Quantum Supremacy in Management: A Google Incident

December 25, 2023

green-dino_thumb_thumb_thumbThis essay is the work of a dumb dinobaby. No smart software required.

I spotted an interesting story about an online advertising company which has figured out how to get great PR in respected journals. But this maneuver is a 100 yard touchdown run for visibility. “Hundreds Gather at Google’s San Francisco Office to Protest $1.2 Billion Contract with Israel” reports:

More than 400 protesters gathered at Google’s San Francisco office on Thursday to demand the tech company cut ties with Israel’s government.

image

Some managers and techno wizards envy companies which have the knack for attracting crowds and getting free publicity. Thanks, MSFT Copilot. Close enough for horseshoes

The demonstration, according to the article, was a response to Google and its new BFF’s project for Israel. The SFGate article contains some interesting photographs. One is a pretend dead person wrapped in a shroud with the word “Genocide” in bright, cheerful Google log colors. I wanted to reproduce it, but I am not interested in having copyright trolls descend on me like a convocation of legal eagles. The “Project Nimbus” — nimbus is a type of cloud which I learned about in the fifth- or sixth-grade — “provides the country with local data centers and cloud computing services.”

The article contains words which cause OpenAI’s art generators to become uncooperative. That banned word is “genocide.” The news story adds some color to the fact of the protest on December 14, 2023:

Multiple speakers mentioned an article from The Intercept, which reported that Nimbus delivered Israel the technology for “facial detection, automated image categorization, object tracking, and even sentiment analysis.” Others referred to an NPR investigation reporting that Israel says it is using artificial intelligence to identify targets in Gaza, though the news outlet did not link the practice to Google’s technology.

Ah, ha. Cloud services plus useful technologies. (I wonder if the facial recognition system allegedly becoming available to the UK government is included in the deal?) The story added a bit of spice too:

For most of Thursday’s protest, two dozen people lay wrapped in sheets — reading “Genocide” in Google’s signature rainbow lettering — in a “die-in” performance. At the end, they stood to raise up white kites, as a speaker read Refaat Alareer’sIf I must die,” written just over a month before the Palestinian poet was killed by an Israeli airstrike.

The article included a statement from a spokesperson, possible from Google. This individual said:

“We have been very clear that the Nimbus contract is for workloads running on our commercial platform by Israeli government ministries such as finance, healthcare, transportation, and education,” she said. “Our work is not directed at highly sensitive or classified military workloads relevant to weapons or intelligence services.”

Does this sound a bit like an annoyed fifth- or sixth-grade teacher interrupted by a student who said out loud: “Clouds are hot air.” While not technically accurate, the student was sent to the principal’s office. What will happen in this situation?

Some organizations know how to capture users’ attention. Will the company be able to monetize it via a YouTube Short or a more lengthy video. Google is quite skilled at making videos which purport to show reality as Google wants it to be. The “real” reality maybe be different. Revenue is important, particularly as regulatory scrutiny remains popular in the EU and the US.

Stephen E Arnold, December 25, 2023

A Grade School Food Fight Could Escalate: Apples Could Become Apple Sauce

December 25, 2023

green-dino_thumb_thumb_thumbThis essay is the work of a dumb dinobaby. No smart software required.

A squabble is blowing up into a court fight. “Beeper vs Apple Battle Intensifies: Lawmakers Demand DOJ Investigation” reports:

US senators have urged the DOJ to probe Apple’s alleged anti-competitive conduct against Beeper.

Apple killed a messaging service in the name of protecting apple pie, mom, love, truth, justice, and the American way. Ooops, sorry. That’s something from the Superman comix.

image

“You squashed my apple. You ruined my lunch. You ruined my life. My mommy will call your mommy, and you will be in trouble,” says the older, more mature child. The principal appears and points out that screeching is not comely. Thanks, MSFT Copilot. Close enough for horseshoes.

The article said:

The letter to the DOJ is signed by Minnesota Senator Amy Klobuchar, Utah Senator Mike Lee, Congressman Jerry Nadler, and Congressman Ken Buck. They have urged the law enforcement body to investigate “whether Apple’s potentially anti-competitive conduct against Beeper violates US antitrust laws.” Apple has been constantly trying to block Beeper Mini and Beeper Cloud from accessing iMessage. The two Beeper messaging apps allow Android users to interact with iPhone users through iMessage — an interoperability Apple has been opposed to for a long time now.

