/2017-...

The ones before are very very relevant also
http://dilbert.com/strip/2017-...
http://dilbert.com/strip/2017-...
http://dilbert.com/strip/2017-...

The ones before are very very relevant also
http://dilbert.com/strip/2017-...
http://dilbert.com/strip/2017-...
http://dilbert.com/strip/2017-...

And a third Apple salesman -- who touted the glories of an OLED screen -- also kept his iPhone X in a case at all times "It's glass," he explained. "You'll definitely need a case."

"But what about not being able to see the lovely phone?"

"Get a see-through case," he replied with a smile.

http://dilbert.com/strip/2017-...

Whenever I read the words 'climate model', I generally replace them in my head with the words 'wildly inaccurate climate model'. Scott Adams has some interesting things to say about the subject.

And I'm gonna replace the name "Scott Adams" with "cartoonist that has a blog". And by "blog", we mean "diary of crazy thoughts that someone decided to share with the world".

From TFA about halfway in:

"Today, scientists still generally agree that it's impossible to attribute any individual weather phenomenon solely to climate change. ...

But what scientists can do is investigate the extent to which climate change has influenced a given event. Generally, researchers do this with the help of climate models, ..."

Whenever I read the words 'climate model', I generally replace them in my head with the words 'wildly inaccurate climate model'. Scott Adams has some interesting things to say about the subject. The point is that the scientists trying to attribute a specific event to climate change can simply sift through hundreds (thousands?) of climate models until they find the one that gives the highest probability that the specific event was due to climate change. Then they hold a press conference to proclaim they know this with "near certainty".

I personally believe humans definitely do influence climate, but I think it's the wrong approach to try and convince the public using computer simulations that have no hope of being accurate.

Instead, I suggest a better approach is to point out that digging shit out of the ground and burning it into the air is not a long term solution. The planet is quite livable with all that shit underground. What makes us think that bringing it up out of the ground and burning it into the atmosphere will have no effect? Logically thinking, it's not a good idea. It will definitely cause problems, and science has demonstrated what those problems could be (acidic rain and oceans, warming temps, mercury from coal, etc.). We must find other ways to harness energy.