Working Up

by Dwayne Phillips

This is another fundamental of written communications that we seem to have forgotten—the humble abbreviation.

Let’s abbreviate:

1. Jn: John
2. DevSecOps: Development, Security, Operations
3. &: and
4. etc: and other similar things
5. USA: United States of America or United States Army or …

The last item in the list is confusing, but given the context we always know what that means, right? Sorry, we don’t.

I contend that we should not use abbreviations any longer. 98.6% of the abbreviations we use today are not worth the trouble.

An abbreviation is to be used in a case where we don’t have enough space to type the full word(s).

That is a controversial statement. In the days of computers (that’s us, right?) with word processors and “powerpoints” and all this wrap around text automatically and easily scaled font sizes and such (gosh, a lot of things to help us), we have plenty of space.

Why do most of us abbreviate so much? We don’t want to type the words. “USA” is much easier to type than “United States of America.” It is so much work to type those four words instead of those three letters.

Again, all this computer writing stuff makes it easy to type the four words. Just type USA everywhere. Then use the find-and-replace software to … well, you know, find the abbreviation and replace it with the words.

Confusion gone. Extra work gone. A little more clarity restored. A little more clarity is a good think. At least I think so.

I think it is worth the effort. Let’s lessen our use of abbreviations. We have the space for the full words.

by Dwayne Phillips

We predict the future poorly. We know we do. What we don’t seem to realize is how often we predict the future.

We predict the future poorly. Very poorly. Very, very poorly. Which among us predicted ChatGPT would arrive? And then become that fastest adopted system ever? I am waiting. Okay, I didn’t predict it. Who predicted that a virus from China would allow many of us to work from home, forever? Not me.

Sigh, if predicting the future was easy… well, I don’t know what that would mean.

Another problem with predicting the future is that we still try to do it—often.

“This is a temporary measure.” That’s a prediction of the future.

“I’ll see you tomorrow.” Another prediction of the future. We get that one right most of the time.

How about rephrasing these things.

“I think and hope we only have to do this a little while. Things will change, and we won’t have to do this any longer.”

“If all goes well, I’ll be back here tomorrow and so will you.”

Wait, do we have to do those things? Must we be so literal? No, we don’t. Life is already too complex to toss in all these caveats to what we say.

Still, let’s consider what we are doing. Let’s realize when we are predicting the future and remember how poorly we predict the future.

Is the future we are predicting costly? Some temporary structures cost hundreds of thousands if not millions of dollars. Being back here tomorrow to see you again costs just about nothing.

Are our predictions of the future merely hopes and dreams? Remember that “hope is not a plan” or something like that.

Are we merely too busy and tired to do anything but (poorly) predict the future? My experience is that “busy-ness” and fatigue are the reasons most of the time.

Yikes. I am too busy and too tired to think. My response is to predict the future. I don’t predict the future well. I predict the future poorly. Back to where I started.

Here is a prediction: I will continue to predict the future (poorly).

I hope that prediction is wrong, too.

by Dwayne Phillips

New problem? Need a new solution. First, try the simplest thing.

It happened again at work the other day. We have a new problem (new day, new problem). We need a new solution. What will we do? Hmmm, there are so many options. Each option with its good things and bad things and … gosh this gets complicated quickly. Let’s make a matrix, hold a conference, maybe a seminar before the conference to learn the latest tools and techniques, then maybe in a few months we can do something that will last for ages and withstand all the slings and arrows that those who hurl slings and arrows can withstand and … have I lost track of where I am in this sentence?

Let’s step back for a second or moment or something. Let’s try something simple. Actually, let’s try one of the simplest things that come to mind.

How about a clipboard with a few pieces of blank paper and a pencil (attached with a string of course so we will always have the pencil ready)?

Don’t want that simple? Okay, how about a Word document or Google Docs thing? Most folks have access to those things. We can share them and collaborate and all that goodness we learned during the work-from-home pandemic. Yes, how about that?

With a simple thing, we can learn a few things about our problem and our “permanent” solution. Hmmm, that sounds ominous—permanent solution. That implies the problem is “permanent.” If we solve the problem, won’t it go away and not be permanent? Perhaps, but I digress.

See, trying a simple or simplest solution allows me to pause and consider the relationships among problem, solution, time, permanence, etc. All the while, I have a solution that helps me do what I am trying to do.

There are many good things about the simplest solution. One, it is quick. Here, I have a solution right now. It is flexible. Here, I have changed my mind and moved to another solution. It is cheap. Here, I already own all the tools and I didn’t spend much time on this.

If we are trying to solve a problem, let’s do the simplest thing first.

by Dwayne Phillips

We live in a world of fake photos, videos, voices, and accounts. Go back to some old country wisdom I heard as a teen.

