Intelligence, Human and Artificial

The most recent meeting of the Austin CTO Club featured an extremely vigorous discussion under the theme AI Hype versus Reality. Listening this discussion led me to a new AI strategy. Everyone in the meeting is exploring use cases for AI. And everyone is working hard to keep up w…

Focus on the Value Stream

Most of the AI use I have seen to date focuses on optimizing a step in a value stream: rapid prototyping, shorter implementation lead times, automated code review, writing marketing collateral, organizing a calendar, coordinating handoffs from the tracking system to the source-co…

Back It Off a Quarter Turn

A friend actually educated in the workings of LLMs described some aspects of LLM training. A sequence of train-then-verify loops produces models of varying quality. The trainers look for increasing performance, and eventually see it level off or start to decline with overtraining…

Sorting Networks

Today I learned about sorting networks and bitonic sequences. Despite being aware of djbsort since its initial publication, I never looked at any implementation details. Today I ran across this introduction and this apparently canonical reference. Fun stuff!

A Judgement Amplifier

At a recent Austin CTO Club meeting someone remarked that AI tool use amplifies the quality of the technology development team members. That is, good developers become better, and bad developers become worse. How can this be so? AI Tool Effects If an AI toolkit is worse at progra…