Early publicity produces a number of success stories — often accompanied by scores of failures. Some companies take action; many do not.

In both cases, the guys work in manufacturing. One designs hardware. Other runs a welding crew replacing people with AI empowered robots.

One finds it exciting and integrates it into all of his life. He recommended I look into Mercor and sell my expertise to them and make some money. (I’m pretty sure that’s a conflict of interest I should to seek permission to do and Legal needs to update the specific wording to cover.) He wants to use it more and for everything.

The Other is a bit more measured. He uses it, but he’s got his complaints. He may be on his way down into the Trough of Disillusionment part of the Hype Cycle. The main concern he expressed was replacing his quality people with inferior robots. Instead of doing the work, he’s babysitting the robots and fixing their mistakes. Before AI, robots were not good because of inconsistencies in previous steps in the line. Upstream assemblers may have differences in how they put together a part, so dumb robots will ruin parts making no choice. Intelligent AI robots in theory could train on what to do with the differences the same as a human to make a good weld. The challenge is keeping them running in orchestration.

AI is coming for both blue and white collar jobs. The better the models, the better they will get at nuance and the more jobs they will displace.

It’s frustrating that the “social” media resources prevent us from connecting in person because they don’t prioritize recognition of something as timely and pushing them to where audiences see them in time.

I get it from the Facebook perspective. They want users, pages, and groups to use the Events functionality. But, also even that functionality is designed for posting it, people to RSVP, etc. Many of these problem situations are:

• Poster is not the host. They are saying they are going to go.
• The host doesn’t want an RSVP. Come or don’t.

May the 4th be with you, screenagers! It’s Star Wars Day, and while we do have a new list (or three) in the works for the franchise, they won’t be ready until The Mandalorian and Grogu hits theaters later this month.

Instead, we thought we’d throw out a real softball of a question to get some discussion going about the future of Star Wars. So, the question I ask today is: if you were Dave Filoni, head of Lucasfilm, which Star Wars project would you instantly greenlight?

The Adventures of Lando Calrissian starring Donald Glover. Continue where the Solo movie left off.

Back then, it was saving my job from going to overseas outsourcing. Working in IT, I saw plenty of cases where the vendors I worked with (BEA, Oracle, HP) open overseas support desks. Over the ensuing two decades I’ve probably worked with a few dozen support people who seemed to work in distant time zones. Now, it’s artificial intelligence. I guess we will see. In both cases, it’s how to be valuable enough to still have a job.

I feel like back then, the argument was shipping overseas the easy jobs so that onshore employees could focus on higher order thinking jobs. Similar to using AI to do that work. So, I guess the question is why so many more IT jobs 20 years didn’t go overseas? The worry was IT in the 2000s would go the way of manufacturing. Did H1-B VISAs help? That doesn’t seem a relevant mitigation to AI. We didn’t create that many college graduates. I wonder how much of it was Enshittification? It felt like in that era, people really complained about all this overseas support in terms of resolution, feeling supported, and making a favorable impression of the company. It cut costs that cut brand image.

Given all the different things I’ve worked on in my career, the one thing that’s remained consistent is finding ever worse source code running something important that’s designed to be used in a very specific way without any sort of error handling (meaning it’s waiting to be abused).

• Does it work? Yeah, for the use case specification.
• Does it break? Yeah, when not used correctly.
• Does it break the service? Sometimes, but probably not encountered in the way anyone notices.

Given these factors, it’s going to go unnoticed.

This is the theory for why software should go through code reviews. People should check each other’s work. This is why it should go through quality assurance testing to ensure it works as expected and doesn’t break unexpectedly. This is why there are bug bounties to find problems so they can get addressed before they break things.

But, as long as things kind of sort of just work enough, the garbage will remain out there. AI won’t fix it. AI will probably make more of it. Human code reviewers, QA testers, and bug bounties won’t keep up plus miss things, so AI will take over those roles. Which means it will miss things too, but it will keep up with the code generation.

The questions are:

1. Will things crash and burn because the AI misses something.
2. Will the humans tasked to resolving it, be able to figure out what the AI created?

My Magic 8-Ball says: Signs point to yes about #1 and no about #2.

1. Entire Claude Code CLI source code leaks thanks to exposed map file. Ars Technica. ︎

It feels like a lot to go through them. It feels inefficient to not be able to tell which incident I am checking before I click. And, the design makes me have to check them the most inefficient way possible.

I’ve had this blog since 2000. That’s over a quarter century of messages. Thousands of posts.

I am no longer the same person.

There’s a therapy in putting thoughts into an external brain. Journaling is a good way to help process and not dwell.

