Working Up

by Dwayne Phillips We seem to think that everything will be on the screen and we don’t need to use pieces of paper. Years ago, we didn’t have the computers we have today. How many years ago? Twenty? Ten? Two? Years ago, some of us would take great pains to put lots of information on […]

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by Dwayne Phillips To be flexible enough to do new things, I often need a foundation of fundamentals in place first. If I am standing on shifting sand, I have to be flexible to adjust my stance and upper body so I don’t fall. Flexibility is required just to stay in place. If I am […]

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by Dwayne Phillips Meta understanding is understanding about understanding. This is rarely practiced. That lack of practice is perilous. I once worked with a man who had a high school diploma and nothing else as far as formal education. Still, this person rose in the ranks of government service to the level of Senior Executive […]

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by Dwayne Phillips Sorry, we (you and me) don’t “know” as often as we like to think. When I ask a person a question and their eyes look up, that means… Hah! Silly notion. I know what this means. I know what that means. I know what the other person is doing and thinking and […]

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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 […]

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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 […]

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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 […]

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by Dwayne Phillips In which I consider one of the more quotable aspects of knowledge. My dad used to tell me that knowledge was the one thing no one could take away from you. A search of the world’s knowledge, a.k.a., Google it for yourself, shows that many famous people are the origin of this […]

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by Dwayne Phillips Most job interviews center on one question, “What do you know?” Here’s a suggestion for a new central question, “Can you learn?” I don’t like job interviews. The folks interviewing me are usually quite pleasant. They want to know what I know. The central question is, “What do you know?” That question […]

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by Dwayne Phillips We know the answers. We have the information. Can we access it? More importantly, can you access it? We have the data silo. Some call it the data stovepipe. Some call it the sandbox. Others call it job (in)security. Enough of the metaphors and cliches. We have the information. I can find […]

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