Working Up

by Dwayne Phillips

It isn’t flattering to understand that what I do is quite predictable.

Ah these AI chattering bots—they are amazing. Type a question, they call it a prompt, in plain English and out pops answers, sometimes as long as books, in plain English. This is amazing!

Well, the software looks at a bunch of numbers and such that has been gathered. It predicts the next word that is most likely. An example prompt is, “There is a town in Texas that has the same name as a big city in France. That town name is what?”

The answer is Paris. That’s just the most likely word given all the numbers calculated by reading all the stuff on the Internet. Predictable. Simple.

Wait a minute…writing is predictable. Answering questions is predictable. So much of this amazing stuff is predictable. What I do all day is … predictable. Yikes! If I am so predictable, then software can predict and do my job.

Hmm. Perhaps I should be doing something that is not so predictable. Perhaps I should be producing something that is not so predictable. Perhaps…

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 fill-in-the-blank.

“Three” is a arbitrary small number, so replace as you see fit.

Here are some examples:

1. Find, display the URL, and display a few sentences from three key commentaries regarding the use of the robo ump in baseball.
2. Find, display the URL, and display a few sentences from three key commentaries regarding value gained vs. skill lost in using a chatbot.
3. Find, display the URL, and display a few sentences from three key commentaries regarding the use of the Oxford comma.

I like the results better than using, “What are the arguments for and against fill-in-the-blank.”

Just a musing on a Saturday morning.

by Dwayne Phillips

Perhaps these chattering bots fulfill the role I requested.

Some ten years ago, I wrote about The Round Table of Librarians. Since all the knowledge of the world was on the Internet, we just searched for it with Google et al. and found it. What were we to do, however, if we couldn’t think of the right terms for the great searchers? We would go to a group of experts, talk to them, and they would tell us the correct search terms to find what we wanted.

Now we have the chattering bots. Ask them for advice. Type to them vague notions of things. Viola’. They find stuff.

Have we corrected the situation? Well, I think we have better capabilities in our tools, but no, I don’t think we corrected the situation. I still find great value in a group of people who can provide advice.

There is something good that I cannot quantify in spending time with smart people. Let’s not forget that. Let’s treasure that. This is not a blog post advocating return to the office and stop all telecommuting. Nevertheless, let’s note the value of time well spent.

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.”