Or so Sarah Butcher reports:

If you’re wondering which coding language to learn for a software engineering job in banking, Goldman Sachs’ CIO Marco Argenti seems to be aligning himself to the people who suggest an advanced knowledge of the English language and an ability to articulate your thoughts clearly and coherently in it, is now up there alongside Python and C++.

Writing in Harvard Business Review, Argenti says he’s advised his daughter to study philosophy as well as engineering because coding in the age of large language models is partly about the “quality of the prompt.”

“Ambiguous or not well-formed questions will make the AI try to guess the question you are really asking, which in turn increases the probability of getting an imprecise or even totally made-up answer,” says Argenti. In the future, he says the most pertinent question won’t be “Can you code?,” but, “Can you get the best code out of your AI by asking the right question?”.

Asking the right question will partly depend upon being able to articulate yourself in English and that will depend upon, “reasoning, logic, and first-principles thinking,” says Argenti. Philosophical thinking skills are suddenly all-important. “I’ve seen people on social media create entire games with just a few skillfully written prompts that in the very recent past would have taken months to develop,” he adds.

I know nothing about coding, but Stu Clayton, who sent me the link, does, and since he thinks this is of interest lächerlich, I’m passing it along. Anything that places value on “advanced knowledge of the English language and an ability to articulate your thoughts” is probably a good thing.

Doxy-PEP can be taken a few hours after sex and is effective at preventing sexually transmitted infections. New research finds it's less effective for women but that may not be the final word.

(Image credit: Rich Pedroncelli/AP)

WOODBURY, Minn. — By the time Taylor Teske came to be sitting on an exam table in an obstetrician’s office in Minnesota, her medical records marked a devastating journey: nine pregnancies, one baby, eight miscarriages.

The first miscarriage happened in June 2018, almost as soon as she found out she was pregnant. Teske told her boss at the vascular clinic where she worked that she was pregnant, and he asked if she wanted to sneak a look using the clinic’s ultrasound. He searched for sounds on the black-and-white screen. Minutes passed, but nothing happened. An obstetrician-gynecologist later confirmed that Teske was having a miscarriage. 

Read the rest…

Most people care about their typefaces

Appearances matter, especially whether fonts have serifs or not.

"Font Wars Spread After State Department Replaces Times New Roman with Calibri

"'I'm banging my head against the wall;' camps divided in fallout from government efforts to make documents easier to read"

By Katie Deighton, WSJ (3/14/23)

One wonders whether it is a matter of functionality and efficiency or esthetics and taste.  Whatever motivates the confrontation, one thing is evident, and that is that people have deeply held opinions in favor of / against one side or the other.

What sounds like a typeface tempest-in-a-teapot has boiled over in the U.S. and U.K., where changes in document requirements have set off a war of words among cantankerous font factions.

The State Department announced in January that Calibri would replace Times New Roman on official documents to make them easier to read. U.K.’s Home Office, for similar reasons, x-ed out the 83-year-old Times New Roman, which has the wings and feet on letters known as serif style.

…

“For every study out there that says that sans serifs are more legible than serifs, you’re going to find an opposite study,” said Maria Lindenfeldar, the creative director at Princeton University Press in New Jersey.

A 2017 study published in the scientific journal Annals of Dyslexia found that text in Dyslexie, a typeface designed to make reading easier for people with dyslexia, didn’t test any better—whether measured by speed or accuracy—than words in Times New Roman.

Some typeface executives say that, in fact, the serif flourish makes letters easier to distinguish. They cite the identical appearance in some Calibri fonts of the lowercase “l,” as in look, and uppercase “I,” as in India.

The serif versus sans-serif debate extends to nonverbal communication.

Typographer Sarah Hyndman, author of the book “Why Fonts Matter,” found that people saw serif typefaces such as Times New Roman embodying “traditional,” “conventional” and “trustworthy” values, she said; Calibri and other sans-serif typefaces were seen as “confident,” “friendly,” and “honest.”

…

Rebecca Creed, a Florida-based appellate attorney, had in the past used Times New Roman or Courier New for court briefs and other legal documents. In 2021, the Florida Supreme Court adopted a rule requiring Arial or Bookman Old Style, chosen for their readability on screens, for computer-generated documents.

At Ms. Creed’s law firm, Bookman Old Style won out.

“We just liked the way it looked,” she said. “That sounds dumb, but it’s really just what it came down to.”

Chacun à son goût.

Selected readings

• "Choose your font carefully" (8/22/22)
• "Decolonizing Chinese fonts by probing the past" (9/11/21)
• "Character building is costly and time consuming" (12/22/15)
• "Font adjustment: Times Beef Noodle" (11/14/18)
• "Ye Olde English katakana" (9/11/14)
• "Phonetikana)" (10/22/15)
• "Washirweng" (3/26/14)
• "An inconclusive psycholinguistic take on post-period spacing" (5/1/18)
• "Font rage" (7/5/07)
• "The interpretation of stones and typefaces" (7/11/04
• "Do what to the switch?" (5/4/16)
• "Idea: A new typography term" (Ironic Sans, 2/19/08) — about bad kerning, aka "keming" (David Friedman's coinage), with plenty of references to "flick" in the comments
• "FLICK BAD KERNING" (Notes from a Linguistic Mystic, 11/1/12)
• "Fuck Yeah Keming" (Flick Yeah Kerning!) — many hilarious examples
• "Why kerning matters" (Wug Life, 12/25/13)
• "Another chapter in the history of the Chinese typewriter" (8/14/21)
• "Agbègbè ìpàkíyèsí" (12/15/08)
• "Charaelerislie" (5/13/21)
• "How Michael spent his summer vacation" (9/14/08)
• "@Everybody" (7/26/20) — in the comments
• "I kept doingⁿ it wrongⁿ" (5/26/10)

WASHINGTON — Health secretary Xavier Becerra on Tuesday warned of dramatic consequences if a federal judge revokes the federal approval of mifepristone, a form of medication abortion.

The judge, Matthew Kacsmaryk, is set to rule on a case brought in Texas by anti-abortion advocates seeking to overturn the drug’s initial approval more than two decades ago. Mifepristone, taken in combination with misoprostol, accounts for over half of U.S. abortions. It is also used to treat miscarriage.

Read the rest…