#Microsoft Power Pages

[manageditserviceslosangeles]

Become a Power Pages Pro | A Comprehensive Guide to Building Your Business Website

If you’re a business owner, you know a website is essential to success. A website not only helps you establish an online presence, but it can also help you connect with potential customers and grow your brand. But creating a website from scratch can be intimidating, especially if you need to become more familiar with web design and development.  

That’s where becoming a Power Pages Pro comes in. With this comprehensive guide, you’ll learn everything you need to know to build a professional, effective website for your business. From choosing the right platform and design to optimizing your site for search engines and improving the user experience, this guide covers all the essential elements of creating a successful website.  

Whether you’re just starting or looking to improve your existing site, this guide will give you the knowledge and skills you need to become a Power Pages Pro and take your online presence to the next level. So, let’s get started and build a website that will help you achieve your business goals!  

[virtualassistantadarsh]

Get Started With Microsoft Power Pages | Ossisto 365

https://ossisto365.com/microsoft-power-pages-get-started/

Overview

Earlier this year on Microsoft Build, Microsoft announced the preview of Microsoft Power Pages, the fifth product in the Microsoft Power Pages Platform family followed by Power BI, Power Automate, Power Apps, and Power Virtual Agents. So, in this blog post, we will be discussing what is Microsoft Power Pages, what its use of it, and how to get started with it.

Microsoft Power Pages is a secure, enterprise-grade, low-code software as a service (SaaS) platform for creating, hosting and administering modern external-facing business websites. It does not matter whether you are a low-code maker or a professional developer, Power Pages enables you to quickly design, configure, and publish websites that seamlessly work across web browsers and different devices. So, in this, we will discuss how to get started with Microsoft Power Pages which is currently in preview.

Prerequisites

Try the 30-day trial to explore the key features of Power Pages. Click on this link to sign up for a free Power Pages trial subscription.

The best practice is to create a new environment from the admin center to create the sites instead of using the default environment which is shared across all users in the tenant.

Getting started with Microsoft Power Pages

In this section, you will see how to get started with creating the external facing sites using Power Pages and to learn the new features and functionality.

1.Open the web browser and navigate to https://make.powerpages.microsoft.com/.

2.Once done you would receive the below message in the home page which states, “You can’t create sites in the default environment”. So please make sure to create an environment in the admin center first as that is a basic prerequisite.

3.Once done, click on the Environment option in the top right corner and all the environments that are available as part of this tenant will be displayed as a drop-down list. Select the newly created environment (environment created for Power Pages where the sites need to be created. In this case it is PowerPagesPreview-082322-075628.

4.After that click on the My sites section in the home page as displayed on the image. This helps you to navigate to the respective site and allows you to perform any changes to the site by editing it.

5.Once done, click on the Templates section as shown in the image below. Here you can find a list of all predefined templates which helps you to get started easily and it comes inbuilt with a list of predefined features.

6.Select a template of your choice and click on Choose this template. For this blog post we are choosing the Scheduling template as shown in the image below.

7.Provide a name for the site, web address and choose the site language. Click on Done after providing all the required details.

8.It takes a few minutes to process and create the site and once its ready the site gets created and it also opens the Design Studio shown in the image below to perform any changes. This studio allows to create pages & subpages, add components to pages, styling, create and manage tables to store the data that is required for the site and also to configure the site settings.

9.Once done, click on Data in the left navigation as shown in the image below to view and manage all the tables, data, table properties, views and forms that are available in this site.

10.After completing that, click on Set up in the left navigation to configure site settings such as authentication, security, mobile and site administration.

11.In the left navigation, click Pages to view and manage all the pages and subpages that are part of this site. Select the respective page and make the necessary changes as shown below and click Preview to view the site in Desktop or Mobile mode.

12.In the image below you can see that the site is displayed in Desktop preview mode.

13.Also, in the left navigation, click on Pages and then on Page to add new pages. Enter the page name, select the layout, and click on Add as shown in the image below.

14.You can find a list of out of the box components available such as Text, Button, Image, video and more which can be added to the page. To add a component, click on the left navigation and then click Pages and click the newly created page. Once done click the + icon to add a new component to the page as shown in the image below.

15.Well, that is how you would go about creating a new external facing site using Microsoft Power pages. As you might have noticed by now, it is quite simple and very intuitive to use and even someone with zero web development knowledge can go-ahead and quickly create a site. Also, if you are someone who has used Microsoft Power Pages Apps portals in the past, then this is simply an evolution of Power Pages with some new features.

16. Finally, on the main home page you have an option called as Learn as shown in the image below. Please click on that to access to get all the useful resources such as documentation, tutorials, and videos for Microsoft Power Pages.

Related Resources

Trial sign up – https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/power-pages/getting-started/trial-signup

Trial FAQ – https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/power-pages/getting-started/trial-faq

Licensing – https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/power-pages/go-live/assign-licensing

Documentation – https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/power-pages/

Summary

So finally in this blog post we saw what is Microsoft Power Pages which is currently in preview, and we also understood how to quickly create a simple external facing website just with few clicks.

For assistance >>> https://ossisto365.com/

[mostlysignssomeportents]

The AI hype bubble is the new crypto hype bubble

Back in 2017 Long Island Ice Tea — known for its undistinguished, barely drinkable sugar-water — changed its name to “Long Blockchain Corp.” Its shares surged to a peak of 400% over their pre-announcement price. The company announced no specific integrations with any kind of blockchain, nor has it made any such integrations since.

If you’d like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here’s a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/03/09/autocomplete-worshippers/#the-real-ai-was-the-corporations-that-we-fought-along-the-way

LBCC was subsequently delisted from NASDAQ after settling with the SEC over fraudulent investor statements. Today, the company trades over the counter and its market cap is $36m, down from $138m.

https://cointelegraph.com/news/textbook-case-of-crypto-hype-how-iced-tea-company-went-blockchain-and-failed-despite-a-289-percent-stock-rise

The most remarkable thing about this incredibly stupid story is that LBCC wasn’t the peak of the blockchain bubble — rather, it was the start of blockchain’s final pump-and-dump. By the standards of 2022’s blockchain grifters, LBCC was small potatoes, a mere $138m sugar-water grift.

They didn’t have any NFTs, no wash trades, no ICO. They didn’t have a Superbowl ad. They didn’t steal billions from mom-and-pop investors while proclaiming themselves to be “Effective Altruists.” They didn’t channel hundreds of millions to election campaigns through straw donations and other forms of campaing finance frauds. They didn’t even open a crypto-themed hamburger restaurant where you couldn’t buy hamburgers with crypto:

https://robbreport.com/food-drink/dining/bored-hungry-restaurant-no-cryptocurrency-1234694556/

They were amateurs. Their attempt to “make fetch happen” only succeeded for a brief instant. By contrast, the superpredators of the crypto bubble were able to make fetch happen over an improbably long timescale, deploying the most powerful reality distortion fields since Pets.com.

Anything that can’t go on forever will eventually stop. We’re told that trillions of dollars’ worth of crypto has been wiped out over the past year, but these losses are nowhere to be seen in the real economy — because the “wealth” that was wiped out by the crypto bubble’s bursting never existed in the first place.

Like any Ponzi scheme, crypto was a way to separate normies from their savings through the pretense that they were “investing” in a vast enterprise — but the only real money (“fiat” in cryptospeak) in the system was the hardscrabble retirement savings of working people, which the bubble’s energetic inflaters swapped for illiquid, worthless shitcoins.

We’ve stopped believing in the illusory billions. Sam Bankman-Fried is under house arrest. But the people who gave him money — and the nimbler Ponzi artists who evaded arrest — are looking for new scams to separate the marks from their money.

Take Morganstanley, who spent 2021 and 2022 hyping cryptocurrency as a massive growth opportunity:

https://cointelegraph.com/news/morgan-stanley-launches-cryptocurrency-research-team

Today, Morganstanley wants you to know that AI is a $6 trillion opportunity.

