Working Up

by Dwayne Phillips AI enabled completing a 12-page report in five minutes. No, that took ten years of effort. Somehow, using a new piece of software became cheating or something bad. A request arrived at work. Click. Boom. Pow. Out goes a 12-page report. Five minutes. Next? Cheating! Consider, however, that the five-minute task was […]

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by Dwayne Phillips Perhaps those big, bad datacenters aren’t so bad. How do you think that works? or how about They work because of datacenters. Datacenters are big. Still think datacenters are bad?

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by Dwayne Phillips We return to the era of the main computer center and waiting for computer time. Way back in the previous millennium, I was leaving graduate school. While in school, I had access to a new 32-bit minicomputer (I think it was made by Perkin-Elmer if anyone else remembers that time). One problem […]

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by Dwayne Phillips All the pieces are here. Let’s have one download, install, and run. This is what I want: one piece of software that reads the text files on my computer (.docx, etc.), answers questions about them, writes output to a file, and I can do all the copy-and-paste I want. pandoc seems to […]

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by Dwayne Phillips Which way is AI going? The big datacenter or on my little laptop computer? We seem to be at some fork in the road regarding artificial intelligence. The big (colossal) datacenters are rising from the farmlands of America. Big, bigger, and even bigger. If the price doesn’t run into the hundreds of […]

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by Dwayne Phillips Vibe coding shows us that coding is not all there is to developing software. No duh! For many years I applied to jobs for software engineers and later what was called “developers.” “How many recent years have you written Java?” was a common question (substitute any other language). I tried to explain […]

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by Dwayne Phillips All this computing power, datacenters, rising prices for hardware, land, water, electric power, etc. for what? To plan a party? This is utter waste. Come on, stop it! Wired recently had an article on the full story of OpenClaw (is that the name they eventually decided to use?). That is the agent […]

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by Dwayne Phillips The world of computing has turned upside down. In 2001, Marc Andreesen noticed and noted, “Software is eating the world.” Here I am to notice and note, “Hardware is the new software.” Everyone wants to buy computer hardware. Prices of computer hardware are shooting upwards as demand far exceeds supply. If you […]

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by Dwayne Phillips These chattering bots merely predict the next N word(s). Software has been doing this for many years—nothing new here. In the 1990s (yes, 30 years ago, I am that old), word processors started guessing what word we were trying to type. Some called that “auto complete.” It was nice. Not perfect, but […]

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by Dwayne Phillips I just had a chattering bot filter through layers upon layers of a spreadsheet and provide the answer. After a moment, I realized I could have written a simple program to do that, but that was true for me, not everyone. I just solved a problem with data presented in a spreadsheet. […]

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