Day 350 – The Best Process is the One That You Follow
I hear the phrase, cognitive dissonance used frequently these days. It seems to have become a rhetorical device used to redirect or explain away a preponderance of evidence or of the motivations and feelings of a large group of people. Leon Festinger was the social psychologist who coined this phrase while doing research at Stanford […]
Day 349 – What is a Decision?
There are many ways to define the concept of making a decision. I have been in the computer science world most of my life, so I tend to think of decisions as a process. So, in essence, a decision would refer to the outcome of an algorithmic process where a system evaluates inputs and rules […]
Day 348 – What are You Willing to Cut Out?
It is always best to be single-minded to achieve a goal. Serving two masters, as Jesus said, never works out. You can try to fool yourself into believing you can keep a bunch of plates spinning simultaneously, but that is hardly ever the case. Having a heart and mind with a single purpose is always […]
Day 347 – Life Lesson from the Iron Tiger
One of the most exciting chess battles was the 1966 Chess Championship between Tigran Petrosian and Boris Spassky. Tigran was the World Champion at the time, having won the 1963 championship decisively against the very famous Mikhail Botvinnik. In my chess studies, there was a time period when I went carefully through many of the […]
Day 346 – Achieving Stillness
My entire life, I have been pushing for something. The concept of contentment eluded me. When I was younger, I thought being content was akin to being complacent, which I would certainly not allow. So, I pushed forward, always trying to improve, challenge myself, and get to the next level. As I got older, I […]
Day 345 – Should We Practice Herd Anonymity?
There was some buzz today about the LinkedIn policy to automatically enroll people in volunteering their data for Generative AI Improvement. I will share the link at the bottom of this article so you can turn it off if you want to. My reaction was horror. The evil corporation will reach their prying eyes into […]
Day 344 – Talk It Out
This is not a universally true statement, but conversation usually resolves the issue. I have seen this concept repeated countless times and in my scenarios. My general rule of thumb is this; if I do not know what to do, I am struggling, facing a problem, or having an issue, the best thing I can […]
Day 343 – Humans Hallucinate Too
I was talking to someone today about AI, specifically large language models (LLMs). They commented, “I cannot use that because AI hallucinates too much; I cannot trust it.” I reflected on this thought for a while. I have heard this objection before, but that got me thinking. If AI is hallucinating, then humans are hallucinating […]
Day 342 – There Will Never be An Apple
For years, I had this mythical idea in my head that a breakthrough was something that a person just suddenly had happened. Newton just suddenly thought about gravity when an apple hit him in the head. Edison suddenly realized that filament needed to be in a vacuum to not burn out from debris and other […]
Day 341 – A Followed Process is Best
I have a lifetime of experience creating processes. It seems if my work life has one theme it has been to create a process to accomplish some given objective. I have created so many of them, that I cannot remember them. I have saved my email inboxes since I started having my first email address. […]