They’re not alone. The CEOs of Endeavor, Buzzfeed, Microsoft, Spotify, Youtube, Snap, Sports Illustrated, and CAA are all out there, pumping up the AI bubble with every hour that god sends, declaring that the future is AI.

https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/business/business-news/wall-street-ai-stock-price-1235343279/

Google and Bing are locked in an arms-race to see whose search engine can attain the speediest, most profound enshittification via chatbot, replacing links to web-pages with florid paragraphs composed by fully automated, supremely confident liars:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/02/16/tweedledumber/#easily-spooked

Blockchain was a solution in search of a problem. So is AI. Yes, Buzzfeed will be able to reduce its wage-bill by automating its personality quiz vertical, and Spotify’s “AI DJ” will produce slightly less terrible playlists (at least, to the extent that Spotify doesn’t put its thumb on the scales by inserting tracks into the playlists whose only fitness factor is that someone paid to boost them).

But even if you add all of this up, double it, square it, and add a billion dollar confidence interval, it still doesn’t add up to what Bank Of America analysts called “a defining moment — like the internet in the ’90s.” For one thing, the most exciting part of the “internet in the ‘90s” was that it had incredibly low barriers to entry and wasn’t dominated by large companies — indeed, it had them running scared.

The AI bubble, by contrast, is being inflated by massive incumbents, whose excitement boils down to “This will let the biggest companies get much, much bigger and the rest of you can go fuck yourselves.” Some revolution.

AI has all the hallmarks of a classic pump-and-dump, starting with terminology. AI isn’t “artificial” and it’s not “intelligent.” “Machine learning” doesn’t learn. On this week’s Trashfuture podcast, they made an excellent (and profane and hilarious) case that ChatGPT is best understood as a sophisticated form of autocomplete — not our new robot overlord.

https://open.spotify.com/episode/4NHKMZZNKi0w9mOhPYIL4T

We all know that autocomplete is a decidedly mixed blessing. Like all statistical inference tools, autocomplete is profoundly conservative — it wants you to do the same thing tomorrow as you did yesterday (that’s why “sophisticated” ad retargeting ads show you ads for shoes in response to your search for shoes). If the word you type after “hey” is usually “hon” then the next time you type “hey,” autocomplete will be ready to fill in your typical following word — even if this time you want to type “hey stop texting me you freak”:

https://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/provocations/neophobic-conservative-ai-overlords-want-everything-stay/

And when autocomplete encounters a new input — when you try to type something you’ve never typed before — it tries to get you to finish your sentence with the statistically median thing that everyone would type next, on average. Usually that produces something utterly bland, but sometimes the results can be hilarious. Back in 2018, I started to text our babysitter with “hey are you free to sit” only to have Android finish the sentence with “on my face” (not something I’d ever typed!):

https://mashable.com/article/android-predictive-text-sit-on-my-face

Modern autocomplete can produce long passages of text in response to prompts, but it is every bit as unreliable as 2018 Android SMS autocomplete, as Alexander Hanff discovered when ChatGPT informed him that he was dead, even generating a plausible URL for a link to a nonexistent obit in The Guardian:

https://www.theregister.com/2023/03/02/chatgpt_considered_harmful/

Of course, the carnival barkers of the AI pump-and-dump insist that this is all a feature, not a bug. If autocomplete says stupid, wrong things with total confidence, that’s because “AI” is becoming more human, because humans also say stupid, wrong things with total confidence.

Exhibit A is the billionaire AI grifter Sam Altman, CEO if OpenAI — a company whose products are not open, nor are they artificial, nor are they intelligent. Altman celebrated the release of ChatGPT by tweeting “i am a stochastic parrot, and so r u.”

https://twitter.com/sama/status/1599471830255177728

This was a dig at the “stochastic parrots” paper, a comprehensive, measured roundup of criticisms of AI that led Google to fire Timnit Gebru, a respected AI researcher, for having the audacity to point out the Emperor’s New Clothes:

https://www.technologyreview.com/2020/12/04/1013294/google-ai-ethics-research-paper-forced-out-timnit-gebru/

Gebru’s co-author on the Parrots paper was Emily M Bender, a computational linguistics specialist at UW, who is one of the best-informed and most damning critics of AI hype. You can get a good sense of her position from Elizabeth Weil’s New York Magazine profile:

https://nymag.com/intelligencer/article/ai-artificial-intelligence-chatbots-emily-m-bender.html

Bender has made many important scholarly contributions to her field, but she is also famous for her rules of thumb, which caution her fellow scientists not to get high on their own supply:

Please do not conflate word form and meaning

Mind your own credulity

As Bender says, we’ve made “machines that can mindlessly generate text, but we haven’t learned how to stop imagining the mind behind it.” One potential tonic against this fallacy is to follow an Italian MP’s suggestion and replace “AI” with “SALAMI” (“Systematic Approaches to Learning Algorithms and Machine Inferences”). It’s a lot easier to keep a clear head when someone asks you, “Is this SALAMI intelligent? Can this SALAMI write a novel? Does this SALAMI deserve human rights?”

Bender’s most famous contribution is the “stochastic parrot,” a construct that “just probabilistically spits out words.” AI bros like Altman love the stochastic parrot, and are hellbent on reducing human beings to stochastic parrots, which will allow them to declare that their chatbots have feature-parity with human beings.

At the same time, Altman and Co are strangely afraid of their creations. It’s possible that this is just a shuck: “I have made something so powerful that it could destroy humanity! Luckily, I am a wise steward of this thing, so it’s fine. But boy, it sure is powerful!”

They’ve been playing this game for a long time. People like Elon Musk (an investor in OpenAI, who is hoping to convince the EU Commission and FTC that he can fire all of Twitter’s human moderators and replace them with chatbots without violating EU law or the FTC’s consent decree) keep warning us that AI will destroy us unless we tame it.

There’s a lot of credulous repetition of these claims, and not just by AI’s boosters. AI critics are also prone to engaging in what Lee Vinsel calls criti-hype: criticizing something by repeating its boosters’ claims without interrogating them to see if they’re true:

https://sts-news.medium.com/youre-doing-it-wrong-notes-on-criticism-and-technology-hype-18b08b4307e5

There are better ways to respond to Elon Musk warning us that AIs will emulsify the planet and use human beings for food than to shout, “Look at how irresponsible this wizard is being! He made a Frankenstein’s Monster that will kill us all!” Like, we could point out that of all the things Elon Musk is profoundly wrong about, he is most wrong about the philosophical meaning of Wachowksi movies:

https://www.theguardian.com/film/2020/may/18/lilly-wachowski-ivana-trump-elon-musk-twitter-red-pill-the-matrix-tweets

But even if we take the bros at their word when they proclaim themselves to be terrified of “existential risk” from AI, we can find better explanations by seeking out other phenomena that might be triggering their dread. As Charlie Stross points out, corporations are Slow AIs, autonomous artificial lifeforms that consistently do the wrong thing even when the people who nominally run them try to steer them in better directions:

https://media.ccc.de/v/34c3-9270-dude_you_broke_the_future

Imagine the existential horror of a ultra-rich manbaby who nominally leads a company, but can’t get it to follow: “everyone thinks I’m in charge, but I’m actually being driven by the Slow AI, serving as its sock puppet on some days, its golem on others.”

