Working Up

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.

by Dwayne Phillips

This is a basic practice. It is unfortunate that many have either forgotten or never knew this practice concerning documents.

I find a document on the disk drive farm or network or whatever it is we call these things today. There are a jillion files out there, but I find the document I want to use.

Well, I think I found the document I want to use. There is no date or version number on the document. There is no author or authoring organization on the document. Hmmm, no one wrote this ever, but it seems to exist.

I wonder if this is the only document with the same title and filename on the bunch of disks I can access. There are all these different disks and all these different folders and folders in folders and so on. Some searches show me that there are several dozen files with the exact same file name scatter hither and yon.

Am I looking at “the right one?” Is there a “right one?” Gosh. This is confusing. Computers were supposed to make this simple(r).

Here is a fundamental practice:

• Have one file with one file name in one place.
• No duplicated copies anywhere else.
• All documents have authors, dates, and version numbers.
• If a document needs changing, the right people meet at the right time in the right place and change the document. The authors, dates, and version numbers change in a controlled manner.
• Anyone who needs the document can find it in the one place it is stored.

Boring? This depends on your point of view. Most people consider this document control stuff to be boring. Then again, most people who need the content of the document right now quickly find and use it, right now. They aren’t happy because they expect things to be this way.

Is this all passe’? Sorry, no it is not. I daily see people wasting hours trying to find the right copy of the right document in the right place at the right time.

We can do better.

by Dwayne Phillips

In which I consider what is the ultimate purchase for the home, family, and home business: the table.

Consider the humble flat horizontal surface. Narrow the consideration to the kitchen table with four chairs. A quick search shows plenty of choices from $100 on up. Let’s settle for $150.

A family eats two to three meals on this table six to seven days a week for 40 or 50 years. A quick napkin estimation shows about 30,000 uses. That’s about half a penny per use. Pretty darn inexpensive for a valuable experience.

Friends drink coffee, wine, or something at the table another three or four times a week. Children do their home work three days a week, nine months a year for twelve (or more) years each. A work-from-home professional sits at the table when all these other uses are not in progress.

Laughter, sorrow, love, angst, staring into another’s eyes, grasping hands in desperation.

All of this over a table.

The per use cost is now less than a tenth of a penny each. Is there a better value anywhere in the home or in a person’s life?

In 1983, my wife and I married. Her parents bought us a table and chairs. It sure seemed expensive to me at the time. Silly me. It was one of the best values in my life and it continues to be so.

by Dwayne Phillips

Aha! I was sort of right. Now companies have teams of folks hunting down stupid in their systems to keep the world safe from stupid.

Way back in 2015, I wrote a blog post about being a stupid hunter. This is not a hunter who is stupid, but a hunter whose job is to seek out and eliminate the stupidity in systems and organizations.

Well, this week I read of OpenAI (fill in the name of any AI-focused company) with its “red team” that hunts the answers its ChatGPT provides. When it finds “toxicity, prejudice and linguistic biases in the model” they blow their horns and bring in the rabid dogs or something terrifying to rid the toxicity, prejudice and linguistic biases from the model. What’s a “model” anyway, and is the model afraid of rabid dogs or something terrifying?

Let’s say it simply: they seek out and eliminate the stupidity in their system.

Aha! I knew it. Well, I can claim I knew it. Then again, their is so much stupid in systems and organizations that stupid hunters will always have jobs called “red team” and some such polite thing. No one, aside from me, wants to wear a shirt that proclaims STUPID HUNTER.