As if law enforcement did not have enough to think about. Now an alleged monopolist is engaged in a grade school cafeteria spat with a younger, much smaller entity. By golly, that big outfit is threatened by the jejune, immature, and smaller service.

How will this play out?

  1. A payday for Beeper when Apple makes the owners of Beeper an offer that would be tough to refuse. Big piles of money can alter one’s desire to fritter away one’s time in court
  2. The dust up spirals upwards. What if the attitude toward Apple’s approach to its competitors becomes a crusade to encourage innovation in a tough environment for small companies? Containment may be difficult.
  3. The jury decision against Google may kindle more enthusiasm for another probe of Apple and its posture in some tricky political situations; for example, the iPhone in China, the non-repairability issues, and Apple’s mesh of inter-connected services which may be seen as digital barriers to user choice.

In 2024, Apple may find that some government agencies are interested in the fruit growing on the company’s many trees.

Stephen E Arnold, December 25, 2023

An Important, Easily Pooh-Poohed Insight

December 24, 2023

green-dino_thumb_thumb_thumbThis essay is the work of a dumb dinobaby. No smart software required.

Dinobaby here. I am on the regular highway, not the information highway. Nevertheless l want to highlight what I call an “easily poohpoohed factoid. The source of the item this morning is an interview titled “Google Cloud Exec: Enterprise AI Is Game-Changing, But Companies Need to Prepare Their Data.”

I am going to skip the PR baloney, the truisms about Google fumbling the AI ball, and rah rah about AI changing everything. Let me go straight to factoid which snagged my attention:

… at the other side of these projects, what we’re seeing is that organizations did not have their data house in order. For one, they had not appropriately connected all the disparate data sources that make up the most effective outputs in a model. Two, so many organizations had not cleansed their data, making certain that their data is as appropriate and high value as possible. And so we’ve heard this forever — garbage in, garbage out. You can have this great AI project that has all the tenets of success and everybody’s really excited. Then, it turns out that the data pipeline isn’t great and that the data isn’t streamlined — all of a sudden your predictions are not as accurate as they could or should have been.

Why are points about data significant?

First, investors, senior executives, developers, and the person standing on line with you at Starbucks dismisses data normalization as a solved problem. Sorry, getting the data boat to float is a work in progress. Few want to come to grips with the issue.

Second, fixing up data is expensive. Did you ever wonder why the Stanford president made up data, forcing his resignation? The answer is that the “cost of fixing up data is too high.” If the president of Stanford can’t do it, is the run-fo-the-mill fast talking AI guru different? Answer: Nope.

Third, knowledge of exception folders and non-conforming data is confined to a small number of people. Most will explain what is needed to make a content intake system work. However, many give up because the cloud of unknowing is unlikely to disperse.

The bottom line is that many data sets are not what senior executives, marketers, or those who use the data believe they are. The Google comment — despite Google’s sketchy track record in plain honest talk — is mostly correct.

So what?

  1. Outputs are often less useful than many anticipated. But if the user is uninformed or the downstream system uses whatever is pushed to it, no big deal.
  2. The thresholds and tweaks needed to make something semi useful are not shared, discussed, or explained. Keep the mushrooms in the dark and feed them manure. What do you get? Mushrooms.
  3. The graphic outputs are eye candy and distracting. Look here, not over there. Sizzle sells and selling is important.

Net net: Data are a problem. Data have been due to time and cost issues. Data will remain a problem because one can sidestep a problem few recognize and those who do recognize the pit find a short cut. What’s this mean for AI? Those smart systems will be super. What’s in your AI stocking this year?

Stephen E Arnold, December 24, 2023

Bugged? Hey, No One Can Get Our Data

December 22, 2023

green-dino_thumb_thumb_thumbThis essay is the work of a dumb dinobaby. No smart software required.

I read “The Obscure Google Deal That Defines America’s Broken Privacy Protections.” In the cartoon below, two young people are confident that their lunch will be undisturbed. No “bugs” will chow down on their hummus, sprout sandwiches, or their information. What happens, however, is that the young picnic fans cannot perceive what is out of sight. Are these “bugs” listening? Yep. They are. 24×7.

image

What the young fail to perceive is that “bugs” are everywhere. These digital creatures are listening, watching, harvesting, and consuming every scrap of information. The image of the picnic evokes an experience unfolding in real time. Thanks, MSFT Copilot. My notion of “bugs” is obviously different from yours. Good enough and I am tired of finding words you can convert to useful images.