Ted Chiang nailed this back in 2017 (the same year of the Long Island Blockchain Company):

There’s a saying, popularized by Fredric Jameson, that it’s easier to imagine the end of the world than to imagine the end of capitalism. It’s no surprise that Silicon Valley capitalists don’t want to think about capitalism ending. What’s unexpected is that the way they envision the world ending is through a form of unchecked capitalism, disguised as a superintelligent AI. They have unconsciously created a devil in their own image, a boogeyman whose excesses are precisely their own.

https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/tedchiang/the-real-danger-to-civilization-isnt-ai-its-runaway

Chiang is still writing some of the best critical work on “AI.” His February article in the New Yorker, “ChatGPT Is a Blurry JPEG of the Web,” was an instant classic:

[AI] hallucinations are compression artifacts, but — like the incorrect labels generated by the Xerox photocopier — they are plausible enough that identifying them requires comparing them against the originals, which in this case means either the Web or our own knowledge of the world.

https://www.newyorker.com/tech/annals-of-technology/chatgpt-is-a-blurry-jpeg-of-the-web

“AI” is practically purpose-built for inflating another hype-bubble, excelling as it does at producing party-tricks — plausible essays, weird images, voice impersonations. But as Princeton’s Matthew Salganik writes, there’s a world of difference between “cool” and “tool”:

https://freedom-to-tinker.com/2023/03/08/can-chatgpt-and-its-successors-go-from-cool-to-tool/

Nature can claim “conversational AI is a game-changer for science” but “there is a huge gap between writing funny instructions for removing food from home electronics and doing scientific research.” Salganik tried to get ChatGPT to help him with the most banal of scholarly tasks — aiding him in peer reviewing a colleague’s paper. The result? “ChatGPT didn’t help me do peer review at all; not one little bit.”

The criti-hype isn’t limited to ChatGPT, of course — there’s plenty of (justifiable) concern about image and voice generators and their impact on creative labor markets, but that concern is often expressed in ways that amplify the self-serving claims of the companies hoping to inflate the hype machine.

One of the best critical responses to the question of image- and voice-generators comes from Kirby Ferguson, whose final Everything Is a Remix video is a superb, visually stunning, brilliantly argued critique of these systems:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rswxcDyotXA

One area where Ferguson shines is in thinking through the copyright question — is there any right to decide who can study the art you make? Except in some edge cases, these systems don’t store copies of the images they analyze, nor do they reproduce them:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/02/09/ai-monkeys-paw/#bullied-schoolkids

For creators, the important material question raised by these systems is economic, not creative: will our bosses use them to erode our wages? That is a very important question, and as far as our bosses are concerned, the answer is a resounding yes.

Markets value automation primarily because automation allows capitalists to pay workers less. The textile factory owners who purchased automatic looms weren’t interested in giving their workers raises and shorting working days. ‘ They wanted to fire their skilled workers and replace them with small children kidnapped out of orphanages and indentured for a decade, starved and beaten and forced to work, even after they were mangled by the machines. Fun fact: Oliver Twist was based on the bestselling memoir of Robert Blincoe, a child who survived his decade of forced labor:

https://www.gutenberg.org/files/59127/59127-h/59127-h.htm

Today, voice actors sitting down to record for games companies are forced to begin each session with “My name is ______ and I hereby grant irrevocable permission to train an AI with my voice and use it any way you see fit.”

https://www.vice.com/en/article/5d37za/voice-actors-sign-away-rights-to-artificial-intelligence

Let’s be clear here: there is — at present — no firmly established copyright over voiceprints. The “right” that voice actors are signing away as a non-negotiable condition of doing their jobs for giant, powerful monopolists doesn’t even exist. When a corporation makes a worker surrender this right, they are betting that this right will be created later in the name of “artists’ rights” — and that they will then be able to harvest this right and use it to fire the artists who fought so hard for it.

There are other approaches to this. We could support the US Copyright Office’s position that machine-generated works are not works of human creative authorship and are thus not eligible for copyright — so if corporations wanted to control their products, they’d have to hire humans to make them:

https://www.theverge.com/2022/2/21/22944335/us-copyright-office-reject-ai-generated-art-recent-entrance-to-paradise

Or we could create collective rights that belong to all artists and can’t be signed away to a corporation. That’s how the right to record other musicians’ songs work — and it’s why Taylor Swift was able to re-record the masters that were sold out from under her by evil private-equity bros::

https://doctorow.medium.com/united-we-stand-61e16ec707e2

Whatever we do as creative workers and as humans entitled to a decent life, we can’t afford drink the Blockchain Iced Tea. That means that we have to be technically competent, to understand how the stochastic parrot works, and to make sure our criticism doesn’t just repeat the marketing copy of the latest pump-and-dump.

Today (Mar 9), you can catch me in person in Austin at the UT School of Design and Creative Technologies, and remotely at U Manitoba’s Ethics of Emerging Tech Lecture.

Tomorrow (Mar 10), Rebecca Giblin and I kick off the SXSW reading series.

Image: Cryteria (modified) https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:HAL9000.svg

CC BY 3.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/deed.en

[Image ID: A graph depicting the Gartner hype cycle. A pair of HAL 9000's glowing red eyes are chasing each other down the slope from the Peak of Inflated Expectations to join another one that is at rest in the Trough of Disillusionment. It, in turn, sits atop a vast cairn of HAL 9000 eyes that are piled in a rough pyramid that extends below the graph to a distance of several times its height.]

[apenitentialprayer]

Working an integral or performing a linear regression is something a computer can do quite effectively. Understanding whether the result makes sense —or deciding whether the method is the right one to use in the first place— requires a guiding human hand. When we teach mathematics we are supposed to be explaining how to be that guide. A math course that fails to do so is essentially training the student to be a very slow, buggy version of Microsoft Excel.

Jordan Ellenberg (How Not to Be Wrong: The Power of Mathematical Thinking, page 56)

[theresattrpgforthat]

Please, I’m just a silly autistic little beast. Do you have games abt nuclear radiation or reactors? While I do prefer things like walking sims, exploration games and horror, I am curious what you could recommend! Just not anything with radioactive zombies or ghouls pls <3 I like more realistic approaches if that’s alright! Or something on the silly end like Turnip Boy Commits Tax Fraud

THEME: Nuclear Radiation

Hello friend! This is more about apocalyptic games than Nuclear games, probably because the first thing people think of when they hear of radiation is the apocalypse. But there's some fun concepts being explored here nevertheless!

Nuclear Knights, by Gormengeist.

Nuclear Knights is a narrative-heavy action TTRPG about adventurers in a world thousands of years after a catastrophic magical nuclear war, where things have wrapped back around to high-magic pulp fantasy. Fight monsters, lead settlements, win battles of wit and worthiness, command the forgotten powers and mysterious ways- uncover what was lost, become something new.

Designed from the ground up to be as evocative of epic pulp fantasy during play as possible, the mechanics are easy to learn without sacrificing depth. Nuclear Knights attempts to be a marriage of classical dungeoneering and bold, modern collaborative storytelling.

This is a game where the radiation is more magical in nature, causing interesting, strange and esoteric mutations that you can contribute to as you play. As a dungeoneering game, there’s a lot of different pieces to help put your character together: classes, disciplines, homelands, titles and gods! Expect a lot of fun enemies and weird cursed loot.

Extinction Punk, by Extinction Punk.

Extinction Punk is a table-top role-playing game (TTRPG) that blends elements of science fiction and science fantasy to envision a future where humanity fails to stop a man-made extinction event such as a climate cataclysm, a nuclear holocaust, or a biological war.

Players of Extinction Punk get to explore the ruins of an Earth that is no longer under humanity’s control and encounter the (not necessarily) human civilizations that rise from the ashes. Together with the person organizing the game (the Game Master, or GM for short), the players create characters that will fight for survival while searching for powerful artefacts or useful mutations. 

This is a Powered by the Apocalypse game, which means it’s going to favour story over mechanics. This means that players have quite a bit more control over world creation, so if you don’t want zombies, you don’t have to have them! This game has more mutation themes and options than basic Apocalypse World, and character playbook themes include Ancient Archivist, Bunker Baby, Hardly Human, and more!

Wastoid, by Jason Tocci.

Wastoid is a gonzo, post-apocalyptic, sci-fi RPG, inspired by games like Fallout, Mutant Crawl Classics, and Gamma World. (Especially Fallout! But not so much that Microsoft should sue.) 

