Working Up

by Dwayne Phillips

Abbreviations have real purposes. Laziness is not one of them.

I see many abbreviations these days. Most are acronyms (TBD, F/U/W, Apr, etc.) that are not expanded. Funny thing, I read in an authoritative book at some point in time that abbreviations were used for:

1. Save space on a page or PowerPoint or such.
2. Faster note taking like short hand writing.

Please note “to save typing when there is plenty of space on the page or PowerPoint or such” is not in the list of uses for abbreviation. If you want to save typing, type some abbreviation and follow that with a find-and-replace with the actual term. Otherwise, I am just being lazy.

We can do better.

by Dwayne Phillips

Sometimes success brings failure. Sometimes success brings anxiety. Note Wikipedia as an example.

Back when Wikipedia was young (I am old enough to remember that), it was fun. I would write articles for it. I would put photographs in it to add some depth to some articles. Joy. Experiment. Learn.

Then Wikipedia became THE ENCYCLOPEDIA of all encyclopedias. Does anyone remember when Microsoft tried to distribute an encyclopedia on a CD? I digress.

Once Wikipedia succeeded in the eyes of some people, well, we started to worry and fuss. Who is editing those articles? That is political! X-wing folks are trying to take over and slant the world towards X. We shouldn’t have all that X. Replace X with fill-in-the-blank or some sort of evil.

Wikipedia is an encyclopedia. Back when I would write articles, I was constantly reminded to write in the style of an encyclopedia. Just the facts. Cut the adjectives and adverbs. Date, places, numbers, facts. Boring. Not so much fun. And boy, cutting those adjectives and adverbs brings anxiety.

An encyclopedia is supposed to sort of be boring. Sorry about that. If you want opinion, read the National Enquirer.

by Dwayne Phillips

Do you have a great idea for a story? If you can write one sentence, there you go.

“I have a great idea of a story,” said a a person who has a writer as a friend. The person continues with, “I will tell you the idea, you write the story, and we’ll share the (really big anticipated) profits.”

Several things to note here: (1) there are no really big profits in 999,999 of 1,000,000 stories, (2) everyone has great ideas for stories, (3) writers actually write the stories, and (4) that is the difference between writers and everyone else.

Moving on, here are some tips for the person with the great idea. First, write the great idea on a piece of paper with a pencil.

“These guys rob a bank by bulldozing an ATM and grabbing all the cash.”

Expand “these guys.” You don’t have to write sentences or paragraphs, just grab another piece of paper and write something like: (1) three white males, (2) age 23, (3) high school grads, (4) work for the construction company owned by one of their uncles, (5) live in the wheat farming area of Kansas, (6) it is the year 2024, (7) all three are single.

Now there are seven things about “these guys.” We can change any of those seven to change the story. For example, they are all married, they live in Brooklyn, New York, or both. Perhaps it is the year 2020 in the beginning of COVID-19. Those and other changes change the story.

Move to the next thing and expand “bank.” Grab another piece of paper and write something like: (1) convenience store, (2) edge of a small town, (3) owned by a dreaded enemy from high school, (4) has gas pumps, (5) keeps all the cash in a safe cemented in the floor.

Now there are five things about “the bank.”

Step through everything else in the one sentence that began the story. Expand (1) bulldozer, (2) grabbing, and (3) cash. Now there are about … let’s see 5 times 5 times 5 times 5 times 5 … and that is, uh, carry the two, add the seven, and there are over 3,000 different ways to make the original one-sentence story real. There are probably some crazy combinations with some really funny and some really frightening.

Okay, six pieces of paper: (1) original sentence, (2) expansion of “these guys,” (3) expansion of bank, (4) expansion of bulldozer, (5) expansion of grabbing, and (6) expansion of ATM. Cut pages (2) through (6) so that there is one item per cut. Randomly pull one item from each pile. Look at it. Write it? Try again. Write it? And so on.

Here is another variation: start writing the story and then change one item. Two out-of-towners show up and now there are five guys. Maybe two females join and now we have three guys and two gals. Make the gals 66 years old. Gosh. I lost track of the stories we could write.

