Most of HR isn’t about finding the right candidate

A friend in the UK recently told me: I read how companies say they cannot find anyone to fill their roles, and I have a bunch of very talented, highly qualified friends who are out of work who can’t find anything. Having looked into this locally, it’s far from being a strictly UK problem. I […]

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Google search is worse by design—internal memo

You didn’t imagine it: Google’s search is worse, and that’s by design, according to a document produced in discovery.     Dr Jonny L. Saunders of UCLA shared one on their Mastodon earlier today. The internal Google email, from Jerry Dischler to Anil Sabharwal, dated May 3, 2019, expresses a concern over the company missing […]

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‘Google.com is blocked’—good riddance

This error message began creeping up this week:     google.com is blocked google.com refused to connect. ERR_BLOCKED_BY_RESPONSE   And appears with increasing frequency. Maybe Google is too poor to be able to serve everyone? I’ve noticed the search results worsen, as this blog’s covered. Is this the reason I can’t use it any more? […]

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It’s harder for humans to add stuff to Facebook than it is for bots

This is why you should let an automated service post to Facebook and not do it yourself. I am reminded of this each time I try. I go into Autocade’s Facebook page and now have the extra step of having to “become” Autocade in order to post. (This came in a few years back.) Secondly, […]

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Bring back the human-curated web directory

Wayback Machine/Archive.org Nostalgia, with the Open Directory Project. This archived page from 1999 isn’t even the original. I still remember when it was called Gnuhoo in 1998.   Where have all the web directories gone? It seems we need them more than ever, since Google is so poor at ranking websites (while it funds the […]

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Google News continues bias against independent media

This is by no means a new complaint, but if you want to give a non-sinister explanation, then the idea that Google is too poor to build its search capability has to be one of them. And that it’s been poor for the good part of a decade. More sinister is the idea that all […]

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A celebration of Chinese languages by The Post

  I take my hat off to Eda Tang of The Post (formerly The Dominion Post) for highlighting six Chinese New Zealanders and our reo tūpuna (ancestral languages). As many of us said last year (and for many years prior) during “Chinese Language Week” (NZCLW), it’s not all about Mandarin, a relatively new tongue that […]

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‘Fake it till you make it’ isn’t a legal doctrine

Some say, ‘Fake it till you make it,’ as a positive thing. In fact, a very dear friend used to say it, and it did him a lot of good. But then, he’s an honest sort of chap and he never promised something he couldn’t deliver. His take on faking it was to present a […]

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First impressions of the Royal Kludge RK100 with blue switches

After only a few days’ wait, my (oddly named) Royal Kludge RK100 keyboard with blue switches arrived. It’s going to be my daily driver (I hope) to replace my Cooler Master Quickfire TK with Cherry MX Brown switches, which is going to another office. First impressions: I love the return of the click sound. If […]

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Hiding a Mediawiki category; Techdirt on its absence from Bing (‘Welcome to the party, pal’)

Since Autocade was reinstalled last year, an errant line appeared on the home page: ‘Category: Pages using DynamicPageList3 parser tag’. The sole page that was listed under this Mediawiki category: the home page. It was very useless information, especially for site visitors. I finally discovered how to hide this, and I’m recording it as the […]

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