Posts

Showing posts from 2026

AI-lishah

Image
I've been writing some form of my blog for more than 25 years now - I think I started before it was even called 'blogging.' I'm that old. In 2026, when you have that much writing readily available on the internet, there's really only one thing left to do: Feed it to your favorite LLM, ask it to deeply analyze your writing, build memories for storage, and instruct that, hence forth, it should respond in your own voice. Why... why would I upload my thoughts to the machine overlords? I had a theory: A lot of my posts tend to be exploratory or pursuasive ideas, and (as observed by GPT) "favor metaphors, are often a bit playful, and grounded in shared experience rather than top-down instruction; warmth over authoritative;" and I think I write this way because it's also how I best receive and process information. I like a story, real-world examples, a healthy dose of self-deprecating humor and flexibility over rigidity. If GPT could explain things to me the...

Pitting AI Against AI by Putting AI in AI

Image
5 years ago, I wanted to help the engineers on my team stretch their coding skills by presenting them with an entirely new set of challenges than the typical tedium that can come with building business applications day in and day out. Having built so many games over my own career, one unique element I've always enjoyed is building out the game's AI. After building the core engine, collision detection, and all that - building the AI was always a fun, and very different, challenge. I'd have to think it through: if I was a player, playing this character - what would my own in-game approach be? To be fair, what elements could my AI player see and interact with, and what would they not see, how could I scale my strategy to different difficulty levels. Expressing your strategy in code requires a different line of thinking. It may not directly translate to writing better business or consumer applications, but it stretches your computational thinking and problem solving. Plus it...

W.I.L.A

Image
Can I be so bold as to create my own business acronym? What an apropos way to start this, because the acronym I want to create applies to that very question. Let me re-start by, somewhat apologetically, confessing that I'm one of those distracting types who gets an idea, feels really passionate about it, thinks it will change the world and will offer it up for consideration. Over the years, I've learned to balance out the negative qualities that come with it: I try to focus on nuance, rather than chase novelty; I started keeping more ideas to myself and doing more to vet my own solutions before offering them. While I'm a work-in-progress, I will admit I do love sitting in a meeting where there all problems and no solutions. The gears that start spinning at full speed in my brain can cause such a strong buzzing that people will look at their phones, thinking they're getting a call. One danger I learned long ago about getting so passionate about a new idea is that it can ...

Task Failed Successfully

Image
It's always interesting to pit Gemini vs GPT using the same prompt and source data. There's never a clear winner - and it really points to how important the precision and quality of the prompt is.  Google's Gemini definitly wins on this one. It's really strong, but not great (zooming in, you can see the edges and there was overall quality loss) - however the speed of the update was impressve (<20 seconds!).

Micboard

Image
Will input change with AI? Speech detection with AI is remarkable and, in particular, the whisper-mode lets people speak comfortably in public. Folks are using it for everything from writing emails, creating presentations, and even writing code. But does that mean the death of my beloved keyboard? I like being as hands-free as the next driver (well, maybe not all drivers...) but right now it seems voice is meant to fill the gap when I can't use a keyboard, it's not the default.  There's the obvious social issue of talking outloud to a device. Whisper-mode and earbuds solves the privacy issue, but even then I've only found voice-input to be useful when I'm being conversational (researching, brainstorming, learning) or directional (send a short msg, asking for music to be played, requesting directions). It's a different story when I'm writing, editing, iterating, refining. It's hard to edit on the fly with spoken instructions. While reading is linear, writ...

Popular

Work Experience vs Professional Experience

Let's Clear Up The Ambiguity!

FAQs for a Software Engineering Hiring Manager

7 Steps to Writing an Amazing Resume

7 Steps to Building your Portfolio MVP