This article reads like a beat reporter attended the session and wrote a summary. My problem is I can’t seem to find corroborating information. Nothing on the House Education Committee web site. They seem to post their stuff after the legislative session. I looked in Google searches, the Atlanta Journal Constitution, and need to recall some of the lesser state and Atlanta papers to see if I can find anything about that committee meeting and what was discussed.

I’m of two thoughts:

1. If there’s not a person being assigned to this stuff, then an AI covering and elevating things like this that might otherwise get missed because no one is doing is great. My general impression is the journalism companies are looking to layoff people as their way to profitability, so I’m not sure that’s why I can’t find people doing this stuff.
2. I don’t know anything about this website to trust they are have controls to ensure the integrity of what they publish. And a push to AI for journalism in general means a loss of jobs for PEOPLE. So, it sucks that the ONLY source is this. I’d like to compare the coverage of a handful of articles.

CitizenPortal.ai is a platform designed to help you stay informed about state officials by giving direct access to their original statements and actions while staying completely unbiased and optimistic.

It offers features like deep search capabilities, allowing you to find every word spoken by your representatives on any topic, and AI-generated summaries of government meetings for quick understanding. Additionally, you can create and share clips from a vast library of speeches, interviews, and press conferences, facilitating informed discussions within your community.

From “AI Chief“

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I had a flippant reply to this tweet.

And then I spiraled thinking about it.

By the end of ice ages, humanity hunted large mammals like mammoths to extinction. We also eliminated giant sloths, sabertooth tigers, among others.

Hunting these creatures required cooperation, coordination, planning, and execution. They needed many people, acting in concert by understanding and trusting each other to behave in predictable ways. Mutual understanding.

Modern project and operations management needs the same. Managers struggle when all the steps of a plan have to be mapped out in part because analysis can sometimes miss things. Acting in concert by understanding and trusting each other is required for success.

Managers can struggle getting to where workers work well together. Turnover changes team dynamics. Events external to work can create a minefield. People are full of wild variables to navigate. They are the solution, but it takes work.

Systemization creates the promise of making it better. Create an understanding of how it all works. Make the processes consistent, acting in concert by being understood and trustable by all. Like a mammoth hunting party.

Systems work is different. The work can be sustainable. The human element is a difficult challenge here too. So a system to coordinate the systems. At some point the systemization becomes the mammoth. It’s what we hunt and why we cooperate, but in the end we are going to extinguish it. Well, replace it with another “better” system. Better meaning a different one we think will be more efficient but that’s only because we haven’t used it yet. Odds are it’s going to be more complex with more issues and challenges.

What I love about automation is eliminating the need for myself. I create things that do my work so I don’t have to. It frees myself for other things… like doing more automation. The dream of AI is to have something that will create my automation for me so I am freed to… I dunno. Whatever I would do if I didn’t have to do anything?

A critical-severity vulnerability in the Advanced Custom Fields: Extended (ACF Extended) plugin for WordPress can be exploited remotely by unauthenticated attackers to obtain administrative permissions.

ACF Extended, currently active on 100,000 websites, is a specialized plugin that extends the capabilities of the Advanced Custom Fields (ACF) plugin with features for developers and advanced site builders.

Unauthenticated privilege escalation to get admin is about as bad as it gets. Though, it does appear the WordPress blog has to have mapped “role” as a custom field. It’s impossible for anyone other than the blog owner to know if that’s the case. Well, probably spammers and scammers seeking sites to compromise and turn into platforms to exploit might given which ones they successfully turn.

It’s tracked as CVE-2025-14533:

• NIST
• tenable

Podcasts and TikTok content creators often get into the context and meaning. They take the story of the day and wrap it with why it matters and what it could affect. This facilitates understanding. Knowing it happened without why seems counter-productive.

Bureaucracy relies on process and procedure. Follow the process. Stay within the procedures. Stressors remain low as what to do is known and repeatable. Work easily flows as we are doing what we should. It’s order. They also exist to protect the organization.

The exceptions to the process and procedure create chaos. We have to make decisions as it’s often unknown. Though, all too often there’s known exceptions where we know what to do.

When we have to ask others to make an exception, we expend reputational capital. We are breaking the order. Others grant us a favor doing something outside the normal, which likely means more effort in tracking, understanding, and decision-making. In the short term it means a hit on credibility inside the bureaucracy as the procedures exist for a reason. Too many asks for exceptions can break trust as well.

