How does coding change when coding is cheap, but getting it wrong isn’t.
Category: Tech
I didn’t build it, but I am using it.
What I Learned by Developing a Top Alexa Skill.
Top 1% of Skills There are over 160,000 Alexa skills available worldwide. Amazon does not publish rankings or engagement scores, but reviews are visible on the site. Voicebot estimates that less than 1% of skills receive more than 100 ratings. My Skill Tarot Reader is a game / educational tool. Users can have their Alexa explain specific tarot…
Apple Can Save AI
Manifesto for AI Privacy in a Surveillance Economy Long ago, tech companies and users lived in harmony. Everything changed when Advertising became the main business model. Tech companies mastered the power of algorithms and AI to exploit their users. They sold them to advertisers. They mined and exploited their behaviors. They created intentionally addictive products….
Generative AI as APIs
Let the computers talk amongst themselves Pixar’s “Up” gave us Doug, who answered the age-old question of what dogs would say to us if they could talk. It turns out, dogs have nothing to say that we already didn’t know. In 2023, Large Language Models (LLM), such as ChatGPT, gave computers the ability to mimic…
No One Wants To Talk To Your Chatbot
Dearly beloved, we are gathered here today to talk about this thing called chat. Electric word, “chatbot”. It means automation of human interactions, and that’s a mighty cost-effective thing. But I am here to tell you, no one wants to talk to your chatbot. So before you call up your programmers, and ask them about ChatGPT….
Comparing Different LLM Models For Data Extraction
A lot of human and computer processing time is spent getting data from one format to another. Many processes defy automation because they run on a long tail of unstructured data, human text, and documents designed for printing. The explosion of AI and large language models (LLMs) opens the door to fully automated data extraction…
Apple Vision Pro Experience
I have seen the future. Spatial computing is almost here. It felt like when I tried my first e-paper reader in 2007. You could see the potential, but you couldn’t miss the warts. The massive difference is that my first e-paper reader was a wild bet from a small company, and this is being backed…
Apple Vision Pro Questions
From desktop, to clamshell laptop, to tablet/phone handheld; Apple is betting they can change, or at least, extend the form factor of personal computing again. Questions I have: How many monitors? Vision Pro has the ability to act as a 4K monitor for an Apple computer. It seems reasonable that it will use AirPlay2, which…
You’re Interviewing Wrong: Telling the Talented from the Talkers
Originally posted to LinkedIn on March 25, 2015 Slim Pickings A recent Forbes posting blew up the age old question, “Why don’t more people work as programmers?” (http://www.forbes.com/sites/quora/2014/10/31/why-dont-more-people-work-as-programmers/) Forbes claims that we have plenty of programmers, just a shortage of qualified ones. Most hiring managers I know would agree. We see tons of good resumes,…
Big Data Is Not Enough
Originally posted to LinkedIn on Aug 25, 2014 You Don’t Want to Need Big Data Janitors When Big Data hit the scene, technologist told us to throw away our databases, our spreadsheets, and our models. This was a brave new world where simply having tons of data would answer everything. A 2008, Wired article prognosticated “The End…
Jira: Epics, Sub-Epics, and Story Points
I love Jira, probably more than I should, but the difficulty in tracking progress and breaking down work to mirror my teams kills me. The new Greenhopper 6.2 and the “edit in place” fields made a big difference, but I still needed a couple of things: A way to groups a bunch of Epics together…
Software Estimation that Works, Part 1: Ranges. Confidence and Risk
Estimates Cannot Be Precise “How long will that take?” No other question stops a tech team dead in it’s tracks. Without exaggeration, it is like asking a new parent, “So how much do you think it will cost to send you kid to college?” If you are that parent and paid your own way, or…