eddigo

I've been working with speech systems on and off since 1998. They're all pretty bad in my opinion. They're not even almost there yet.

I remember studies from years back that speech is far lower throughput than typing for nearly every language except Chinese.

I hate talking, especially to a computer, when I have a typing interface. Speech is such a serial, synchronous information channel. That fact paired with how context-limited speech systems are makes for a very poor experience. It's really going to take an inventive design to get people to use speech regularly for machine interaction. We're just not there yet.

If you're a competent programmer who uses these terms and phrases, then indignation is not an unreasonable reaction.

However, I think it's a completely valid article if you've ever experienced the interactions between an unproductive programmer and their non-technical manager. I've witnessed this dance every week for the past 3 years. The programmer in this case has used every one of those phrases except "platform independent".

When I ditched cable TV about 7 years ago I lost track of these outlets. I can't say I've missed them. I occasionally open cnn.com if I'm bored, mostly because it's quick to type.

I have a (physical) subscription to the Economist, which is where I get all my serious news. I can't tell you how great it is to read the news without the page content shifting all around because of ads loading.

Don't get up. I'd gladly show myself out.

Having been a "salaried contractor" for my second job, I learned to avoid those positions like the plague. When customers stop buying the company's software, guess who's the first to get the ax? Also, you get to sit by and watch project managers agree to all sorts of outlandish features that you'll be stuck implementing.

I interviewed there in 2012. The engineer called me, did his little talk and we jumped into the questions. His first question was the subset sum problem. The literal problem. It wasn't even couched in a practical application. So I said "this is subset sum. You can solve it with dynamic programming. I would look it up in a book." His response was "but I want you to solve it." I stopped the interview and thanked him for his time.

I'm a senior engineer. Those types of interviews are to stoke the egos of green engineers who remember the solutions to their algo finals questions. If I can look it up in a book, it's not worth the time to quiz me on it.

And I would bet in a large subset of those cases it's because the person implementing those tests and the person interpreting the results aren't the same. And that neither understands basic statistical hypothesis testing.