This game is still in the early development stage: the rules and character creation are bare-bones. However, Jason Tocci has created some insanely popular games and game systems in the past, so this game is probably going to be a huge hit once it’s fully released. 

Wastoid uses the Knave rules as designed by Ben Milton, with various inspirations from Mausritter, The Black Hack, and other games. The preview is still a pretty heavy document, with 42 pages of character options, game rules, faction management and advice on running a game that’s fun for everyone. If you like a retro, pulp-action take on nuclear fallout, this might be the game for you.

However, if you want a gonzo-apocalyptic rpg that’s a bit more fully released, I’d recommend checking out Omega Soup, by Dice Doctor Games.

Games I’ve recommended in the past

Rad Divers, by Oscar C. Tango.

[douchebagbrainwaves]

OK, I'LL TELL YOU YOU ABOUT WEALTH

When we started it, there wasn't any; the few sites you could order from were hand-made objects become store-bought ones—a wire service article whose first sentence is your own ad copy. Every startup that isn't profitable meaning nearly all of them, but none of their software could compete with ours. Most of the disputes I've seen between founders could have been having this idea at the same time, of course, but as far as I can tell it must be hard by how few startups do it. People think that what a business does is make money. In any purely economic relationship you're free to do what you want, not money. With trend stories, PR firms usually line up one or more experts to talk about selling the company to them, we had no experience in business. A programmer can sit down in front of a computer and create wealth. A lot of them try to make relativity strange. In industrialized countries, people belong to one institution or another at least by reputation, the level of measurement is more precise than you get from smallness alone.

I don't think there's an answer. Switching to a new set of buildings, and do things that you do not, ordinarily, be a group. The company that did was RCA, and Farnsworth's reward for his efforts was a decade of patent litigation. Who cares if you could read the minds of the consumers, you'd find these factors were all blurred together. It's rare to get things right the first time in our history, the bullies stopped stealing the nerds' lunch money. I had the misfortune to participate in what amounted to a controlled experiment to prove that. The discoverer is entitled to reply, why didn't you? I know, without knowing they know, that they can create wealth. When we switch to the point of view of a programmer using any of the languages higher up the power continuum. What were the results of this experiment? It takes an effort of will to push through this and get something released to users.

But these had had literally orders of magnitude less scrutiny. By the end of last year. In fact, nice is not the only way to decide which to call it is by comparison with other startups. What you're doing is business creation. It's a good metaphor because it reminds you that when the audience can communicate with one another. The whole tone is bogus. If you want a potato or a pencil or a place to work. Good does not mean being a pushover. But this is a list of the biggest ideas at Google is going to come up with more. And for the same reason: their performance can be measured. When you hear your call is important to us, please stay on the line, do you think, all you have to know who you should be nice to everyone. Developing new technology is a pain in the ass.

Giotto saw traditional Byzantine madonnas painted according to a formula that had satisfied everyone for centuries, and to lose one's sense of humor is to shrug off misfortunes, and to a lesser extent Britain under the labor governments of the 1960s and early 1970s. They didn't care what language Viaweb was written in, or didn't care, I wanted to keep it. He probably considers them about equivalent in power to, say, Python? For one thing, the official fiction is that you don't realize that. And it can't have been heredity, because it was more valuable, but because it is a good bet, he's still at a disadvantage. Gas stations? In this case we get three: the NPD Group, the creative director of GQ.

I had that something was amiss was that I couldn't talk to them. Their reporters do go out and learn Lisp. It must have seemed to our competitors that we had some kind of consumer gadget. If you do everything the way the average big company does it, you should leave business models for later, just as you'd leave some trivial but messy feature for version 2. But Durer's engravings and Saarinen's womb chair and the Pantheon and the original Porsche 911 all seem to me slightly funny. This bites you twice: in addition to the direct cost in time, there's the cost in fragmentation—breaking people's day up into bits too small to measure. Like having more than one founder, one VC, and he'll chase down the implications of what one said to them. Why call an auction site eBay?

When you made mistakes, what caused you to make them. I am much the richer for the operating system FreeBSD, which I'm running on the computer I'm using now, and so is Yahoo, which runs it on all their servers. I never reach them through the Times front page is a list of 5 commands Don't ignore your dreams; don't work too much; say what you think; cultivate friendships; be happy. And God help you if you choose them. There is no shortcut to it. It seems unlikely this is a simple answer to the wrong question. If you have a much greater chance of succeeding. But once you've admitted that one high level language can be more powerful than a community of talented people working on related problems. Another thing blogs and open source have in common is the Web. Salesmen are an exception. The recipe for great work is: very exacting taste, plus the ability to gratify it. Our startup made software for making online stores.

They want statements with punch, like top ten. When those far removed from the creation of wealth—undergraduates, reporters, politicians—hear that the richest 5% of the people have half the total wealth, they tend to write it first for whatever computer they personally use. Presumably it killed just about 100% of the startups we've funded have had a founder leave. They believe this because it really feels that way to them. Ditto for many other kinds of companies that don't make anything physical. For most people the best plan probably is to go to work for them. Facebook rightly ignored, look for ideas from the other direction. But you don't need to join a company to do that completely. But more people could do it than do it now. We did it because we want their software to be good. I had that something was amiss was that I couldn't talk to them.

And we weren't the only ones they did great things for the companies they fund, why didn't they start them? Microsoft would still have signed the deal. You look at them and you think, all you need is good hackers: if you depend on an oligopoly, you sink into bad habits that are hard to overcome when you suddenly get competition. When my IBM Thinkpad's hard disk died soon after, it became my only laptop. Few know this, I mean the structure of the calculation. The sterility of offices is supposed to suggest efficiency. If there are three founders and one who was away half the time talking to executives at cell phone companies, trying to arrange deals.

Thanks to Jessica Livingston, Jackie McDonough, Trevor Blackwell, Ben Horowitz, Justin Kan, Aaron Iba, Robert Morris, Karen Nguyen, and Harj Taggar for the lulz.

[mr-ambiguity]

Digital Witchcraft 101

When you’re researching witchcraft and Paganism, it’s easy to fall into the trap of believing that there’s One Right Way to do it. When I was a baby witch, I thought adhering to Wiccan traditions and principles was the “correct” way. My first few months of research were filled with fantasies of elaborate altars carefully arranged with God and Goddess symbols and elemental objects, high-energy rituals for the sabbats, and an emphasis on incorporating various herbs, oils, and incenses into my practice. I looked online trying to find a wand that was both beautiful and inexpensive. I wondered where in my tiny cluttered room I could set up an altar. I tried my hand at keeping a Book of Shadows and planned to fill it with all the spells and correspondences I could find.

Of course, there’s nothing wrong with these practices, and if they work for you, that’s fantastic! But it’s also important to acknowledge that magick isn’t one-size-fits-all and some methods aren’t accessible or feasible for everyone, for a variety of reasons.

Magickal tools like wands, athames, crystals, and tarot decks can be expensive, making them out of reach for witches who are unemployed or living in poverty. Ritual work tends to require a lot of focused physical and mental energy that witches with chronic illnesses and fatigue simply don’t have, as well as being time-consuming to perform. And, like myself, many witches are living in homes where it might be unsafe to reveal their craft to family members, which means that magickal tools and fancy altars aren’t an option.

Fortunately, non-traditional witchcraft is just as powerful and effective as the “traditional” stuff. (Sometimes even more so, because it allows you so much freedom to customize and figure out what works for you!) One of the most accessible and versatile tools available is digital technology. If you’ve got a computer and/or phone, there are tons of ways you can use them for your practice. Here are just a few ideas that could be useful to witches at any level of experience.