Part of why I overcommunicate is to prepare for the possibility of engaging in reputational repair. Part of asking for the exception will involve explaining the context so the grantors are on my side, part of my team, and we are working together to solve the issue. Also, we may need to work on improving the procedures, which will require building consensus necessitating understanding. Exceptions create a potential of extra work beyond just the simple ask, so I need my boss to know.

Also, my role has become to handle exceptions so my boss doesn’t have to expend so much effort on them. There’s trust in me and maintaining that is giving a heads up with context.

I wonder how many software vendors are going this route because they know their users are increasingly hitting this limitation.

It sucks for Cybersecurity because the whole point of their approving the administrator requests was so they can screen for malware, ransomware, and other potentially problematic software. It’s just so inconvenient to getting our work done to wait hours for an approval. Plus the uncertainty of getting it. (One person was on day two of getting approval.)

The natural response is already in motion to obtain an inventory of installed software and remove inappropriate installs. So, I wonder what the users will do to end-run this new approach. It’s the normal cycle. Administrators forbid something the users need to get their work done, so they figure out a way to do it anyway.

One of the most important skills we taught was to locate salient terms as they influence the answers we get. The more closer to the jargon, the better the research one would find. Better relevant terms, yields results with improved usefulness. Vocabulary worked wonders. Knowing the topic in ways to manipulate the search made research work.

As a result, working in IT, I monitor buzzwords and learn about them. I try to understand them in the current and potential future context. And watch their progress.

AI are replacing search engines, but the same issue remains. We still have to know what to ask to get the right answers.

Additionally, we have to know how to determine the answer validity. For that, we need knowledge to fact check.

It’s reasonable if one knows one is allergic to related drugs, one is to the new one. Like, say you are allergic to penicillin. You reasonably could be to related drugs.

I feel like most people who are allergic have no idea if they are. Or what symptoms indicate they are.

For instance, I had a chronic cough. A new specialist doctor expressed concern about having this cough for five years. He switched me to a different medication, and the cough improved. I was allergic and had no idea.

In my professional life, my job is to fix it, so a vague meaningless error message means hours of trying things. Depending on impact, this might sit broken for days while other things of higher priority get the attention. (Given my position, others come to me with these things they couldn’t figure out.)

In my personal life, I take affront. Providing a layperson with such useless errors seems a disservice. They can’t use the product or service without a reason why. Those like me might work around it, and friends or family sometimes some to me for help. We should all do better about holding the providers to account.

Troubleshooting is an art. It helps to have a wealth of knowledge about system failure modes along with resolutions. It makes sense for professional information technologists who ensure computers remain operational to know. As technology expands, everyone encounters failures more often. Providers know they should trap errors and send something useful. There will be times when errors escape, but most of the time, they should either get automatically corrected or tell the user something useful.

The real problems are the unknown things lurking where one person knows how they work that are fragile and good enough. Until they aren’t. These ticking timebombs lie in wait. That one person keeps them running. They leave. Death, retirement, or even changing jobs means that one person who keeps an important thing going isn’t there anymore. What happens when it breaks? No one knows how to fix it. There’s a period of frustration and anger because it’s broken with no solution.

We see fairly often at the institutions using our services. The one person who knew the authentication system left and it has coasted on fumes for months to years. They keep meaning to upgrade it, but no one has figured it out the passwords to get into the system. (The penetration test found they were the defaults.) The payment gateway critical to accepting funds was managed by that one person who retired years ago. A consultant setup the automation system last year, but no one really knows how it works. It’s just running along doing it’s job until someone complained about all this bad data, only they can’t stop the bad data because no one can update the workflows.

What’s more interesting to me is these things force them or us to address the issue. Custom fragile processes no one, including us or vendors, understand gets replaced with standard integrations. The business process has to adapt to using it the correct way, but that’s the trade off for doing it the right way. That’s hard work to implement. That’s disruptive. The business has to suffer for a while.

Why can’t we do it the right way from the beginning? The business drives innovation. The business wants something tailored to how they want to work and IT helps them get it that way. The business thinks their way is a competitive advantage. The business rewards IT for being helpful. And so IT delivers these custom solutions that give the business ever more fragile solutions. The rewards aren’t more staff to support all the stuff, not that anyone really knows how much support really is needed.

Looking at it tonight, I thought, “East.” Suddenly, it clicked.

My childhood home was east of my grandmother’s house. The most likely time to walk from her house to mine at night is this time of year. (It’s only really visible in the winter when it gets dark earlier.) Orion would sit above my house like a guide. More than likely I would be happy from sweets, games, and stories.

Maybe there’s some association. And it might be all these years later, I am still reminded of these good times by seeing a named collection of stars.

All the past week it was mostly China. Today, it’s the USA.