Working Up

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 […]

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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 Here come new tools. Adopt them or lose your job? Probably not. Yet more recent news about big tech eliminating jobs due to AI. Or perhaps they were eliminated because those companies simply hired too many people and they weren’t doing much of anything on the job. Here are more thoughts on […]

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by Dwayne Phillips Here is an attempt to gain value from a chattering bot by wording the prompt a little differently. These chattering bots are everywhere. Some value is gained while some skill is lost. I thought of a better prompt: Find, display the URL, and display a few sentences from three key commentaries regarding […]

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by Dwayne Phillips It seems that when we stop doing something, we forget how to do it, sort of. I recently read reports of AI causing “deskilling.” (pronounced de-skilling, not des-killing) It seems that some folks were using AI tools to do something they used to do all the time. After a few months, one […]

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by Dwayne Phillips New tools sometimes allow us to modify the techniques we use. The new tools don’t require modification, but allow it. These kids today, these engineers and scientists under 30, they just … well, they just do things differently. They have new tools (and I have new tools). They work the way the […]

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by Dwayne Phillips Chatbots can answer questions about written pieces. They can be good tools for feedback. I was recently testing several different chatbots to understand which performed better. I fed a 200-page document I wrote into each chatbot and asked them questions. There were several questions which all the chatbots failed to answer. The […]

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by Dwayne Phillips To use AI to write reports requires a person who can write well. Let’s use AI to write our reports or essays or deep research or whatever AI will write for us now. That’s not cheating, that’s using good tools … some disagree violently with that statement. The AI tools are quite […]

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by Dwayne Phillips AI tools are here. They don’t do everything, but they boost productivity. Use the tools. I am old enough to remember a time in the late 1980s when word processors appeared. There were many older managers who were accustomed to writing in cursive on yellow pads with pencils and handing those to […]

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by Dwayne Phillips Sometimes you just lower your head against a wall and push as hard as you can. Let’s begin this little blog post by noting that I attended LSU—not MIT, Carnegie Mellon, Stanford or any of those places known for producing really smart people. At LSU, we may not be able to spell […]

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