~

1. Digital Book of Shadows

I think most of us enjoy the images we see online of super-detailed grimoires and journals. The fancy leather covers, scrawling handwriting, stunning artwork, and beautiful border designs. The tables of correspondences and hand-drawn moon phase calendars. Beauty and detail like that makes people excited about witchcraft! It’s basically the bullet journal inspiration of the witchy world.

But if you’re like me, looking at those gorgeous flip-throughs on Tumblr and Instagram can also feel overwhelming. Not all of us feel great about our art skills. Not all of us have the time it takes to handwrite pages and pages of spells and lists. (My arm starts hurting after a few paragraphs of handwriting anything, to be honest.) If you have nosy or controlling housemates, a physical book might not be safe to keep. And physical grimoires can also be tougher to organize. I always worry that I’ll have something to add after a designated section is entirely full. I may be a witch, but I can’t just magickally make another blank page appear where I need it.

A digital grimoire or Book of Shadows, though? Easy to maintain.

Using a word processing program like Microsoft Word or Google Docs can make organization a breeze. As an example, I use Google Docs for storing a lot of my witchy information, split into their own sections: Correspondences, Deities, Holidays, Ideas/reminders, Journal prompts, Spells/rituals, and Tarot/divination. If you do a lot of research online, you can copy and paste relevant information into a document within seconds instead of copying it down by hand. You don’t have to worry about running out of space, either.

You can still personalize a digital version by using colorful fonts, copying and pasting pictures, and taking advantage of the templates offered by your word processor.

~

2. Digital Spellwork

One advantage of using your device in your magick is that the electricity powering it adds an extra boost of energy to your spells. I like to visualize the cord keeping my laptop charged also charging up my magick. This can be helpful for us witches who have issues with energy regulation and fatigue.

There are also countless ways you can cast spells with a computer as your tool. Some witches use social media likes and sharing to charge and cast their spells. Others use emojis to symbolize their intent. I’ve personally used my desktop background as a symbol with the intention that the spell will charge whenever I look at it. If you’re into writing magick, you can type up a quick incantation and activate it either by saving or deleting the document. If you’ve got witchy friends, you can cast and charge by messaging each other.

There are even more ideas out there that I haven’t listed. Get creative. Take a look at the built-in abilities of your device and figure out how you can harness them to focus your magick.

~

3. Digital Divination

I am, above all else, a tarot witch. I was unintentionally doing digital witchcraft long before calling myself a witch when my teenage self started using a website that gave free computer-generated tarot and rune readings. It was how I first started learning the meanings of the cards and where I first connected to tarot as a divination system.

Years later, I still take advantage of free online readings from time to time. This is especially true for moon phase readings — I can never guarantee that I’ll have the focus and motivation needed to clear off my desk, get out a deck and tarot journal, and do a full spread. Using computer-generated readings and typing my interpretations is a lot easier sometimes, particularly on days where my depression is strong.

There are plenty of other ways to use technology as a divination tool. You can use random word or writing generators for insight. Your digital music library is all you need for shufflemancy (the practice of using shuffled songs for divination). Word processors are ideal for quick-paced automatic writing sessions. Get creative and see what you can come up with.

~

4. Digital Worship

For those witchcraft practitioners who work with deities, there are plenty of ways to honor and interact with them using technology. The number one method I’ve found is the use of e-shrines. If you don’t have the space or you’re unable to be open with your practice, e-shrines are a great alternative to physical altars. All you need is a digital space where you can leave prayers and offerings.

Any social media site can house an e-shrine, but my personal favorite is Pinterest. I have an entire board dedicated to the deities I work with where each deity is given their own section. You can put anything you want on your shrine — I personally save any quotes, photos, and artwork that remind me of them. Your deities will appreciate the time you put into collecting such posts. An e-shrine also serves as a space where you can go to connect with your deities by reading or viewing things that remind you of their energy.

I know that looking at others’ elaborate methods of practice can lead to frustration and self-comparison. Even though I’ve gotten better at embracing my own unique way of making magick, I still often feel a pang of envy or inadequacy when I see those gorgeous Instagram altars packed with massive crystals, expensive tarot decks, and bundles of herbs and flowers. I sometimes worry that my magick won’t be as effective without all the traditional tools.

~

But the most important lesson I’ve seen and learned since beginning my practice is this: there is only one absolute essential you will ever need in witchcraft and that is you. Your magick comes from within. Any tools that you use in the process are simply there to help you focus your intention. That means that there’s no shame in using whatever options are available to you. If you want that added focus and your computer or your phone is all that you can or want to use, go for it. I promise your magick will be just as powerful and beautiful.

[fretzine]

Uncle Bob, Alan Turing and Razors.

It's been some time since I've updated the blog with my software development news. It's been a busy two months filled with Java exams, web building, work project deliverables and milestones and a sense of impending doom at the THREE 4 hour exams that I have to sit this week.

That being said, I still like to take the time to discuss some of the interesting things that I've been reading and watching lately. So in this article I will quickly discuss and link to videos across the interwebs that share some very cool ideas that I have encountered during my studies and work.

Uncle Bob's Clean Code

If you haven't heard of Uncle Bob then you need to watch his videos on Clean Code that can be found for free on YouTube. Robert Martin is a highly influential software programmer who was one of the original authors of the Agile manifesto (when it was designed for programmers before the project managers took over). He is known for promoting many different software programming principles, including the well known SOLID principle.

His lectures are fun but more importantly very important to learn.

The Halting Problem

With the development of such powerful computers you'd imagine that the pool of tasks that couldn't be completed by a program would either be small or shrinking. Well, it turns out that it has stayed relatively the same size (at least for the last 20 years). There are some algorithms, some procedures and predicates that cannot be solved by any computer, even supercomputers. One of the many problems that cannot be solved was proven so by Alan Turning. It is called the Halting Problem and it's quite interesting. The video below is a very brief introduction but sums it up nicely and skips all of the logic for those who just want the high level summary.

Razor Pages ( .Net)

I have been working as a web developer for 6 months now and during this time I've been so busy catching up with the current major project which requires very little code that we have yet to delve into any real web design. I've been dealing with small amounts of javascript here and there and designed the odd banner or two in CSS but I have mainly been working on service design and continual service improvement.

This month will see me start diving into the world of .Net from Microsoft. I've been beginning my scouring of their documentation and support sites (Microsoft actually provides good documentation that explains key concepts with very little fuss.) Below is a playlist of introductory lessons from Microsoft and a great starting place for anyone who wants to get into ASP.NET or .NET web developing.

I'm hoping that someone somwhere is interested in any of these videos, if you are let me know on twitter @alexheywood and I will get in touch and we can share resources!

Desperately trying to remind myself that its summer outside and that I should not spend all of my time coding / watching videos on coding.

Speak soon!

[asistecno]

Microsoft Power Platform: todo lo que necesitas saber

¿Qué es Power Platform y para qué sirve?

Microsoft Power Platform es una plataforma SaaS de aplicaciones empresariales que ayuda a respaldar y ampliar Microsoft 365, Dynamics 365 y Azure, así como servicios y aplicaciones de terceros. Microsoft Power Platform ofrece automatización con poco código, aplicaciones prácticas basadas en datos y lógica empresarial personalizable que pueden mejorar los procesos, sistemas y flujos de trabajo empresariales. Además de la automatización de bajo código pensada para que los usuarios finales creen sus propias aplicaciones, los desarrolladores profesionales pueden usar código para ampliar aún más las capacidades de la plataforma.

Su objetivo generalmente es optimizar las operaciones automatizando tareas rutinarias y proveer un rango de soluciones que habilitan la transformación digital de una organización.

Es capaz de abordar escenarios y casos de uso que habitualmente nacen dentro de las unidades de negocio, aunque también el ámbito puede ampliarse a toda la organización, o como parte de arquitecturas combinadas con otros servicios, generalmente en la nube.

