Working Up

by Dwayne Phillips We have a new twist on the old excuse, “My dog ate my homework.” That excuse about the dog and the homework goes back to 1905 (some sources report, but then again, there may be earlier instances, but the dog ate the stories and …). John Steinbeck even said that his dog […]

[Read more →]

by Dwayne Phillips We never run out of excuses. Well, if we ever come close to the end of the list, we can add AI. Microsoft had a mistake. No worry as mistakes can be corrected. The source of the mistake? Well, people are always the source of mistakes, but now we can blame AI. […]

[Read more →]

by Dwayne Phillips AI capabilities are increasing fast. Too fast for some of us. What do we call this? This past week, Anthropic showed people what Mythos could do. WOW! That is amazing. Why only a few months ago… Where were we way back then? And, by the way, how do you pronounce Mythos? There […]

[Read more →]

by Dwayne Phillips Big iron is back. The mainframe is back. And we hate it more now than ever. A long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away… well it was 1979, Baton Rouge, Louisiana and a friend of my father worked for the computer company of America (IBM). He walked me through the […]

[Read more →]

by Dwayne Phillips History repeats itself as the computer can be fully occupied by the efforts of just a few programmers. There was a time in computing history when there were few programmers. The computers weren’t powerful. A couple of programmers could keep a big computer busy all the time. Then the computers became more […]

[Read more →]

by Dwayne Phillips Every now and then we need a new scapegoat, i.e., something that receives the blame for all the faults and mistakes of society. We have one. Ah, the datacenter. It is big, noisy, ugly, and raises my electric and water bills. I hate it. It is the cause of all ills in […]

[Read more →]

by Dwayne Phillips The middle manager has been replaced by the entry-level employee. What? Ah, the bane of 20th century civilization—the middleman. The middleman was the person in the middle who did nothing but pass a product along from the producer to the consumer. The middleman did nothing of value, but took a good 10% […]

[Read more →]

by Dwayne Phillips The one great advantage to working with a chatbot. curt: adjective, using or expressed in few words, in a way perceived as rude. Ah, that’s it. That’s what I like about working with a chattering bot: I can be curt and I won’t hurt anyone’s feelings. I was attempting to create a […]

[Read more →]

by Dwayne Phillips Software that writes software is quite helpful. Well, maybe sort of not. MIT jumps into the fray and asks a few dozen programmers if AI that writes software is helpful to people who write software. First, the folks at MIT are smart enough to not base a survey piece on a survey […]

[Read more →]

by Dwayne Phillips Expert systems live on after 40 years. Well, sort of. I worked in artificial intelligence research in the mid-1980s. We had an AI boom in that decade. Then a winter and a boom or two since then. Back in 1985, we had “expert systems.” (I am old enough to remember this. I […]

[Read more →]