The essay explains:

While Meta, Google, and a handful of other companies subject to consent decrees are bound by at least some rules, the majority of tech companies remain unfettered by any substantial federal rules to protect the data of all their users, including some serving more than a billion people globally, such as TikTok and Apple.

The situation is simple: Major centers of techno gravity remain unregulated. Law makers, regulators, and “users” either did not understand or just believed what lobbyists told them. The senior executives of certain big firms smiled, said “Senator, thank you for that question,” and continued to build out their “bug” network. Do governments want to lose their pride of place with these firms? Nope. Why? Just reference bad actors who commit heinous acts and invoke “protect our children.” When these refrains from the techno feudal playbook sound, calls to take meaningful action become little more than a faint background hum.

But the article continues:

…there is diminishing transparency about how Google’s consent decree operates.

I think I understand. Google-type companies pretend to protect “privacy.” Who really knows? Just ask a Google professional. The answer in my experience is, “Hey, dude, I have zero idea.”

How does Wired, the voice of the techno age, conclude its write up? Here you go:

The FTC agrees that a federal privacy law is long overdue, even as it tries to make consent decrees more powerful. Samuel Levine, director of the FTC’s Bureau of Consumer Protection, says that successive privacy settlements over the years have become more limiting and more specific to account for the growing, near-constant surveillance of Americans by the technology around them. And the FTC is making every effort to enforce the settlements to the letter…

I love the “every effort.” The reality is that the handling of online data collection presages the trajectory for smart software. We live with bugs. Now those bugs can “think”, adapt, and guide. And what’s the direction in which we are now being herded? Grim, isn’t it?

Stephen E Arnold, December 23, 2023

A High Profile Religious Leader: AI? Yeah, Well, Maybe Not So Fast, Folks

December 22, 2023

green-dino_thumb_thumb_thumbThis essay is the work of a dumb dinobaby. No smart software required.

The trusted news outfit Thomson Reuters put out a story about the thoughts of the Pope, the leader of millions of Catholics. Presumably many of these people use ChatGPT-type systems to create content. (I wonder if Leonardo would have used an OpenAI system to crank out some art work. He was an innovator. My hunch is that he would have given MidJourney-type smart software a whirl.)

image

A group of religious individuals thinking about artificial intelligence. Thanks, MidJourney, a good enough engraving.

Pope Francis Calls for Binding Global Treaty to Regulate AI” reports that Pope Francis wants someone to create a legally binding international treaty. The idea is that AI numerical recipes would be prevented from replacing humans with good old human values. The idea is that AI would output answers, and humans would use those answers to find pizza joints, develop smart weapons, and eliminate carbon by eliminating carbon generating entities (maybe humans?).

The trusted news outfit’s report included this quote from the Pope:

I urge the global community of nations to work together in order to adopt a binding international treaty that regulates the development and use of artificial intelligence in its many forms…

The Pope mentioned a need to avoid a technological dictatorship. He added:

Research on emerging technologies in the area of so-called Lethal Autonomous Weapon Systems, including the weaponization of artificial intelligence, is a cause for grave ethical concern. Autonomous weapon systems can never be morally responsible subjects…

Several observations are warranted:

  1. Is this a UN job or is some other entity responsible to obtain consensus and effective enforcement?
  2. Who develops the criteria for “good” AI, “neutral” AI, and “bad” AI?
  3. What are the penalties for implementing “bad” AI?

For me the Pope’s statement is important. It may be difficult to implement without a global dictatorship or a sudden change in how informed people debate and respond to difficult issues. From my point of view, the Pope should worry. When I look at the images of the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, the riders remind of four high profile leaders in AI. That’s my imagination reading into the depictions of conquest, war, famine, and death.

Stephen E Arnold, December 22, 2023

Cyber Security Crumbles When Staff Under Stress

December 22, 2023

green-dino_thumb_thumb_thumbThis essay is the work of a dumb dinobaby. No smart software required.

How many times does society need to say that happy employees mean a better, more profitable company? The world is apparently not getting the memo, because employees, especially IT workers, are overworked, stressed, exhausted, and burnt out like blackened match. While zombie employees are bad for productivity, they’re even worse for cyber security. BetaNews reports on an Adarma, a detection and response specialist company, survey, “Stressed Staff Put Enterprises At Risk Of Cyberattack.”

