KFCblog - November 2024

Life

Good sign - November and no snow yet in Chicago! I hear the US has an important election coming up shortly. Most readers of this blog know I stay away from political issues - my only urge is for you to strongly consider exercising your right to vote, as there might even be important things to vote on other than the presidential election.

I also had a great time visiting Kinnick Stadium at the University of Iowa, watching the Hawkeyes crush the Badgers of Wisconsin, 42-10. I want with my daughter, Jackie Corless and my son Thomas Corless . I do think Iowa has the best tradition in college sports (even though it is only 7 years old): The Hawkeye Wave

And get ready for the Annual Techy Gift Guide post - it should be coming on or around Black Friday.

Sports World

Congratulations to the 2024 World Series Champion Los Angeles Dodgers, who beat the New York Yankees, 4-1. Interesting fact? The 30 of the 49 runs scored in the World Series (61%) were an all-time record.

The 3-2 Bears are now the 4-4 Bears and the predictable calls for the coach to be fired is getting a head of steam. Last week's Hail Mary loss to the Washington ???????????????????????? Commanders was one of the worst individual efforts in NFL history and almost has bad for Chicago as 1.8 seconds. The NBA season has started and the Knicks (?!?!) have the 3rd best odds to reach the NBA finals (after Boston and Oklahoma City).

Hello, World

I got a few (offline) comments on my suggestion last month that LLM assisted development can drive 5x improvement. After discussing with a few people, I'd like to clarify my position. The 5x productivity improvement was for me, a guy who hasn't coded every day since the early 1990s (and wasn't a particularly talented developer). I think LLM assistance can improve the productivity of superstar developers by a much, much smaller amount (20%? 10%?). However, if you work in this world you realize that superstar developers are pretty rare, especially outside big technology companies. And in professional servcies/consulting companies, where development roles are dominated by junior developers, I think we should still be expecting pretty big improvement (50% reduction?). Any comments or disagreements, throw them down below.

Puzzle Corner

We haven't had a puzzle corner for quite a while, but this I ran across this one and thought i'd share because of its simplicity and elementary school level of math required.

Take the four numbers, 8, 8, 3, and 3 and using only addition, subtraction, multiplication and division, make and expression that evaluates as 24. Remember, no exponents, factorials, etc.

Put your answer below in the comments (no peeking)

Caught My Eye

A reddit thread with a whole set of best/clever practices.

A super simple solitaire Battleship meets Minesweeper game.

Do you need a quick little chart or diagram for a presentation or blog post? Try Napkin.ai

If you're geeky enough to want to know how Apple generates their suggested passwords, here's an explainer.

Walkcast.fm - a site that dynamically generates a podcast telling you something interesting about the place you currently are. I tried it and got a spooky story about the Madrid Metro.

You are probably familiar with ghost kitchens, but how about the new peer-to-peer home cooked food trade happening on Facebook Marketplace?

WhenPhoto - a quick game that shows you 8 photos and ask you to guess the year the photo was taken.

I Bought This: I wanted to get something that I could easily travel with.

Closing Quote

“Participation is the essence of democracy and the spirt of sports” – Harvey Mackay, American author