Working Up

by Dwayne Phillips Just use those other words. “In other words…,” spoken by someone frustrated with their attempts to write or speak. “What I’m trying to say is…,” also spoken by someone frustrated with their attempts to write or speak. There is something about communicating in either the written or spoken word. After fumbling, grumbling, […]

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by Dwayne Phillips As much as we “have a better idea” and want to revise, sometimes the first version is the best. The first draft. The bane of writers of fiction and non-fiction. Let’s fix it. Okay. That’s the first version. Let’s revise as we become “smarter.” Are we always becoming smarter? Sometimes not. The […]

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by Dwayne Phillips Another rant about writing that makes no sense (to me). This system uses three times less (memory, weight, time, space, effort, and whatever) than that system. I understand what it means to use three times more weight (15 pounds instead of 5 pounds), but what does it mean to use three times […]

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by Dwayne Phillips Please tell me what we are doing. Please don’t read from a catalog. Person beaming with confidence: Look. Here is a block diagram of our system. You see we are using Snowflake, Spark, Databricks, Kafka, Tableau, ThoughtSpot, and toss in a little Excel for good measure. Person baffled but interested: Interesting. I […]

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by Dwayne Phillips Let’s revise that one more time. Okay, but will it be better or just different? Revisions. Edits. That is what writers do. Many prescribe to the notion that the first draft is practically nothing. The real work of the writer begins when the revising and editing begin. And how many revisions finish […]

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by Dwayne Phillips I express a bit of angst over the use of “geo.” This post may mean nothing to everyone else in the world, but I have to get it out of my system. I have been overwhelmed with the use of the term geo the past ten years. Just my personal problem, but […]

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by Dwayne Phillips Wait. Stop. Someone grab that person. That person is about to fall into the pit of endless details. Oh no. It’s too late! I know it’s about to happen. I should be able to do something to stop it. Oh no. It happened too fast. There is nothing I can do. The […]

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by Dwayne Phillips All this $$$ is killing AI. I used to work in AI. That means that I researched things that might allow us to do things that we couldn’t do. I attempted to instruct a computer or, as we used to say, I attempted to write a computer program to do something that […]

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by Dwayne Phillips I often hear people speak with great certainty. Further consideration, however, reveals almost no certainty. People like to speak with great certainty. I write those words because I often hear people speak with great certainty. If people don’t like to do that, why do they do it almost all the time? Great […]

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by Dwayne Phillips Influencing behavior via modeling instead of coating with chocolate syrup. I recently read an article written by a mother describing how she had her children eat vegetables. The answer applies to all behaviors that are distasteful to some persons. There is an old joke about a farmer who fed his dogs spinach. […]

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