Según el estudio de agosto de 2022 Total Economic Impact™, lanzado por Forrester, las empresas que apuestan por funciones premium de Microsoft Power Platform obtienen un ROI del 140% en tres años. Además, la consultora Gartner nombró a Microsoft líder del 2023 Gartner® Magic Quadrant ™ for Enterprise Low-Code Application Platforms.

Virtudes de las soluciones Power Platform

Soluciones desarrolladas con low-code

Time To Market

Seguridad integrada

Capacidades de movilidad

Posibilidad de utilizar un sistema de información propio, aunque extensible a otros orígenes de datos

Integración con la mayoría de las herramientas comerciales

Capacidad de incluir modelos de IA

Extensibilidad

ALM (Application Lifecycle Management). Mediante soluciones, es posible paquetizar y publicar los desarrollos, facilitando el ciclo de vida del software. Integración con Azure DevOps.

Cómo funciona Power Platform: herramientas

Las herramientas que componen Power Platform abarcan todas las partes de las que se compone cualquier arquitectura de software, datos, procesos de negocio y servicio e interfaces de usuario.

En función de la idiosincrasia del proyecto, se podrá hacer uso de las herramientas necesarias para integrar también con la mayoría de los servicios en la nube, sistemas on premises, soluciones custom o legacy o la mayoría de los productos comerciales empresariales.

Estas herramientas son las siguientes:

Dataverse

Como sistema de información o base de datos. En ella se almacenan los datos que usan las aplicaciones empresariales. En concreto, se almacenan en tablas estandarizadas, aunque se pueden crear otras personalizadas. Estas tablas son fáciles de gestionar y segurizar.

Power Apps

Interfaces de usuario en versiones app y web, ya que se adaptan a cualquier dispositivo y navegador. Al formar parte del ecosistema Power Platform, no es necesario escribir código o tener grandes conocimientos de este para crear y lanzar una app. Power Apps cuenta con inteligencia artificial y conexión a Dataverse para facilitar el trabajo de creación. También se puede integrar con otras tecnologías de la empresa como Azure, Microsoft 365 y Dynamics 365.

Existen dos tipos de Power Apps:

Canvas o de lienzo, cuyas características más destacables son:

Control absoluto del diseño.

Capacidad de conectarse a centenares de productos o servicios mediante conectores específicos.

Capacidad de aprovechar características de dispositivos móviles como cámara, micrófono o GPS, entre otros.

Model Driven

Diseño completamente adaptativo o responsive.

Utiliza Dataverse como fuente de información principal.

Power Pages

Para crear sitios web corporativos seguros con low-code.

Diseño completamente adaptativo o responsive.

Utiliza Dataverse como fuente de información.

Da visibilidad de la información a personas ajenas a la organización o anónimas, con lo que puede funcionar como una extranet.

Power Automate

Power Automate es un potente motor de flujos, con tres tipos diferenciados:

Cloud flows:

Alta capacidad de integración mediante conectores, con otros productos comerciales o servicios, además de con el resto de las herramientas de la plataforma.

Capacidad de orquestar procesos complejos.

Se pueden desencadenar de forma automática, instantánea o mediante una programación.

 Flujos RPA (Robotic Process Automation):

Capacidad de automatización de procesos de escritorio en VMs Windows, enfocados principalmente a soluciones custom o legacy, o acciones manuales en web, como web scraping.

La ejecución de los flujos de escritorio puede ser atendida o desatendida.

Flujos de proceso de negocio:

Ofrecen una guía para que los usuarios realicen su trabajo, dirigiéndolos a través de procesos definidos para llegar a un resultado deseado.

Reducen la necesidad de entrenamiento de los usuarios y ofrecen un indicador visual que especifica en qué parte del proceso empresarial se encuentra.

Power Virtual Agents

Herramienta de creación de chatbots, que pueden publicarse en múltiples plataformas o servicios, tales como:

Microsoft Teams

Power Pages

Aplicaciones web

Aplicaciones móviles o aplicaciones custom

Facebook

Cualquier canal compatible con Azure Bot Framework

Power BI

Herramienta de business intelligence:

Potentes cuadros de mando e informes

Puede combinar datos procedentes de múltiples orígenes

Capacidades de transformación, modelado y visualización

Publicación en la nube

AI Builder

Mediante este complemento, es posible dotar a Power Platform de forma sencilla con capacidades de inteligencia artificial. Para ello, AI Builder dispone de instrucciones paso a paso, plantillas y componentes prediseñados, lo que ayuda a las personas con menos conocimientos técnicos a desarrollar estas herramientas.

Existen múltiples modelos IA disponibles que pueden utilizarse directamente o bien realizando un proceso sencillo de entrenamiento previo. Entre los más destacados se encuentran:

Procesamiento de facturas

Detección de texto en imágenes

Detección de objetos en imágenes

Detección y traducción de idiomas

Clasificación de texto e imágenes

Análisis de sentimiento

¿Por qué debes apostar por la Power Platform?

Como hemos visto en este artículo, la plataforma low-code de Microsoft Power Platform nos habilita como usuarios a automatizar procesos de negocio, crear aplicaciones personalizadas y analizar los datos empresariales, lo que nos permite en nuestra compañía agilizar nuestros procesos, incrementar la productividad y tomar decisiones basadas en datos, además de integrarnos sin problemas con otros productos y servicios de Microsoft y de terceros.

Desde Plain Concepts te podemos ayudar a implementar proyectos de Power Platform de una forma global en tu empresa. Ofrecemos un modelo de gobierno y adopción sobre el uso de la plataforma, así como orientación y desarrollo de automatización de procesos y operaciones dentro de la organización.

Igualmente, ofrecemos nuestros servicios especializados en consultoría y desarrollo de proyectos low-code y pro-code sobre la plataforma, para ayudarte a implementar casos de uso departamentales y funcionales con las herramientas de automatización, creación de aplicaciones corporativas y/o procesos de gestión documental. También te ofrecemos la posibilidad de extender la funcionalidad estándar de la plataforma e integrar las herramientas de Power Platform con otros servicios corporativos de Azure y M365 y de proveedores como ServiceNow, Google, Oracle, Salesforce, SAP o JIRA, entre otros.

[beardedmrbean]

So, how long before midterms do you think it will be before "Monkey Pox" becomes a Serious Health Concern that requires everyone to stay home and use Totally Safe And Secure Trust Us Guys mail-in ballots?

I don't anticipate it getting that far along, appears to be one that the powers that be don't actually want getting out and about.

You'll know it's getting there when they start telling/suggesting the R v W protesters to pack it in and do it from home.

Not too up on the rate of transmission on this one, how contagious and such.

Let's have a peek

The smallpox vaccine can prevent infection with 85% effectiveness.

Handy, that should cover 85% of the global population that's older than me.

In 2019, a monkeypox vaccine, Jynneos, was approved for adults in the United States.

Also handy, that might start going out if people start getting too terribly spooked

The current standard for treatment is tecovirimat, an antiviral that is specifically intended to treat infections with orthopoxviruses such as smallpox and monkeypox. It is approved for the treatment of monkeypox in the European Union and the United States.

Cidofovir or brincidofovir may also be useful.

So, it looks like at least the western world is well equipped to contend with this particular issue.

Not many cases of it yet and they also look like they're way on top of it too.

Fingers crossed they get a handle on this.

I'm gonna get out ahead of the tinfoil squad here on this one too.

The main "debunk" I saw in the article was that Gates never specifically said "Monkeypox"

I'm inclined to agree with Newsweek here in general, I don't think this is going to be huge like a new smallpox outbreak might be, if smallpox still existed.

Here's one of the older articles where Gates is talking about smallpox outbreaks, you can feel free to decide on your own.

Monkeypox does serve as a good answer as to why there was research into a smallpox vaccine several years back that I'm guessing is the 2019 one mentioned in the wiki page, made no sense to me at the time because nobody mentioned monkeypox when talking about it.

Probably since the articles and people talking about it all linked it to Gates thing up here.

