oldcynic

So do I. Made a few very close friends via LJ. All non technical oddly enough.

Up til that point, people would type. If they were having a bad time they'd type A LOT. You couldn't help getting to know them better than you did.

Then Facebook etc arrived, and now it's "Life's shit. Inbox me", if that, or a photo of lunch/cat/coffee.

I think we took a wrong turn somewhere along the way.

They do. If I have someone's bank details I can transfer for free, instantly. (OK it sometimes takes a few minutes at weekends). There's two issues with ever using that for online payment:

1. There is no mechanism to obtain a refund for a mistake - eg I mistype the account number, someone else gets the money. Banks won't reverse but ask the payee to refund. If they still exist and are willing to cooperate. This is the route used for many, many scams like Microsoft calling because they noticed a fault with your Windows.

2. There is no protection under the Consumer Credit Act to obtain refund in the event the company goes bust or the product is defective and they won't refund. Credit cards have to provide that.

I use it with friends in preference to any other method, especially Paypal though.

You've also surely got loads of anecdotes on how not to do it and tales from the coalface from your years in industry.

I'm sure you can sprinkle some of those into the classes to give a little light relief if the students are really finding things too dry. You don't have to go as far as recreating TheDailyWTF. Perhaps use some to provide worked examples of designing yourself into blind alleys and how to get out again, or just to provide awareness of a few real world issues that might come up with whatever topic is the day's lecture.

Not at all. A little glibness aside, I do think we should have replaced many things with better or less polluting alternatives far, far earlier than we do. The market is the wrong tool for many of these choices as shown by some of the current global issues.

At such a vast time distance there's likely nothing whatsoever left of us - except in the geological record as a few rare fossilised artefacts and environmental clues. We have a hard enough time understanding life a couple of thousand years back and religion is all too often trotted out as easy explanation for "we don't know why".

Snark aside, it's important. There probably should be someone adequately numerate on every jury.

Most juries will have around half, perhaps more, who've done nothing at all mathematical since school 10-45 years previously and think percentages are in the difficult part of maths (ie it's more than basic arithmetic). HN is going to be very unrepresentative for numeracy. :)

You want them to achieve "beyond reasonable doubt" conclusions from probabilities, percentages, false positive rates and perhaps standard deviations, well you may as well be making your case in French or Ancient Greek that they can pick a few part-understood bits from.

Or hope for an eloquent statistician on the jury!

Do not underestimate the ability of juries to be swayed by impressive sounding claims. Nor their ability to be swayed, and dismiss clear mitigations, by one dominant or eloquent individual.

"Our facial recognition has over 90% accuracy" from the prosecution's expert can easily become "clearly guilty" in the jury room.

They'll probably wonder why all the fragments they find seem to indicate we preferred damaging technologies over benign.

Then like archaeologists everywhere will conclude it was of religious significance.

When I know I'm asking an SO sort of question I can !so directly. The whole ! system transforms ease of use - I miss them elsewhere!

TL;DR I mostly find what I need quicker with least faffing around changing terms to try and fight them "knowing best".

Google shot themselves in the foot when they removed code search, and "improved" results by constantly knowing better with synonyms and other semantically linked results. It rather broke code searches and led to more of the wrong language turning up instead. Language reference and standard library type searches they do just fine at.

Google spoiled it for the obscure and code when even + and - modifiers and advanced searches became optional. They felt able to give a page of results with only one result having my must-have term. Makes searching for a specific release hellish - not everyone integrates latest and greatest v9 the week of its release. No, I really do want v7. I never fathomed the rationale of that change for anyone.

DDG do the least additional messing with my search terms with helpful expansion, pluralisation and so on. DDG got a little worse at obscure error searches when they started on some "oh you also meant" games fairly recently. They still do the least of this. There's still occasional cases where the content simply isn't there - but they're far better than say a year or two ago.

When I first tried DDG a few years ago I was !g or !sp all the time and it was barely worth the effort. Now I very rarely go near Google and don't feel I'm losing out.

I dislike the "last month", "last six months" way of doing ranges oh so much.

Where are the 2 years or older, 4 years or older options at the other end of the scale or let me specify two actual dates.

Sadly I often need to search for older content - DDG are least worst, but they're all poor to hopeless at it.

Well I must be using it wrong. Very wrong.

I find it better than Google for code / technical searches, and all things work related

I find it better than Google for historic or old content as Google barely acknowledges such content is possible any more. Admittedly DDG is "least worst" in this respect but it hasn't entirely thrown the results out with the obsession with recency and update frequency (I consider this to have essentially ruined Google). Google were better at this and dated searches in their first 2 years than now.

Google then ruined themselves further by feeling it can overrule my keywording attempts and gives a page of results featuring no result with the must have term. Adding insult to injury they proceed to heavily promote brands over small companies and blogs, or anything really.

Once a week I'll try !sp and not find what I need on Google either. The rare times I want video search Bing is orders of magnitude better than Google.

We just listened to ep #1 over dinner.

Great production quality, I was surprised. We both enjoyed it and sat to the end before going to do other stuff, will definitely be checking out the other two.

I'm interested to see how this develops.