We can fake videos. We can fake voices. We can fake photograph. We can fake entire people. We can fake fake detectors (Does that make sense? Yes, it does.).

A long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away…

Someone told me, “Don’t believe half of what you see and none of what you hear.”

Timeless wisdom whose time has come.

by Dwayne Phillips

The experts devise a better way to do things. The rest of us attempt to follow their expert lead. We flop.

Object-oriented programming flopped.

Microservices and serverless computing flopped.

I guess I could think of a few other great ideas that flopped. How about teaching kids to read via that total method or whatever it was called instead of “sound it out” or whatever that was called?

These and most other great ideas came from experts. Those experts are simply smarter than the rest of us, that is how they came to be called “experts.” Experts have great ideas. They use these great expert ideas to do great expert things that astound the rest of us.

Let’s all do it that way!

We spends lots of resources to do it like the experts. Many years later we are all sitting around looking at each other with wrinkled faces and headaches of frustration.

This wasn’t supposed to turn out this way.

What happened? Well, let’s admit it: we weren’t smart enough to do it the way the experts did it. We didn’t draw our object-oriented diagrams correctly. We didn’t architect our systems correctly. We didn’t tell the kids how to think in four or five dimensions correctly. We just didn’t do it right because we just weren’t smart enough or disciplined enough or we just had too many other things to do instead.

Gosh. It seems this would be easier. It seems the experts would create a better way to do things that the rest of us could follow. Now and then that happens. This Internet thing seems to work. These computer typing programs seem to work.

I suppose we have to learn how to pick and choose which expert method fits us—the not-so-expert.

by Dwayne Phillips

Look at the world. Those countries with seemingly unsolvable problems were under communist rule the longest.

This post is a bit different as I delve into some political science and recent world history. It appears that the countries on earth that accepted communism the longest are the biggest messes.

Russia is a mess. The West missed a great opportunity when the Iron Curtain fell. We could have used a new Marshall Plan to help the Russians build a country where rule of law was the case. Instead, we celebrated and turned our backs. The Russians fell into corruption. Steal and sell everything you could. Drink more vodka. Fall into a deeper hole of alcoholism, drugs, and corruption.

Look at Cuba. Talk to folks who have been there and still have relatives there. It is a corrupt place where people live by stealing and selling.

Look at North Korea. Well, we can’t look at North Korea because, well, we just can’t.

Look at China. Prison camps for those who were born on the wrong side of the tracks out west. We became trading partners with China for various reasons, but we didn’t use the opportunities we had for humane reforms.

And so here we are. Perhaps after the Ukraine-Russia war we will do what we should have done in Eastern Europe two generations ago. Perhaps.

by Dwayne Phillips

Some people are using text-generating software to write a book a day. The world changes daily. Some people change while some don’t.

Here is a story about some folks in India(?) who are putting several books a day every day onto online book sellers. The same bunch of folks are writing glowing reviews of those books under different names and accounts. Wow. Someone figured out how to use the latest tools to make money.

And some, like the Washington Post’s editors, are crying foul. These aren’t real books. These are spam books or something bad like that. Someone needs to stop this before … well before something happens.

Note, the writers of the Washington Post are writers who want to earn a living from writing. The people in the news story are earning a living from writing in a different manner than the Washington Post writers. Hence, the Washington Post writers have a conflict of interest in their stories in that someone else has learned how to do their job far more efficiently at a far lower salary.

Nevertheless, these folks in India (we think that is the location) are creating books. One person working one day creates one book. The books are probably pretty good in that they convey information that is correct. There may be some writing hiccups, but “real” books have those as well.

Times have changed. If lower-paid people can use technology to do this type of thing, why pay other people more money to do the same thing. To write books AND make good money, you need to do something special(er).

And that is the point: we don’t use quill pens to write any longer. We use mechanical metal pens to do that. Times changed with pens and some people didn’t change. Times changed when we moved from the typewriter to the computer word processor. Some people didn’t change. Times have changed with writing. Some people are refusing to change. Some of those people want “the government” to take care of them. We shall see if that happens.

Times haven’t changed. To earn money as a creative person (painter, actor, sculptor, WRITER, etc.) a person need to do something special, something that others cannot do. Let’s use the tools at hand and put that extra something special into the product.

Times haven’t changed.

by Dwayne Phillips

Let’s curb our enthusiasm about these chatbots and large language models multiplying productivity and costing jobs.

I just saw another article about how ChatGPT and the like are being used in yet another field of endeavor with giant gains in productivity. We won’t need half the people we have in the office now. Just cut their jobs and use technology to get ‘er done.

Let’s take a deep breath—something we should do much more often, even in “normal times.”

