Working Up

by Dwayne Phillips We have invented a new job: it is the chatic (pronounced like “static”) or the chattering bot technician. I often work as a chattering bot technician. Substitute the name of your favorite system (ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Coilot, Mistral, Qwen, Grok, etc.) for chattering bot and you have it. We employ “ChatGPT technicians” […]

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by Dwayne Phillips AI enabled completing a 12-page report in five minutes. No, that took ten years of effort. Somehow, using a new piece of software became cheating or something bad. A request arrived at work. Click. Boom. Pow. Out goes a 12-page report. Five minutes. Next? Cheating! Consider, however, that the five-minute task was […]

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by Dwayne Phillips We return to the era of the main computer center and waiting for computer time. Way back in the previous millennium, I was leaving graduate school. While in school, I had access to a new 32-bit minicomputer (I think it was made by Perkin-Elmer if anyone else remembers that time). One problem […]

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by Dwayne Phillips I guess we live in an age where we have to state this, even though many disbelieve. If the grammar is too good, AI must have written it. If the style has changed, AI must have written it. If fill-in-the-blank, AI must have written it. It is possible to write with good […]

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by Dwayne Phillips All the pieces are here. Let’s have one download, install, and run. This is what I want: one piece of software that reads the text files on my computer (.docx, etc.), answers questions about them, writes output to a file, and I can do all the copy-and-paste I want. pandoc seems to […]

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by Dwayne Phillips Writers can write more than we do. Is this lazy? And, by the way, lazy was the worst thing in the world according to my mother, so that comments stings. Writers in 2026 are for the most part lazy. — Dean Wesley Smith Mr. Smith’s comment stings. According to my mother, there […]

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by Dwayne Phillips Technology changes. Practice changes with the technology. Nothing new here, but it requires me to change. Aargh. Sometimes I don’t like that. There was a time when Xerox machines didn’t work as well as they do now. I guess I should call them copy machines instead of Xerox machines. There was a […]

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by Dwayne Phillips AI is a tool to be used by those who provide ice cream cones and honey buns. Lose sight of that and advance at your peril. Who is going to be the winner in all this AI competition? Who is going to be the loser in this? After all, avoiding losing is […]

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by Dwayne Phillips Which way is AI going? The big datacenter or on my little laptop computer? We seem to be at some fork in the road regarding artificial intelligence. The big (colossal) datacenters are rising from the farmlands of America. Big, bigger, and even bigger. If the price doesn’t run into the hundreds of […]

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by Dwayne Phillips The world of computing has turned upside down. In 2001, Marc Andreesen noticed and noted, “Software is eating the world.” Here I am to notice and note, “Hardware is the new software.” Everyone wants to buy computer hardware. Prices of computer hardware are shooting upwards as demand far exceeds supply. If you […]

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