Notices by Adrian Howard (adrianh@mastodon.social)

Having one of those days when I realise how much that 70s Judge Dredd strip about folk on the moon dying coz they didn't pay their oxygen bill has shaped my politics.

@scribe @Thayer The thing that weirds me out about the usage tracking thing is that it's the classic output over outcome mistake.

Who gives a fig for how much stuff is used — what is the actual useful _impact_?

It's worrying how many of my clients are dealing with orgs that don't have an answer to that question.

@scribe It's already on the list of things to look at

They've started cross-selling to Jira in Trello… oh noes!

#Brutalist December

It's somewhat depressing how bad so much form design still. Le Sigh.

@grimalkina A pattern I’ve seen more than once already is experts in Domain A using generative tools and being able to spot and fix errors — and doing it so quickly they kinda don’t understand how error prone it is — and so having a false sense of how “good” things are.

Then using it in Domain B… and not having the expertise to spot the errors…

Hijinks ensue.

Centre aligned body text… please people… just… don't.

Just added "(please assume I don't want to know what ChatGPT et al returns)" to my text snippet library — and realised that I am now having to "prompt engineer" the "Prompt Engineers".

Top tip: If you're selling your product/service to even vaguely technically literate folk then your website _needs_ to work when the ad blockers are switched on.

Just seen somebody talking about AI (really LLMs) "removing bias" and I cannot stop giggling.

I swear there used to be a time when my reaction to new software features wasn't a resigned sigh followed by figuring out how to switch it off.

Once more asking people who are puzzling about a 10% drop of <whatever> in February to consider the length of the months.

@cstross Future levels:
* folk reading a question mark when there wasn’t one there in the first place
* folk read an entirely imaginary sentence rather than the one you wrote

Blinding flash of the obvious: The dude who responds to questions with 'I asked SomeRandomLLM and got <something>' cares more about being the person with the answer, than the answer.

I would not be surprised if "meetings that should have be emails" have less net downside than "emails that should have been meetings".

It's just that the waste of the former is way more obvious than the waste of the latter.

Feeling exhausted so switching up today’s to do list to fun/simple things.

@Iris @RuthMalan I do! I do!

Coz I was there in ’88 doing Computing & AI — and Maggie was one of my Cognitive Philosophy lecturers.

Just one of those stupidly smart people you feel lucky to have spent time with.

Still got her AI and Natural Man on the bookshelves somewhere :-)

#Brutalist September

Am I being overly cynical by noticing this pattern happening a bunch (not all the time, but often).

1) We need to have a career progression for folk to get better at Whatever, rather than becoming a people manager (staff/principle engineer | product | etc.)

2) People progress to staff/principle engineer | product | etc.

3) The staff/principle person continually complaining about more junior folk not doing what they tell them… coz they lack people management skills.