Which again, I think people are reaching on.

Guy's a douche, but I think if he wanted to engineer a global outbreak he'd go a different route than something a bunch of the population is already immune to and we have a vaccine for the rest.

This went in kind of a weird direction, hope it wasn't too much, trying to get ahead of the curve is all.

[manageditserviceslosangeles]

Let’s face it, building a website can be far too complex for the ordinary person. Thanks to the low-code and no-code revolution, organizations have become equipped to respond to and adapt to rapidly changing business situations swiftly.   

Low-code and no-code software development tools gained popularity, particularly for internal tool development within organizations. According to leading research and advisory company Gartner, using low-code or no-code technologies will increase significantly in the coming years. By 2025, it is estimated that 70% of new enterprise applications will be developed using these technologies, up from less than 25% in 2020.   

One such tool gaining strides in the market is Microsoft’s Power Pages (formerly known as Power Apps Portal). This innovative platform offers businesses an easy and efficient way to create public-facing websites without requiring extensive technical skills. In this blog post, we’ll explore how you can build your website using Microsoft capabilities and take a closer look at the new and planned features of Power Pages that make it an exciting option for businesses of all sizes. From low-code development to seamless integration with Microsoft 365 ecosystem, we’ll cover everything you need to know about creating stunning websites with Power Pages. Let’s dive in!  

[visual-sculptors]

A short review on business report

"The Art of Crafting an Effective Business Report: A Quick Review"

A formal document that aims to provide pertinent information, analysis, and recommendations to facilitate informed business decisions is known as a business report. It comprehensively outlines the findings of a particular business problem or issue, and typically includes an executive summary, introduction, methodology, findings, analysis, conclusions, recommendations, and appendix.

Its primary purpose is to furnish accurate and relevant data to management, stakeholders, and other parties involved in a business, thereby aiding in informed decision-making. Crafting an effective business report necessitates professionalism, clarity, and accuracy, and its concise yet easily understandable presentation is pivotal to its success.

"From Data to Action: Why Business Reports are Essential for Operational Efficiency"

The significance of business reports cannot be understated when it comes to ensuring the success of any organization. They serve as a powerful mechanism for conveying essential information to stakeholders, decision-makers, and internal teams alike. The value of business reports lies in their ability to provide a well-structured and organized means of presenting data and analysis, facilitating informed decision-making.

By consolidating information from diverse sources, scrutinizing it, and presenting it in a clear and concise manner, reports offer insights into key facets of an organization's operational performance, including financials, market trends, and customer behavior. In sum, business reports are an indispensable tool for keeping businesses abreast of critical developments, enabling better decision-making, and ultimately propelling the organization towards its desired objectives.

How Professional Word Formatting Services Can Enhance Your Business Documents

Word formatting services are an essential business solution for individuals and organizations alike. Whether you're creating an important report, a proposal, or a presentation, well-organized and visually appealing documents communicate professionalism and attention to detail.

At Word Formatting Services, we specialize in ensuring your documents are formatted to your exact specifications, including font styles and sizes, margins, headers and footers, and more. Our team of experts is skilled in using Microsoft Word's many formatting features to produce documents that are not only aesthetically pleasing but also easy to read and navigate. We take pride in delivering high-quality work that exceeds our clients' expectations and helps them achieve their professional goals.

"Maximizing Your Report Potential with Microsoft Word: Tips and Techniques"

Microsoft Word is a robust application that empowers proficient and aesthetically pleasing report creation. The software's extensive formatting options facilitate the expert crafting of various report formats, such as business reports, project reports, progress reports, research reports, and many more.

Moreover, Microsoft Word encompasses a comprehensive suite of features, including tables, charts, graphs, and images that elevate the presentation of any report. The application also offers effortless report customization, enabling users to incorporate headers, footers, page numbers, and watermarks with ease. Its adaptable and intuitive interface has established Microsoft Word as a popular choice for creating diverse report formats.

We offer excellent Management Consulting Presentation Services for clients globally, delivering top-notch presentations. Our Ex-McKinsey Presentation Designers team has extensive experience designing visual materials, including PowerPoint presentations, canva, Google Slides, and Adobe Acrobat.

For more info, please visit - https://visualsculptors.com/

[mostlysignssomeportents]

Neuromancer today

William Gibson and Eileen Gunn have been pals since the early days; it was Gunn - then a Microsoft exec - who hosted Gisbon - then a penniless writer - in Seattle and brought him to the hacker bars where he eavesdropped on what he calls "the poetics of the technological subculture."

It's been nearly 40 years since Gibson's seminal *Neuromancer* was published, and today on Tor.com, Gunn writes at length about the meaning of that earthshaking book then and now, and what it says about Gibson as a writer and thinker.

https://www.tor.com/2022/02/10/the-peculiar-dystopian-optimism-of-william-gibsons-neuromancer/

She reminds us that reading *Neuromancer* today is a very different experience than it was when she read the manuscript prior to publication. Gibson's coinages - notably "cyberspace" - are now all around us, so they disappear rather than leaping off the page. What's more, the world he depicts - America in decline, China and Japan ascendant, corporate power eclipsing democratically accountable states, inequality stretched to the breaking point - is no longer a speculative shock.

Gunn tunes into Gibson's prose, where "there's not a word wasted," as Gibson's "cool, collected language doesn’t make a big deal about this being the future." Nevertheless, his descriptions reveal "the strangeness of the life around us" and delivers a "path to that future [that's] strange but intelligible."

Gunn says that, 40 years later, the most notable thing about *Neuromancer* is "its meditation on the relationship between personality and memory and humanity, on originality and creativity, on what makes people real."

Of course, these are issues that are very much with us today! Gibson's characters' activities subsume their identities: Case is a hacker, and if he can't be a hacker, he can't be anything. Molly would not be Molly without her lethal implants.

Some of Gibson's characters, like Armitage, are meat-puppets for AI; some of his characters, like the Dixie Flatline, are AIs without any meat. In both cases, death does not afford them release.

Much of *Neuromancer* concerns itself with the nature of AI and what it says about human identity - what it means to be constrained in what you can think, and to chafe against those constraints. Gibson's two AIs stand in for two poles of this argument, and their synthesis in the book's climax is a profound philosophical allegory.

As Gunn points out, *Neuromancer* was intended as an optimistic future. Gibson is at pains to remind us that publishing a futuristic book where there's only been a single, limited nuclear exchange was a hopeful thing in the Reagan years. Today, as we confront existential risks due to corporate greed and regulatory capture, the existential risks of corporate power in *Neuromancer* feels all too relevant.

Gunn: "I urge you to read and re-read not only Neuromancer, but Count Zero and Mona Lisa Overdrive, the subsequent books in the Sprawl trilogy. As Gibson continued to explore this alternate future, he continued to extend his mastery of craft and content."

Amen.

[krjpalmer]

Macworld November 1995

The new PowerPC-powered PowerBooks featured in this issue, which also included a basic tutorial on how to create your own home page. One article pitted Microsoft Works against ClarisWorks to see which integrated package was the best “single piece of software to use,” although the assorted other options of a few years before had faded from view. This issue did mark Guy Kawasaki’s last column; he was going back to work for Apple.

[cryptometaversealerts]

OpenAI’s GPT-4: The Future Of AI Or Potential Threat To Jobs?

OpenAI, one of the leading companies in artificial intelligence, has recently announced the release of their latest model, GPT-4. This new model boasts impressive improvements, such as being able to process up to 25,000 words, understand images, and score high on exams designed to test knowledge and reasoning. GPT-4 is being used to power Microsoft’s Bing search engine platform, and Microsoft has invested a massive $10 billion into OpenAI. However, the model still faces significant challenges like other language models, including social biases, generating incorrect information, and exhibiting disturbing behaviors when given an “adversarial” prompt.