The survey responders believe they’re at a greater risk of cyberattack due to the poor condition of their employees. Five hundred cybersecurity professionals from UK companies with over 2000 employees were studied and 51% believed their IT security are dead inside. This puts them at risk of digital danger. Over 40% of the cybersecurity leaders felt that their skills were limited to understand threats. An additional 43% had little or zero expertise to respond or detect threats to their enterprises.

IT people really love computers and technology but when they’re working in an office environment and dealing with people, stress happens:

“‘Cybersecurity professionals are typically highly passionate people, who feel a strong personal sense of duty to protect their organization and they’ll often go above and beyond in their roles. But, without the right support and access to resources in place, it’s easy to see how they can quickly become victims of their own passion. The pressure is high and security teams are often understaffed, so it is understandable that many cybersecurity professionals are reporting frustration, burnout, and unsustainable stress. As a result, the potential for mistakes being made that will negatively impact an organization increases. Business leaders should identify opportunities to ease these gaps, so that their teams can focus on the main task at hand, protecting the organization,’ says John Maynard, Adarma’s CEO.”

The survey demonstrates why it’s important to diversify the cybersecurity talent pool? Wait, is this in regard to ethnicity and biological sex? Is Adarma advocating for a DEI quota in cybersecurity or is the organization advocating for a diverse talent pool with varied experience to offer differ perspectives?

While it is important to have different education backgrounds and experience, hiring someone simply based on DEI quotas is stupid. It’s failing in the US and does more harm than good.

Whitney Grace, December 22, 2023

Scientific American Spills the Beans on Innovation

December 21, 2023

green-dino_thumb_thumb_thumbThis essay is the work of a dumb dinobaby. No smart software required.

It happened! A big, mostly respected publication called Scientific American explains where the Google type outfits got their best ideas. Note: The write up “Tech Billionaires Need to Stop Trying to Make the Science Fiction They Grew Up on Real” does not talk about theft of intellectual property, doing shameless me-too products, or acquiring promising start ups to make eunuchs of potential competitors.

Instead the Scientific American story asserts:

Today’s Silicon Valley billionaires grew up reading classic American science fiction. Now they’re trying to make it come true, embodying a dangerous political outlook.

image

I can make these science fiction worlds a reality. I am going to see Star Wars for the seventh time. I will invent the future, says the enthusiastic wizardette in 1985. Thanks, MSFT Copilot. Know anyone at Microsoft like this young person?

The article says:

These men [the Brin-Page variants] collectively have more than half a trillion dollars to spend on their quest to realize inventions culled from the science fiction and fantasy stories that they read in their teens. But this is tremendously bad news because the past century’s science fiction and fantasy works widely come loaded with dangerous assumptions.

The essayist (a science fiction writer) explains:

We are not trying to accurately predict possible futures but to earn a living: any foresight is strictly coincidental. We recycle the existing material—and the result is influenced heavily by the biases of earlier writers and readers. The genre operates a lot like a large language model that is trained using a body of text heavily contaminated by previous LLMs; it tends to emit material like that of its predecessors. Most SF is small-c conservative insofar as it reflects the history of the field rather than trying to break ground or question received wisdom.

So what? The writer answers:

It’s a worryingly accurate summary of the situation in Silicon Valley right now: the billionaires behind the steering wheel have mistaken cautionary tales and entertainments for a road map, and we’re trapped in the passenger seat. Let’s hope there isn’t a cliff in front of us.

Is there a way to look down the runway? Sure, read more science fiction. Invent the future and tell oneself, “I am an innovator.” That may be true but of what? Right now it appears that reality is a less than enticing place. The main point is that today may be built on a fairly flimsy foundation. Hint: Don’t ask a person to make change when you pay in cash.

Stephen E Arnold, December 21, 2023

Palantir to Solve Banking IT Problems: Worth Monitoring

December 21, 2023

green-dino_thumb_thumb_thumbThis essay is the work of a dumb dinobaby. No smart software required.

Palantir Technologies recast itself as an artificial intelligence company. The firm persevered in England and positioned itself as the one best choice to wrestle the UK National Health Service’s IT systems into submission. Now, the company founded 20 years ago is going to demonstrate its business chops in a financial institution.

image

A young IT wizard explains to a group of senior executives, “Our team can deal with mainframe software and migrate the operations of this organization to a modern, scalable, more economical, and easier-to-use system. I am wearing a special seeing stone, so trust me.” Thanks, MSFT Copilot. It took five tries to get a good enough cartoon.

