Working Up

by Dwayne Phillips Sometimes it is best to go back to the old practice of putting everything on a wall so we can see the entire thing. We used to do this. We would print a document and tape the entire thing to a wall. We would walk along the wall and glance back and […]

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by Dwayne Phillips Expert systems live on after 40 years. Well, sort of. I worked in artificial intelligence research in the mid-1980s. We had an AI boom in that decade. Then a winter and a boom or two since then. Back in 1985, we had “expert systems.” (I am old enough to remember this. I […]

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by Dwayne Phillips One of the oldest phrases in computing is still true. Rats. Some folks thought AI would fix this. If I meant to find the sum of 2 and 3 but typed 2+4, I would have the wrong answer. Rats. Inputing the wrong information produces the wrong output. So said Charles Babbage some […]

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by Dwayne Phillips Sometimes I can do more than my job. I can exceed and excel. I recommend caution. I read an editorial recently about newspapers. Perhaps that editorial was agreeable or not as it delved into the politics of the English language (thoughtful and fraught with peril). The topic was journalism, journalists, and journal-ing. […]

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by Dwayne Phillips Everyone is building a big(ger) datacenter. Fine. Let’s use some sense while we are at it. Everyone is building a big(ger) datacenter. If you are going to build one, you must build it bigger than the one across the fence. Louisiana building a $10 Billion datacenter? Mississippi must build a $15 Billion […]

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by Dwayne Phillips Perhaps these chattering bots fulfill the role I requested. Some ten years ago, I wrote about The Round Table of Librarians. Since all the knowledge of the world was on the Internet, we just searched for it with Google et al. and found it. What were we to do, however, if we […]

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by Dwayne Phillips We do everything according to our documented documents—except when we don’t. Mr. Zuckerburg at Meta has created a superintelligence group to do something wonderful in AI. He is using the tried-and-true documented management practice of the skunk works. The skunk works is a special place where you put some really smart folks […]

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by Dwayne Phillips Experts know heuristics or “rules of thumb.” Consult these folks before attempting something of importance. Did you know that a pizza will feed three people? Did you know that you should have half the food cooked and ready to serve at a picnic before the picnic-ers arrive? Did you know that sandstone […]

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by Dwayne Phillips This is a practice I recommend for non-fiction writing—especially writing where the writer is attempting to teach good practices. I have written books and dozens of articles and other things recommending good practices. If you want to accomplish such and such, do this and that and the other thing. And then I […]

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by Dwayne Phillips When confronting something that looks odd, show it to an old person. They may have seen this before and can explain it. Many years ago, a programmer saw an odd way to demodulate amplitude modulation. The method didn’t resemble any of the equations or diagrams regarding amplitude modulation (AM, or that radio […]

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