Igor's Computer Blog

As a  manager, I have to build systems to make people do the right thing. For example, if I want software engineers to make the software testable, I make the same software engineers in charge of testing (This is not a majority Microsoft opinion)! I call this strategy Pain Alignment. I heard a great example of pain alignment  on my run this morning and I'm going to share it Verbatim:    Rocky (not his real name) lived in a house with single paned glass in the city. Being in the city his house was very close to the neighbors.  Unfortunately for Rocky his neighbor's house had nice double paned windows and if the dogs barked outside it didn't bother them.  One day his neighbors decided they needed some yippy dogs.  At first this was fine since the dogs lived in the house, and the neighbors walked the dogs regularly. Soon the neighbors realized walking the dogs was a lot of work, and they installed a dog door. Now the dogs could run into the yard and bark...

More and more, I've been noticing the internet is covered in ads. While this is annoying it's parallel to the real world. Drive down any physical highway and you are assaulted with billboard ads, the information super highway ( does that date me? ) is just as covered. Why is the internet covered in ads? Because it's good money. Lets work through an example, first some terms and values: TLA Term Value Definition CTR Click Through Rate 0.3% % of times an add will be clicked EPC Earning Per Click $0.10 Average $ received when a user clicks RPM Revenue/Thousand Impressions $3.00 Amount of money you make when you show 1000 ads. If you can show 1000 ads your website will make 3$.   This doesn't sound like much, but lets look at how much traffic some websites get. Lets use livestrong.com , a health and wellness website, as an example.   Sites which tell you how much traffic a site gets are compete ,  alexa  and google ad planner .  Compete es...

Today's  AI interaction was a spam chat bot.  Spam is an excellent example of big numbers times times tiny probabilities. Below is the transcript of me talking to an AI (calikelya3) I especially like lines 5/6 and 7/8.  Impressively there was some pattern matching to handle line 9. 1) me: who are you? 2) calikeyla3: hey Im ashley. Dont you remember? 3) me: Did we meet at that conference? 4) calikeyla3: hey whats up? 22/F here. you? 5) me: are you a computer 6) calikeyla3: hmm. have we chatted before? 7) me: I have a fish 8) calikeyla3:  oh ok. i wasnt sure. anyways.. whats up? 9) me: Do you have naked pictures? 10) calikeyla3: No sorry not on this computer 11) me: How do you want to get my money then? 12) calikeyla3:  im like so boreddddddddd.... theres nothing to do ohhh wait! i got a idea. have you ever watched a girl strip on a cam before? 13) me: This is what I was waiting for 14) calikeyla3: it turns me on ...