Working Up

by Dwayne Phillips These chattering bots merely predict the next N word(s). Software has been doing this for many years—nothing new here. In the 1990s (yes, 30 years ago, I am that old), word processors started guessing what word we were trying to type. Some called that “auto complete.” It was nice. Not perfect, but […]

[Read more →]

by Dwayne Phillips I just had a chattering bot filter through layers upon layers of a spreadsheet and provide the answer. After a moment, I realized I could have written a simple program to do that, but that was true for me, not everyone. I just solved a problem with data presented in a spreadsheet. […]

[Read more →]

by Dwayne Phillips I would hope that journalists would understand AI and software better than this. I am disappointed. Yet another story about AI written by the ignorant for the masses: AI models that lie and cheat appear to be growing in number with reports of deceptive scheming surging in the last six months, a […]

[Read more →]

by Dwayne Phillips I would hope that journalists would understand AI and software better than this. I am disappointed. I recently read this story about a rogue AI Agent: A rogue AI agent recently triggered a major security alert at Meta Platforms, by taking action without approval that led to the exposure of sensitive company […]

[Read more →]

by Dwayne Phillips History repeats itself as the computer can be fully occupied by the efforts of just a few programmers. There was a time in computing history when there were few programmers. The computers weren’t powerful. A couple of programmers could keep a big computer busy all the time. Then the computers became more […]

[Read more →]

by Dwayne Phillips Working with text and changing file formats just got a lot easier. This little essay was written to be posted in a WordPress blog. I have been doing this blog writing bit for a few years and have over 1,800 posts. Seems like a lot, but a couple of posts a week […]

[Read more →]

by Dwayne Phillips Software that writes software is quite helpful. Well, maybe sort of not. MIT jumps into the fray and asks a few dozen programmers if AI that writes software is helpful to people who write software. First, the folks at MIT are smart enough to not base a survey piece on a survey […]

[Read more →]

by Dwayne Phillips AI has upended large parts of the education system. What to do? Back to basics. Decide what is important to learn and teach that. Teachers give an assignment. Students use one of these chattering bots to write the answer. Task done. No learning, but the task is done so move on. This […]

[Read more →]

by Dwayne Phillips Despite temporary angst, we want the tester who has the bad luck of doing something that finds the errors in our computer programs. A while back, my grandson was writing a program on our kitchen computer. He was writing some type of game where you picked a number and something happened on […]

[Read more →]

by Dwayne Phillips Recent advances in chatting or Q&A software has provided the ability to write simple computer programs. Hooray! There is a trend in the workplace called “low-code/no-code.” A person at work writes a ten-line computer program that is helpful in that it will do something in a minute that would take the person […]

[Read more →]