My sons (now seventeen and twenty) face
the precipice of manhood and career,
and I’m bewildered by the manic pace
of change, accelerating year by year.
My father’s father’s early days were like
his fathers’ from a thousand years before—
a horse, a wagon, sky, a singing shrike,
the edges had evolved, but not the core.
But now? The world I walk at middle-age
can’t fathom that of my own childhood,
and future-focused teens are forced to gauge
which non-existent living would be good.
A dad should help his children find their way,
but how, when future paths are nothing like today?
Tag Archives: Information Technology
Doomscroll
My auntie texted me today,
“Is <app redacted> on your phone?
The news declares it should be gone!”
She wondered what I had to say.
I offered her a metaphor:
“Imagine time is gasoline,
the <app> a wood chipping machine,
and every brain a two-by-four.”
“You start to click; it starts to roar.
The fuel needle leftward rolls;
your mental lumber scrolls and scrolls.
You’re left with sawdust on the floor.”
Now <censored>, it will never last.
Like other fads, it too shall pass.
But by observing let’s amass
of tasty truth a fine repast:
Technology is just a tool.
A stone, a wheel, a clock, an app,
they’re pen and ink; they’re not the map.
A fool with tool is still a fool.
Dear reader, if you would be wise,
above all treasure, guard your heart;
for wisdom is an inward art
that best rewards selective eyes.
AI and the Death of Truth
Note: I first became aware of OpenAI’s language model development work in 2019. Even then, it was clear where their work would lead. In the aftermath of ChatGPT’s release in November of last year, it’s quite clear that the disruptions to work and truth that were envisioned in 2019 are simply inevitable. I am sad for my children. I added a follow-up to the initial post a day later. Both are provided below. (DL, June 11, 2023).
Feed it the first few paragraphs of a Guardian story about Brexit, and its output is plausible newspaper prose, replete with “quotes” from Jeremy Corbyn, mentions of the Irish border, and answers from the prime minister’s spokesman. One such, completely artificial, paragraph reads: “Asked to clarify the reports, a spokesman for May said: ‘The PM has made it absolutely clear her intention is to leave the EU as quickly as is possible and that will be under her negotiating mandate as confirmed in the Queen’s speech last week.’” www.theguardian.com/technology/2019/feb/14/elon-musk-backed-ai-writes-convincing-news-fiction
And who will be able to tell the difference?
I spent ten years as an English teacher. Trust me when I tell you most people definitely won’t be able to.
The search for truth is about to die—shortly before the planet does.
Continue readingThe SharePoint 2013 Distributed Cache Service: A Crash Course
Note: I wrote this on company time (I think; the learning was certainly done on company time) for a company-hosted SharePoint blog at my first IT employer. The blog never really went anywhere. The idea was to demonstrate our bona fides by providing top-quality SharePoint content on our own blog. I no longer have the image that was included in the original post, but you get the idea. I put this here as a record of some of the writing and thinking I was doing at the time. This was pretty cutting-edge stuff in March of 2013 (at least for SharePoint nerds). (DL, Sept. 7, 2021)
The Distributed Cache service is a new piece of SP 2013 architecture that has the potential to wreck your deployment. Here’s some helpful information I gathered while installing a six-server production farm for one of our enterprise clients.
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