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Nonprofit profits

Nonprofit profits

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It’s long been a dirty secret in Portland that the non-profits have board members and CEO’s making $100,000’s a year – and they often serve on multiple boards. Worse, many of their well-meaning employees find themselves serving in dangerous conditions working with dangerously sick or mentally ill homeless with little training or protection. Sadly, in too many cases, many barely even make the equivalent of minimum wage.

How do you find this all out? Well – tax records are public. ProPublica has an amazing website that has copies of their W-2’s and breaks down their costs.

For example: Urban League of Portland made $24.7 million last year. The CEO of this nonprofit? He made $400,000. A good non-profit should use 90% or more of their income for programs and actually helping people. Urban League? Only around 70%

I highly recommend everyone check out the non-profits they give to and see if they’re actually using the money wisely – or just to make their CEO’s and board members rich.

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Design logos that have words with DallE 3 and ChatGPT

Design logos that have words with DallE 3 and ChatGPT

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AI may have trouble with accuracy of information (AI is the know-it-all neighbor) it is a great way to brainstorm a variety of different ideas quickly. Getting them to generate images that have correctly spelled words can be hard.

Julian Horsey and Metricsmule give you prompts that demonstrate how to use ChatGPT combined with DallE 3 to generate logos for your company – that include correctly spelled words.

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IBM 5140 PC Convertible

IBM 5140 PC Convertible

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Cathode Ray Dude did a great rundown on the IBM 5140 Convertible. It was the first PC computer my dad got after the Radio Shack TRS-80 Model III and the first one that had a floppy drive. We even had the serial/parallel port and the thermal printer.

But probably the most amazing thing is that this 8088 XT, floppy based computer actually had a method to sleep and wake right where you left off. As far as we know, it was the very first instance of the technology.

Some Real Alpine Climbing

Some Real Alpine Climbing

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Colin Haley only has 6 videos on his channel, but they capture the essence of alpine climbing like no other. Definitely not the spit and polished videos you see from Red Bull or the perfect climbs you see from Hollywood style productions.

These are very real videos that capture the beauty and beasts that are alpine climbing – and why I fell in love with this. I could only hope to visit one of these amazing places in my life and have the skills he has.

Adventure travel companies

Adventure travel companies

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Going on a vacation is one thing, but how about an adventure? There’s been a rise in adventure travel companies that can help you adventure through some of the most amazing places in the world in a way you’d never experience in a tour bus.

The market is definitely delivering some amazing, affordable deals – and it’s been driving some of the more overpriced companies like REI Experiences out of business. Companies like Much Better Adventures and Explore! are setting the pace by offering 5-15 day adventures for under $1500. You need to get yourself there and handle an amount of the logistics yourself but once there they cover most accommodations, transport, food, and activities with a distinctive local flair – often giving you time to explore on your own.

To be clear, you’re not getting a curated western experience at the Hilton and air conditioned bus transport. It’s probably not for families with younger kids. You’ll likely be working with local guides and staying at affordable, but safe local places. This almost exactly what I would have loved in my 20’s and 30’s – let me save money by doing the parts I can do, then let them handle the local stuff that would be difficult. Instead of a carefully packaged experience, you get to see how people live in the country you’re visiting.

I’m definitely looking into this for my next sabbatical.

Dark Realities of Buying Crunch overseas

Dark Realities of Buying Crunch overseas

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As Nike and Apple learned the hard way, outsourcing your work overseas can have serious ethical concerns.

Sadly, workplace abuse (both mental and physical) is a reality in many low-cost countries. People Make Games reveals some highly disturbing cases of abuse and punishments that are subjected to game dev workers at these outsourced locations. In one case, a young developer is told to record slapping herself in the face 100 times as punishment.

It’s disturbing, but definitely something people should be aware is happening when companies outsource to low cost geos.

Google report on using AI for internal code migrations

Google report on using AI for internal code migrations

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Google published a report on it’s effort to migrate code to the latest dependencies – an often thankless task fraught with risk. Google’s code migrations involved: changing 32-bit IDs in the 500-plus-million-line codebase for Google Ads to 64-bit IDs; converting its old JUnit3 testing library to JUnit4; and replacing the Joda time library with Java’s standard java.time package. The 32-bit ID’s were particularly rough because they were often generically defined types that were not easily searchable.

They used a collection of AI tools as well as manual code reviews and touch-ups to achieve their goal. They emphasize that LLMs should be viewed as complementary to traditional migration techniques that rely on Abstract Syntax Trees (ASTs), grep-like searches, Kythe, and custom scripts because LLMs can be very expensive.

The results?

With LLM assistance, it took just three months to migrate 5,359 files and modify 149,000 lines of code to complete the JUnit3-JUnit4 transition. Approximately 87 percent of the code generated by AI ended up being committed with no changes. For the Joda-Java time framework switch, the authors estimate a time saving of 89 percent compared to the projected manual change time.

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