Got a great idea for a story? Don’t bother your friend the writer.

by Dwayne Phillips

One of the great habits of highly effective persons and organizations is that they “come back to it.”

“We will come back to it when we have the time,” an oft-repeated but seldom completed phrase of the well intentioned.

Sigh. We will come back to this. How many times have I heard that? Many more times than I have seen it fulfilled. I have to do something right now. I know it isn’t the better way to do it, but, gosh, it’s the best I can do now. At least I think it is the best I can do now. I could do much better now, but, gosh, let’s just take the easy way out and all that stuff.

The time or resources or energy or something never allow that return trip. The thing continues to limp along. Perhaps times will change and that thing will go away. Perhaps time will elapse and I will go away and leave that thing to someone else (ah, escape).

I know an elderly man who looks at a task and says he will get to it another day. And, guess what? He does get to it another day. He does come back to it and does the better thing to take care of it. I greatly admire that elderly man.

That elderly man, however, is the exception. How does he do it? He does it. That’s how.

Pretty simple, huh. Yes, pretty simple. Yet it seems to be beyond the great majority of us. We can do better.

by Dwayne Phillips

Sometimes a solution is bad in the long term, but it is exactly what is needed in the short term.

Sitting here in the coffee shop (no names, but their logo is green), I managed to drop a speck on butter on the lens of my reading glasses. I grab the paper napkin and start to wipe the lens. I can hear some persons who are close to me and well meaning saying, “Don’t wipe your glasses with that. You will just smear the lens.”

Yes, I will smear the butter across the lens. I will, however, be able to see through the smear for now. I will need to clean the lens properly eventually. Ah, “for now” and “eventually.” The short term and the long term.

Spreading butter across the lens to make it thin enough to be able to see through it is a bad idea. The thinly spread butter is still there. It will catch dust. The dust will accumulate, and I “won’t be able to see a thing.” I can hear those words coming.

Still, I will be able to see through the thinly spread butter for now. And for now, I am sitting here writing blog posts for posterity (some day my grandchildren will not read this). I have short-term gain. Later today or tomorrow, I will clean the lens of my glasses properly with the proper tools. That will be a long-term solution to a speck of butter on the lens.

As long as I use the long-term solution later, the short-term solution will suffice. And sometimes, the long-term solution isn’t needed. Caution here, folks. Let’s think and do better.

by Dwayne Phillips

Are we putting all our eggs in one basket? No one seems to be arranging this, but we are putting are our eggs in one basket?

A couple of recent news stories caused me to pause and think (a dangerous thing, thinking). Eight tech companies have over 30% of the value of some stock market or other. Nividia sells a large proportion of its product a just a couple of buyers. Nividia ships 90-something percent of all GPUs in the world. TSMC makes a large majority of all the something-or-other in the world. And what percentage of the knowledge management market is owned by WordPress?

Is someone running this show? Do they know what they are doing? Do they exist?

And who is “they?” Well, this is all private enterprise or something. None of it is illegal (yet).

Still, it seems like if the wrong person slips on a banana peel in the company cafeteria…this could all come crashing down on someone’s head. All those eggs would break in one perilous moment.

by Dwayne Phillips

If a computer is used in a system, the data is stored and can be retrieved.

This story is making the rounds on the Internet…Tesla was involved in a crash lawsuit. Tesla said, “We don’t have any data.”

A hacker found the data in the car.

Put this down next to the one that says, “If it is on the Internet, others can and will see it.”

If it was on a computer, it is still there. Folks can read data from disk drives dug up from garbage dumps. We can read old data.

This includes the TSA nude body scanners whereby they claim the data is never stored. It is stored on the disk. But no one saved the file. It is stored on the disk. The operating system does that in the background so it can save the more-expensive random access memory (do we still call it that?). Then the operating system pulls the data back when needed. This is all in the background and helps the machine run efficiently.

If a computer is in the machine, the data is stored. Delete images from your smartphone. They are still there. Someone can read them. The data is stored.

