I wrote some PowerQuery functions and VBA macros to facilitate client invoicing that cut down ~2 hours of work to ~10 minutes (and shrinking, as I toy around with the scripts to delegate more of the work to the machine each time).
The billing data is pulled from an external vendor's portal. The contact data is pulled from our internal CRM. Both sets of data are then cleaned up and merged with PowerQuery, and then VBA is used to send emails out to clients.
I probably spent in the range of 3-4 hours getting a working version going and ~20 hours optimizing during downtime at work. I genuinely find it enjoyable to work on—there is something immensely satisfying about automating rote work away.
I use this once per month (a billing cycle). It will probably never see the light of day for anyone else, at least in its current state, because I work in a low-tech, nonprofit environment and using this kind of tool would be daunting for my co-workers (for reference, mail merging is sometimes intimidating at my workplace).
I am assuming that GP was not specific about Chinese investors' money due to national security concerns or sinophobia. More pressing, especially to anyone hoping to live anywhere near Vancouver, is the fact that Chinese investors account for 1/3 of the total sales volume of property (2016 figures). [1]
> Routledge compiled the data by extrapolating from a Financial Times survey of 77 high- end buyers and data from the U.S. National Association of Realtors
First, not exactly a large sample size. Second, how did this analyst know if the buyer was a Chinese citizen or just somebody with a Chinese surname?
The powers that be have trained us to make everything about race instead of about class, because if it was about class, the powers would have a harder time getting away with it.
no powers that be, here. I was thinking of a Latino woman who was arrested while in labor for a traffic violation and she was handcuffed to the hospital bed and arrested as soon as she delivered.
if she was rich that would not have happened.
if she was white that would not have happened.
poor people pay for being poor every day of their lives in dozens of ways.
minorities pay for being minorities every day of their lives in dozens of ways.
I could have separated wealth from race, yes, and I should have.
This is probably true. More specifically if the police knew she was rich.
>if she was white that would not have happened.
I dunno, I watch a lot of videos where cops behave badly, so much so I had to stop watching them because it was affecting my mood. There's plenty of white people who get treated like crap. It happens to everybody because it's not about race, it's about class. Here's a white guy getting tazed because he didn't comply fast enough. He didn't comply fast enough because he was deaf.
I'm not usually a conspiracy theorist, but I think this is a very thorough and very effective ongoing response to Occupy Wall Street. That movement has been handily forked into the completely pointless: Trump vs Mexicans, Bernie vs Billionaires, and Democrats vs Nazis
Piles of previous statements talking about safety and a general unwillingness to put any of its models in the hands of anyone not under NDA. Bard is the first counterexample I can think of and that was forced by OpenAI.
Anecdotally, Bard is much better at guiding the responses than chatGPT. They're slowly releasing more and more "features" as they feel comfortable. You can see what they're up to with the TestAI kitchen app.
I kinda liked how open chatGPT was before the heavy filtering, but I see why we need to reign in chaos overall.
While loyalty to the craft can have the side effect of generating more value to an employer, I don't think the two notions are antagonists. Get better at your craft and you'll have more opportunity to operate as a mercenary.
Perhaps you're right. Perhaps I am being to literal in my comparison, but I see tension when I compare craftspeople of the past / other industries with our own. Instead of honing our skills under an expert for many years, we swap jobs and even sub-disciplines frequently. Can we cultivate "craftsmanship" in that manner?
* A community fork of a language named after a plant fungus. All of the memory-safe features you love, now with 100% less bureaucracy! *
I assumed with the 'oxide' and 'ferrous' references that Rust's etymology had to do with corrosion, and while that's part of the explanation, it's mostly about fungi [1]
I assumed it was a joke based on the phrase "close to the metal" (zero-cost abstractions allowing high-level features without sacrificing performance). Nothing is closer to metal than an oxidation layer.
Wow had no idea. My assumption was it was about building something so durable and stable that it’ll be around forever.
Which doesn’t make sense given oxidization slowly robs something of its durability. But Discord is named using a word that means “disagreement and lack of harmony” so I kind of look past weird branding in tech.
Why should someone's respect for (presumably) achievements as a technologist or entrepreneur extend to opinions about events like these (or really any event outside of business/technology?)
Because any kind of significant achievement in white-collar areas presumably correlates well with intelligence which in turn presumably correlates well with the ability to understand other events better.
The billing data is pulled from an external vendor's portal. The contact data is pulled from our internal CRM. Both sets of data are then cleaned up and merged with PowerQuery, and then VBA is used to send emails out to clients.
I probably spent in the range of 3-4 hours getting a working version going and ~20 hours optimizing during downtime at work. I genuinely find it enjoyable to work on—there is something immensely satisfying about automating rote work away.
I use this once per month (a billing cycle). It will probably never see the light of day for anyone else, at least in its current state, because I work in a low-tech, nonprofit environment and using this kind of tool would be daunting for my co-workers (for reference, mail merging is sometimes intimidating at my workplace).