Thursday, March 14, 2019

Automation Awry

In our society, it's very easy to pick fly shit out of pepper.

I was reminded of that as I began looking at my Inbox today. To be clear, I love reading my howtogeek.com newsletter. The content is generally well-written and I think the articles either inform me of something new or remind me of something I had tucked away into the archives of my brain. I also do not normally see errors on their website or within the emails I receive from them on a subscription basis. Thus, when I saw the following in my Inbox, I chuckled as it's an example of how automation can sometimes go awry when their software - either the software they wrote or the software they purchased - created the email for Monday at 11:05 AM and included the link to the How to Make Your Smarthome Easier for Other People to Use story twice. What that tells me is that when the software assembles the email, there is no check for duplicate entries. The URL to the story should be the same for the two entries so, at a very high level, I presume there isn't a step, prior to sending the email, that looks for duplicate URLs. If there was, I wouldn't have seen this:


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