Note: the correct title of this post is, “The Data Are Stored.”

by Dwayne Phillips

This current trend in AI fails miserably when confronting the nemesis of all logic—the American teenager.

I recently read about a big fast food chain in America that installed one of these AI chattering bots on the drive through ordering system. Let AI take the orders. Save cost. Improve profit. This will work. This is rational business practice.

Along comes the American teenager.

“I’ll have two of this and two of that … (good so far) and 1,000 cups of water and 2,000 packets of ketchup.”

Now that is FUNNY! At least some American teenagers consider it funny as panic ensues inside the kitchen when the human workers attempt to fill the order or something.

The current trend in AI falls back to supervised learning in one form or another. At one time in AI, the trend was what we know call symbolic AI. An AI practitioner would describe the world as a set of laws or rules.

Or course the old way had its problems. And, by the way, the new trend has its problems, too. The obvious answer, which doesn’t seem to be obvious to many in business, is to combine the strengths of these two and many other approaches. One approach does not work in all cases.

And if you are running a fast food business, the American teenager is one of the cases.

I can cite many other cases where the American teenager foiled the best efforts of adults. I won’t do that as some teenagers will read this and it will trigger more “fun.”

by Dwayne Phillips

Managing work and leading people isn’t easy. It is, however, the job of managers.

I have recently seen several articles about the struggle to bring people back into the office two, three, or even five days a week. And there are requirements to prove that a person actually came to the office, stayed for more than a cup of coffee, and accomplished some work.

What should the policy be? Simple. The policy should be THINK. Think about this person, their personality, their work style, the work they are assigned to accomplish, how that work affects other people and the organization, and tell that person what they need to do.

Yeah, but…

That means thinking about every person every day, talking to every person every day, ensuring the work is accomplished, ensuring every person is reasonably happy with their job and contribution, and… Gosh, that is a lot of work. It is much simpler to declare one policy for everyone and expect everyone to fall in line or toe the line or some cliche. Much simpler. Much less thinking.

Sorry. I am the manager. You are the manager. This is our job. We lead people and manage work. We can do it. We can do better.

by Dwayne Phillips

Borrowing from The Software Crisis of the 1990s, I declare The AI Crisis.

A recent report from MIT claims that 95% of AI projects attempted by well-meaning folks fail. Gosh. That is a pretty high percentage.

I remember the software crisis of the late 1980s and all through the 1990s. Reports like this MIT report were everywhere. High percentages of software projects failed. What was wrong? What to do?

What was wrong? People were doing stupid things. “Let’s write some software to implement my great idea. I think it will work.” This brought phrases like, “Hope isn’t a plan” and such. Yes, stupid things. Hire a roomful of programmers, lock them in a room with no windows, yell at them now and then, and good things are supposed to happen, right? Good grief. Of course good things wouldn’t happen, but well-meaning folks thought it would.

One thing to come along was the Capability Maturity Model whereby people would decide what their problem was before attempting a solution. Imagine such a concept! The Capability Maturity Model helped a lot of people do better. Basic problem-solving basics.

Then the agile methods came in. Hey, we have tools that lessen the cost of experiments. Let’s run more experiments, learn more, then do more. That also helped a lot of people do better.

Still, you need some idea of the problem you are attempting to solve.

Now, here we go again, AI is everywhere. Everyone must have an AI project or be left behind in a pile of silicon dust (I think silicon dust is also called sand, but I digress). Let’s hire a roomful of AI people (what do you call those people?), lock them in a room with no windows, yell at them now and then, and good things are supposed to happen, right? Gosh.

Of course this fails. The high failure rate puts us in The AI Crisis. Someone write it down that I wrote it down.

We still need some idea of the problem we are attempting to solve.

And another thing, a lab project is not a marketable product. It is a lab project. Take the result, give it to a bunch of hardened adults, and they might produce a marketable product.

AI requires compute power—money. AI requires people—more money. AI requires direction and some hardened adults who have turned ideas into marketable products before.

Just flail around and you will become part of the 95%. Come on, we can do better.