Before referencing the big, new job Palantir has “won,” I want to mention an interesting 2016 write up called “Interviewing My Mother, a Mainframe COBOL Programmer” by Tom Jordan. I want to point out that I am not suggesting that financial institutions have not solved their IT problems. I simply don’t know. But my poking around the Charlie Javice matter, my hunch is that banks IT systems have not changed significantly in the last seven years. Had the JPMC infrastructure been humming along with real-time data checks and smart software to determine if data were spoofed, those $175 million dollars would not have flown the upscale coop at JP Morgan Chase. For some Charlie Javice detail, navigate to this CNBC news item.

Here are several points about financial institutions IT infrastructure from the 2016 mom chat:

  1. Many banks rely on COBOL programs
  2. Those who wrote the COBOL programs may be deceased or retired
  3. Newbies may not know how undocumented legacy COBOL programs interact with other undocumented programs
  4. COBOL is not the go-to language for most programmers
  5. The databases for some financial institutions are not widely understood; for example, DL/1 / IMS, so some programmers have to learn something new about something old
  6. Moving data around can be tricky and the documentation about what an upstream system does and how it interacts with a downstream system may be fuzzy or unknown.

Anyone who has experience fiddling with legacy financial systems knows that changes require an abundance of caution. An error can wreck financial havoc. For more “color” about legacy systems used in banks, consult Mr. Jordan’s mom interview.

I thought about Mr. Jordan’s essay when I read “Palantir and UniCredit Renew Digital Transformation Partnership.” Palantir has been transforming UniCredit for five years, but obviously more work is needed. From my point of view, Palantir is a consulting company which does integration. Thus, the speed of the transformation is important. Time is money. The write up states:

The partnership will see UniCredit deploy the Palantir Foundry operating system to accelerate the bank’s digital transformation and help increase revenue and mitigate risks.

I like the idea of a financial services institution increasing its revenue and reducing its risk.

The report about the “partnership” adds:

Palantir and UniCredit first partnered in 2018 as the bank sought technology that could streamline sales spanning jurisdictions, better operationalize machine learning and artificial intelligence, enforce policy compliance, and enhance decision making on the front lines. The bank chose Palantir Foundry as the operating system for the enterprise, leveraging a single, open and integrated platform across entities and business lines and enabling synergies across the Group.

Yep, AI is part of the deal. Compliance management is part of the agreement. Plus, Palantir will handle cross jurisdictional sales. Also, bank managers will make better decisions. (One hopes the JPMC decision about the fake data, revenues, and accounts will not become an issue for UniCredit.)

Palantir is optimistic about the partnership renewal and five years of billing for what may be quite difficult work to do without errors and within the available time and resource window. A Palantir executive said, according to the article:

Palantir has long been a proud partner to some of the world’s top financial institutions. We’re honored that UniCredit has placed its confidence in Palantir once again and look forward to furthering the bank’s digital transformation.

Will Palantir be able to handle super-sized jobs like the NHS work and the UniCredit project? Personally I will be watching for news about both of these contract wins. For a 20 year old company with its roots in the intelligence community, success in health care and financial services will mark one of the few times, intelware has made the leap to mainstream commercial problem solving.

The question is, “Why have the other companies failed in financial services modernization?” I have a lecture about that. Curious to know more. Write benkent2020 at yahoo dot com, and one of my team will respond to you.

Stephen E Arnold, December 18, 2023

Vendor Lock In: Good for Geese, Bad for Other Birds

December 21, 2023

green-dino_thumb_thumb_thumbThis essay is the work of a dumb dinobaby. No smart software required.

TechCrunch examines the details behind the recent OpenAI CEO exodus and why vendors are projecting a clear and present danger to tech startups: “OpenAI Mess Exposes The Dangers Of Vendor Lock-In For Start-Ups.” When startups fundraise for seed capital, they attract investors that can influence the company’s future.

OpenAI’s leaders, including ex-CEO Sam Altman and cofounder Greg Brockman, accepted investments from Microsoft. This forced OpenAI into a vendor lock-in situation, where they relied on Microsoft as their business model and vendor of OpenAI products. While there are many large language model products on the market, ChatGPT 3.5 and 4 were touted as the best product on the market. It’s in no small part to Microsoft’s investment and association with the respected and powerful tech company.

