Tech Talk with Toni

A skull and crossbones is never a good sign—unless you're a pirate.   Today's post is inspired by a video I saw about a customer (let's call her Sally) who purchased a beef pie from a bakery that went bad. Sally took a bite and, to her dismay, discovered creepy crawlies inside. She was understandably upset, but I think this is a great metaphor for what it is like using outdated data.  In both cases, you consume something (be it the pie or the dataset) expecting good results, only to find out later that there's a problem.   Now, just one bad experience could make Sally stop buying from that bakery and lose trust in all store-bought meat pastries. Similarly, you might stop using a dataset and start relying solely on your gut instinct for decisions. Wouldn't it be great if pastries could indicate when they're nearing their expiration date, allowing bakery owners to sell them faster or remove them from the shelves altogether? While that might be ideal, mistakes happ...

Exterminate... Humans! Today's topic is inspired by Apple's recent pivot to home robots after their electric vehicle project failure.  Industrial scenes come to mind when I think robots: a series of them churning out everything from cars to perfectly peeled pineapples.  (Who really likes peeling those?) But robots are far more diverse than those seen in factory lines, they can be classified in various ways based on design, function, autonomy, and application.  Take agricultural drones, for example, these bots hover around trees, using vision technology to select the best fruits for harvest based on color. Additionally, humanoid robots are no longer science fiction! As a result, these advancements in technology have led to workers performing these repetitive tasks being relieved of their jobs. While new jobs are created, the question still stands: "Will there be a balance between job displacement and job creation?" Those who are for robots often say that we will work a...

  A Tesla assembly robot attacked an engineer Today's discussion draws inspiration from a standout moment in the movie Wonka.  In the 'Scrub Scrub' scene, Willy Wonka  unveils a revolutionary clothes-washing machine at Scrubbit’s, where he works part-time. The workers were impressed by the machine and acknowledged its ability to significantly boost their productivity. In a world with many problems, having the freedom to decide how we use our time is empowering. In Wonka, after creating the makeshift washing machine, the characters shifted focus to aiding Willy in selling his chocolate, deeming it more valuable than hand-washing clothes..  Today, despite having washing machines, we fuss about folding clothes and other repetitive chores.  Wouldn't it be great to have these tasks completed in the background while you engage in activities you truly enjoy? With that being said, here are some mundane things that we all do that can be automated:  Too Tired To Turn...

IBM 350 Disk Storage:  a huge stack of metal plates that could store up to 5,000,000 characters In school, you learn the ropes of programming and might even find yourself tackling odd assignments, like creating a cricket simulator in C++ in just two weeks.  In the professional world, ad hoc report requests can cause anxiety. Gone are the days of set deadlines.  Fear not, as you can now utilize low-code software to easily create programs by dragging and dropping tools for a wide range of tasks. Today, our focus will be on the ETL process. In case you're not familiar with the acronym ETL, it stands for Extract, Transform, and Load - the essential steps in the data pipeline. This process involves extracting data from multiple sources, transforming it into a desired format or structure, and loading it into a target system for analysis or reporting. However, this repetitive process can be time-consuming as it often involves cleaning, joining, filtering, and aggregating data. A...

A bitcoin spider (it does not exist) Fintech is an area of the financial industry that is constantly evolving and full of excitement and confusion. While you may enjoy the convenience of tapping your card on a point-of-sale terminal, your granny may struggle to adapt to the bank's new app. We can all agree that technology is infiltrating every sector and has led to the emergence of cryptocurrency and autonomous vehicles.  However, with innovation comes the need for regulation, and companies in the United States are now subject to more than 50,000 regulations according to page 6 of  SVB's Breakdown on The State of Fintech . Failure to comply with these regulations can lead to severe penalties, damage to the company's reputation, and even legal action. Coinbase is a prime example of this, as they were fined $50 million for failing to build and maintain a compliance program that could scale with their rapid growth.  Today, risk management is still a highly manual task that ...