Yes, these new chattering things are fun. I type a simple question and “poof,” there are five paragraphs I can copy and paste. Viola’. Time for a nap. I’m exhausted.

This is new and exciting—NOT. Well, yes, the user experience of type, read, copy, paste, done is new, but the Internet is not new. Wikipedia is not new. The Chicago Manual of Style online edition is not new. The dictionary and thesaurus online is not new. The online Scrabble allowed words thing (I have no idea what you call that) is not new.

For 20 years I have been able to search, read, copy, paste, done. Hey wait, that’s just like… Instead of search I type. You mean I could have been doing this for the past… Wait, no one told me…

Sorry, yes, some folks have been doing this for 20 years. We have an expression where I work, “Let me Google that for you” or LMGTFY.

Chattering (my shorthand for using these new and fabulous tools) is new and exciting. Everybody has discovered the value of all previous human knowledge. Well, some of us discovered that a while back and have been using it for quite a while now.

The current exuberance will fade a bit. My grandchildren (now teenagers) will consider chattering to be normal and most of today’s teens will forget how to do it by the next school year. Teachers will still be debating how to use things (yes, those in bureaucracies are that far behind) and students will stare at the ceiling and yawn while the “adults” are preoccupied with yesterday’s news.

What’s the point? Chattering will multiply productivity for some. We have folks who want to be more productive and get ahead. Most, however, will settle back into their long-formed habits. Their bosses will also settle back as well. No reason to do too much during the work day. That is the way things have been in this world ruled by the 80/20 rule or whatever we call it.

The exceptional folks are exceptions. Nothing to see here. Move on.

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 several hours to do. The person has automated a task that is simply tedious and error prone.

What is new about this low-code/new-code is that a person doesn’t need a computer science degree or such to learn how to write a little program that automates a tedious task. Other programmers have done all the work and created libraries of software. Write one statement that calls a jillion lines of code and there you have it. Useful stuff.

This low-code/no-code works. The only surprise is that few people are doing it.

I call this “hobby” programming. I used to write real computer programs that were complicated and took thousands of lines of code. That was years ago. My career took me down the path of supervising people who wrote real computer programs. I wrote books about how to do that—lead the programmers and manage the work of engineering.

No longer. I still write computer programs, but they are ten lines long and automate tedious, error-prone tasks. Just hobby programming.

And now we have these AI chatting software things like chat.openai.com, bard.google.com, phind.com, etc. Describe the little low-code/no-code, hobby program and the software “writes” the program for me. Hmmm, this is pretty good. And yes, it actually works.

But, but, but… sorry. It actually works. And what is nice is that I can test the software that the software writes.

But, but, but… sorry. This won’t replace real programmers who write real, complex programs. And there is some skill required to use this software that writes hobby programs. The better I specify what I want, the better the result. Hmmm, I have to talk to the software in precise, concrete, and specific terms. That English composition class I took my first semester of college pays off again.

We have a new productivity tool. Decades of work bear fruition. We stand on the shoulders of those who worked before us. Let’s not waste our time standing on one another’s toes.

by Dwayne Phillips

The old ways of doing AI are still better than some of the new ways in some cases. The answer, of course, is to combine the best of all to do something better.

Feed the following into a chatbot: “The cow jumped” The chatbot will finish with “over the moon.”

That is from the 16th century English nursery rhyme “Hey Diddle Diddle.”

In Large Language Models (LLMs), the machines “learn” from vast amounts of text acquired from the Internet. In one respect, the “memory bank” of the computer is filled with all that stuff and the LLM mimics what is there. This machine learning works pretty well.

Now to reality: cows don’t jump and they certainly don’t jump over the moon. The expression “over the moon” could be replaced by “for joy” as in “The cow jumped for joy.” Still, cows don’t jump (very high).

Now back to the old days of AI which are now called Symbolic AI. There was no scraping the world and mimicry. People wrote “rules” about things. Some of the cow rules were:

• have four legs
• females provide milk for people who can digest lactose
• males have horns
• are mammals
• have hide can be tanned and used for clothing humans
• walk slowly
• etc.

Note that “can jump” is not one of the rules. Hence, symbolic AI techniques would never conclude that the cow jumped over the moon. Hence, symbolic AI was much better at avoiding that mistake.

Symbolic AI, given its better performance in regards to cows and jumping, also had problems not experienced by LLMs and machine learning. The attributes of cows above is pretty short. It can be longer, much longer. How long does it need to be? We never discovered that. We never really wrote a good rule set describing cows.

Alas, symbolic AI works to prevent us stating that cows can jump over the moon. LLM works to do many wonderful things other than cows and jumping over moon. The solution, of course, is to use the good in both and avoid the bad in both. Simple idea, difficult to implement.

Let’s try to do better.