Figure it out Aug 28, 2025
I work with a contractor who was delivering numerical data and asking for feedback from my group.  We use the data in a very precise way, but his data only had three digits after the decimal point.  So naturally we requested more digits.  His response was that the software he used to generate the data was only capable of outputting data with three digits after the decimal point.  This software, by the way, was written by his company.  It's not overly complex software, and it was likely written by a person who sits right next to him at work.  But he was adamant that this ask was simply unachievable. 

Not all problems are solvable, and most of the rest of them are hard.  But with the amount of money we pay this guy and the level of intelligence he brings to the table (now questionable), I would've liked to have said one simple thing:  Figure.  It.  Out.  FIGURE IT OUT.  Find a way to solve this problem.  You're smart.  You have resources at your disposal.  You've done all this other complex work.  Figure it out.  Open your code editor and change the format string of the print statement from %3.3f to %3.6f.  Every single other person working on this program and in this entire industry knows this and knows how to do it.  Do it.  "Not possible" is not an option, especially at this level, and especially with this task.  Figure it out.
On AI Aug 11, 2025
Artificial intelligence is everywhere now, for better or worse.  It's interesting to watch how it polarizes people; you're either an AI evangelist or a luddite.  I tend to try to avoid the latest fad, which is why I completely avoided bitcoin and NFTs.  But after some hesitation, I've found some AI tools to be insanely useful.  It all depends on what you're trying to do and how you want to do it.  To paraphrase something I read somewhere, technology is supposed to make our jobs easier so we have more time for creativity, not make creativity easier so we have more time for our jobs.  The use cases I've heard for AI, aside from writing (and grading) school papers, include writing emails, summarizing documents, and drafting performance plans.  These all seem like mediocre ways to use a powerful technology, but whatever.  What I've found is that an AI tool functions well as an improved search engine.  When I'm working on some hard coding problem, I've always kept a browser tab open to look up questions about syntax, errors, or whatnot.  A search engine would inevitably point me to one of a handful of message boards where someone else had asked the same question months, years, or decades ago.  So my task became:  Filter through search results to find the most relevant (while discarding the irrelevant) to cobble together a solution to my problem.  AI can simply do this part for me.  And it can write code.  It still requires a human to organize that code into something workable, and it requires a human to ask the questions in the first place.  But a big chunk of the tedious middle part can be avoided entirely with AI. 

I think most of the hate for AI comes (rightly) from the force-fed nature of it.  There's AI in search engines, shopping websites, browsers, documents, apps, operating systems, phones, home appliances, a toilet, etc.  Every website on the planet now has an AI-powered "assistant."  It's often more difficult to avoid AI than to just begrudgingly use it.  And that's the problem most people have:  There's no choice in the matter.  Tech companies are shoving this concept down our throats, and it all comes off as very Microsoft Clippy-esque -- that super annoying "assistant" in Microsoft Office programs that would try to guess what you doing (wrongly) and try to offer assistance (poorly), really only serving as a thing that got in the way of what you were actually trying to do.  People mostly want freedom to do things as they wish, to express themselves in whatever nonoptimal, convoluted means they see fit.  Technology that gets in the way of creativity is not only not helpful, it's detrimental. 

But also, people hate AI because it sucks.  If you look carefully (or not that carefully), you see it used everywhere -- to create movies, commercials, viral videos, art, etc.  And that's mostly fine, aside from how bad it is at times.  The problem is that humanity already isn't good at determining what's true and what's not, what's fake and what's real.  And as these tools improve, and as more and more people gain access to them, it's concerning to imagine the world we'll be living in with ubiquitous AI-generated viral media available constantly, instantly, and universally. #technology