Wise Owl's monthly (ish) news tweet | Issue 78 - June 2024

The items included in this newsletter are listed below. Our newsletter go out about once a month - if you'd like to subscribe, just let us know!

StackOverflow contributors are (entertainingly) angry at the platform getting into bed with OpenAI

Many readers will be familiar with StackOverflow (SO): it's most programmers' go-to source for help. SO has now announced a partnership which means that OpenAI will include questions and answers from SO when building its large language models. Many past SO contributors are furious that their answers - provided to help fellow programmers - will be exploited (and distorted) in this way, without any proper attribution or compensation. You can see a summary of the furore, some of the angriest comments and even Darth Vader's thoughts on the subject here.

Three new regular expression functions are coming to Excel!

If you're a fan of Excel AND a fan of regular expressions, life has indeed blessed you. If like most people you're a regular user of Excel but couldn't write a regular expression to save your life, fear not - that's what ChatGPT and other similar AI tools are for. The 3 new regex functions coming to Excel will make building complex data parsing formulae much easier!

We've created a completely new set of SQL exercises (Power BI to follow)

It's bye bye Doctor Who and hello Taylor Swift! We've created 74 completely new exercises for our SQL training courses based upon a music database, which includes tables for artists, songs and tours (you can see the details here). We will soon be removing 129 old SQL exercises, as the databases upon which they were based are now out of date. Next month we hope to do the same for our Power BI exercises - watch this space!

An analysis of the (busy) May 2024 Power BI update, a Wise Owl PBI theme and an M language resource

After a few quiet months, the May 2024 Power BI update was a busy one. Modern tooltips, the DAX query view and the model explorer emerged from preview, and new features included pivot-table-style matrix layouts, a new relationships window and (yet) more line formatting options. To help you with formatting we're making available our Wise Owl Power BI theme (with some supporting notes), and we're also taking this opportunity to direct people to an M language resource.

Take a trip back to the 70s, 80s or 90s with a visit to this interactive computer museum

Following last issue's reminiscences from Andrew about his 20 years at Wise Owl, here's another chance to wallow in nostalgia. The Northwest Computing Museum in Leigh (near Manchester) has a huge array of old computers from the last 50 years, including - almost certainly - whichever one first introduced you to IT. You can use many of the computers, choose to have your favourite old game loaded, read old documentation (!) or just play on some of the retro arcade games: details here.

For this month's competition we ask you to find where X marks the spot on our treasure island!

Rummaging through the Wise Owl attic recently we came across a dusty parchment map of a treasure island, together with some clues stored (bizarrely) in a spreadsheet format showing how to find the buried treasure located thereon. If you can solve the riddle you will have a chance of winning this month's £50 voucher. Last month's competiton was won (again!) by Denzil Foakes of Emerald Zenith, who receives his third £50 voucher and proves that the Wise Owl sorting hat is truly random - answers to the Abba songs word search and more details here.

Note that to keep our website content up-to-date we only publish newsletters from the last 3 calendar years.

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