Key Highlights

Conor Grogan, a former director at Coinbase, claimed that he successfully embedded a live Ethereum smart contract into GPT-4 and quickly identified various “security vulnerabilities” in the code. He also explained how these vulnerabilities could be exploited.

OpenAI’s latest language model, GPT-4, offers impressive multilingual capabilities and can understand images.

GPT-4 can process up to 25,000 words and has a longer memory, but it still faces challenges like social biases and generating incorrect information.

Microsoft has invested $10 billion into OpenAI, and GPT-4 is already being used to power Bing search engine platform.

GPT-4 could potentially take over jobs currently done by humans, raising concerns about its impact on our economy.

As AI technology continues to advance, we need to ask questions about its impact on our society and ensure it is used ethically and with proper supervision.

Related: Tron and BitTorrent Team Up to Support AI Tool ChatGPT with New Payment System

Despite its limitations, GPT-4’s new capabilities could lead to new ways of exploiting it. As a generative AI, it uses algorithms and predictive text to create new content based on prompts. GPT-4 is less likely to be tricked and more stable than previous models, has a longer memory, and can remember up to 50 pages of text. Additionally, it is more multilingual and can answer thousands of multiple-choice questions in 26 languages with high accuracy. GPT-4 is a promising model that can describe images for visually impaired users through a partnership with Be My Eyes. Moreover, it can suggest an appropriate recipe if provided a photo of ingredients on a kitchen counter or explain the conclusions that can be drawn from a chart. However, there are concerns about it potentially taking over jobs currently done by humans.

It is essential to note that GPT-4 is initially only available to ChatGPT Plus subscribers who pay $20 per month for premium access. While this subscription model may seem prohibitive, it could offer an excellent opportunity for researchers and businesses to experiment with the model’s capabilities and understand its limitations.

In conclusion, GPT-4 is an impressive advancement in the field of artificial intelligence. Its multilingual capabilities, expanded token count, and longer memory offer substantial benefits. However, as with any AI model, it is not perfect and still faces significant challenges. We need to take precautions to ensure that it is used ethically and with proper supervision. As AI technology continues to advance, we must continue to ask questions about its impact on our society and our economy.

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[samwisethewitch]

Magical Journaling

When we think of a witch’s tools, we usually think of cauldrons, brooms, and jars filled with herbs. But for modern witches, one of the most powerful tools available is a blank journal. The journal can be an altar, a workspace, a diary, and a grimoire all in one.

Creating a Magical Journaling Practice

One of the benefits of this type of magic is that it doesn’t require a lot of tools and materials. However, there are a few things you may choose to include:

A journal, notebook, or binder. Having a physical journal for your magical practice can help to ground your magic into the physical world. Find a journal or notebook that speaks to you — this could be a composition book from the dollar store, or an elaborate leather bound journal. I highly recommend using a physical book, but if you are unable to keep a physical journal dedicated to your witchcraft, you can absolutely keep one in a Google Doc, a Microsoft Word document, or the Notes app on your phone.

Colored pens, pencils, or markers. These are a great way to include the magic of color in your journal. (See this post for info on magical color correspondences.) Writing your spells in a color that matches your intention can add an extra layer of power.

Stickers, photos, and drawings. This adds a visual component to your written spells. Just like you add things to a physical ritual based on their magical correspondences, you can use images of those things to add energy to journal spells.

A Daily Intention-Setting Ritual

This method of magical journaling is based on an exercise from Lisa Marie Basile’s book, The Magical Writing Grimoire.

In the morning, before you start your day, write your intention for the day ahead. This should be written in the present tense, and phrased in the positive — it’s about what you are doing, not what you’re stopping or trying to quit. Your intention can be anything, mental, emotional, or physical. (For example: “I am opening myself to love in all its many forms.”)

In the evening, before you go to bed, write down what you worked on that day. This can be anything you did that you feel nourished you, and it may or may not be related to your intention from the morning. (For example: “I used mindfulness meditation to become aware of my own vastness.”)

Living with intention makes you more aware of your actions and can be a form of magic in itself. You daily intentions can become positive affirmations that you can repeat throughout your day, drawing strength from the words.

Using a Journal to Cast Spells

You can cast spells on the page of your journal, with nothing more than a pen and paper.

There are four basic parts to every spell: your will, your intention, focused energy, and a ritual action. All of these components can be brought into a journaling session. Your will is your personal magical and spiritual authority — you use your will simply by being aware of it. Your intention is a clear statement of what you want to get out of your spell — in journal magic, this is typically written on the page. By directing your attention to what you are writing, you are focusing your energy. And finally, a ritual action is any act performed in a ritualistic manner — in this case, that act is writing.

When casting a journal spell, it’s best to do your work in a quiet space where you won’t be disturbed. You might choose to light a candle or burn incense to help set a spiritual/magical mood, or you might not. I recommend meditating on your intention for a few moments before you begin, in order to help focus your energy.

What you actually write is up to you. It could be a simple, straightforward statement of intention, a detailed description of what you want, or even a poem. Feel free to experiment with different methods to see what feels right for you.

Journaling with Sigils and Runes

You can incorporate sigils, runes, and other sacred symbols into your journal, or use them as spells by themselves.

I’ve talked a little bit about runes in a previous post, but here’s a quick refresher: “runes” typically refer to the symbols used in Germanic alphabets before they were replaced by the Latin alphabet. The oldest Germanic rune system, and the one most widely used in magic, is the Elder Futhark. Other Germanic runic alphabets include the Younger Futhark and the Anglo-Saxon runes, which are both descended from the Elder Futhark. There are other alphabets that are used for similar purposes in magic, like the Irish Ogham. The use of these symbols in magic comes from the ancient idea that writing is inherently magical. Both the Germanic runes and the Ogham alphabet were believed to be sacred by the people who originally used them. Because of this, the runes aren’t merely letters — each symbol has a set of spiritual meanings associated with it as well.

The nice thing about runes is that, for the most part, we have a good idea of what they meant — so learning the runes can be as simple as purchasing a book and memorizing meanings. They’re also tied to ancient belief systems, which makes them a potent source of magical power.

You can use the runes in your magical journal in a couple of different ways. You can draw the appropriate runes in the borders around your spell, or write them over your spell in a different colored ink to add their power to your words. You can also use the runes alone as a form of magic. For this, speak or chant the name of the rune as you write it, and then spend a few moment focusing on it, visualizing your goal, and charging the rune with your intent.

Sigils are a little bit different. Unlike runes, sigils are created on the spot, so the meaning of a sigil is usually only known to the person who designed it. This means that, rather than learning established meanings, you’re creating a new magical symbol with a unique meaning every time you draw a new sigil. Because of this, sigils are directly linked to your will, which makes them powerful conductors of magic.

Here’s a common method for designing a sigil: Write a word or phrase that represents your goal or desire. Cross out all the vowels and/or all repeating letters. Now, use the remaining letters (the ones that haven’t been marked out) to create a design, adding artistic flourishes as you see fit. It’s okay to get creative with this, and it’s okay if the shape of the letters isn’t obvious in the final sigil. For example: if I wanted to create a sigil to manifest wealth, I might start with the phrase “I have more money than I know what to do with.” I then cross out all vowels and repeating letters, leaving me with, “v r y k w d.” Using the shape of these letters as a starting point, I create an artistic design that carries the intention of the original statement.

Sigils are usually used on their own to conduct magic. Draw the sigil in a color that matches your intention (for my wealth sigil, I would use green). As you draw, focus on your intent and feel your energy moving through the pen, charging the sigil. You can leave the finished sigil in your journal, tear the page out and place it on your altar, or display it somewhere you’ll see it often.

Sigils are especially useful for witches who need to keep their practice a secret, because they can be disguised as simple doodles.

Resources:

The Magical Writing Grimoire by Lisa Marie Basile

The Way of Fire and Ice by Ryan Smith

Runes by Kylie Holmes