As Sam Altman and his OpenAI friends head to Microsoft, it points to the importance of diversifying a company’s vendor portfolio. While ChatGPT was the most popular solution, many tech experts believe that it’s better to research all options instead of relying on one service:

“The companies that chose a flexible approach over depending on a single AI model vendor must be feeling pretty good today. If there is any object lesson to be learned from all this, even as the drama continues to play out in real time, it’s that it’s never, ever a good idea to go with a single vendor.

Founders who put all of their eggs in the OpenAI basket now find themselves suddenly in a very uncomfortable situation, as the uncertainty around OpenAI continues to swirl.”

This is what happens when you rely on one vendor to supply all technology and related services. It’s always best to research and have multiple backup options in case one doesn’t work out.

Whitney Grace, December 21, 2023

Google AI and Ads: Beavers Do What Beavers Do

December 20, 2023

green-dino_thumb_thumb_thumbThis essay is the work of a dumb dinobaby. No smart software required.

Consider this. Take a couple of beavers. Put them in the Cloud Room near the top of the Chrysler Building in Manhattan. Shut the door. Come back in a day. What have the beavers done? The beavers start making a dam. Beavers do what beavers do. That’s a comedian’s way of explaining that some activities are hard wired into an organization. Therefore, beavers do what beavers do.

I read the paywalled article “Google Plans Ad Sales Restructuring as Automation Booms” and the other versions of the story on the shoulder of the Information Superhighway; for example, the trust outfit’s recycling of the Information’s story. The giant quantum supremacy, protein folding, and all-round advertising company is displaying beaver-like behavior. Smart software will be used to sell advertising.

That ad DNA? Nope, the beavers do what beavers do. Here’s a snip from the write up:

The planned reorganization comes as Google is relying more on machine-learning techniques to help customers buy more ads on its search engine, YouTube and other services…

Translating: Google wants fewer people to present information to potential and actual advertisers. The idea is to reduce costs and sell more advertising. I find it interesting that the quantum supremacy hoo-hah boils down to … selling ads and eliminating unreliable, expensive, vacation-taking, and latte consuming humans.

image

Two real beavers are surprised to learn that a certain large and dangerous creature also has DNA. Notice that neither of the beavers asks the large reptile to join them for lunch. The large reptile may, in fact, view the beavers as something else; for instance, lunch. Thanks, MSFT Copilot. Good enough.

Are there other ad-related changes afoot at the Google? According to “Google Confirms It is Testing Ad Copy Variation in Live Ads” points out:

Google quietly started placing headlines in ad copy description text without informing advertisers

No big deal. Just another “test”, I assume. Search Engine Land (a publication founded, nurtured, and shaped into the search engine optimization information machine by Dan Sullivan, now a Googler) adds:

Changing the rules without informing advertisers can make it harder for them to do their jobs and know what needs to be prioritized. The impact is even more significant for advertisers with smaller budgets, as assessing the changes, especially with responsive search ads, becomes challenging, adding to their workload.

Google wants to reduce its workload. In pursuing that noble objective, if Search Engine Land is correct, may increase the workload of the advertisers. But never fear, the change is trivial, “a small test.”

What was that about beavers? Oh, right. Certain behaviors are hard wired into the DNA of a corporate entity, which under US law is a “person” someone once told me.

Let me share with you several observations based on my decades-long monitoring of the Google.

  1. Google does what Google wants and then turns over the explanation to individuals who say what is necessary to deflect actual intent, convert actions into fuzzy Google speech, and keep customer and user pushback to a minimum. (Note: The tactic does not work with 100 percent reliability as the recent loss to US state attorneys general illustrates.)
  2. Smart software is changing rapidly. What appears to be one application may (could) morph into more comprehensive functionality. Predicting the future of AI and Google’s actions is difficult. Google will play the odds which means what the “entity” does will favor its objective and goals.
  3. The quaint notion of a “small test” is the core of optimization for some methods. Who doesn’t love “quaint” as a method for de-emphasizing the significance of certain actions. The “small test” is often little more than one component of a larger construct. Dismissing the small is to ignore the larger component’s functionality; for example, data control and highly probable financial results.

Let’s flash back to the beavers in the Cloud Room. Imagine the surprise of someone who opens the door and sees gnawed off portions of chairs, towels, a chunk of unidentifiable gook piled between two tables.

Those beavers and their beavering can create an unexpected mess. The beavers, however, are proud of their work because they qualify under an incentive plan for a bonus. Beavers do what beavers do.

Stephen E Arnold, December 20, 2023

« Previous PageNext Page »

  • Archives

  • Recent Posts

  • Meta