Technology Writing
Why everyone who works with LLMs should watch "Bedazzled"...
The plot of the 1967 move Bedazzled is simple - the Devil, played by Peter Cook, offers a hapless Stanley Moon seven wishes in return for his soul. But there's a problem. Every time the devil implements a wish, there is always a hideous flaw that makes it near useless. Stanley always gets what he asks for, and he never gets any closer to what he actually needs.
For people who use LLMs a lot, this might seem oddly familiar. Alarmingly so, in fact...
Drones: The externalities come home to roost...
Last week we saw a high profile Irish drone operator 'up sticks' and stop flying in Ireland, blaming 'planning delays' and 'regulatory vagueness'. I would argue that the truth is different - the company in question has ignored the externalities associated with their business, and that what's happened is totally unsurprising.
Hallucinations aren't the only problem...
Like a lot of people, I now spend an alarming amount of my time working with LLMs. Which means that I am used to what we have now come to accept as 'normal' - inventing entire product lines because they ought to exist, picking the names of notorious people when asked to generate a list of generic names for test data, and so on. At this stage I've become used to the most brilliant piece of marketing judo since someone renamed 'Killer Whale' to 'Orca', the 'Hallucination', which is an amazing euphemism for 'Catastrophic Error That Can Get You Fired, Sued Or Even Killed'. It's up there with 'Squirrel' for 'Tree Rat'....
Strategic Sales and Agentic AI in 2026
As a "Data Platform Vendor" how do we approach value engineering today in the context of agentic AI, and how does it affect the value proposition?
The Ludic Fallacy and what it means for your data
The Ludic Fallacy is "the misuse of games to model real-life situations". While Taleb sees it as applying to how people create statistical models that fail in the real world because the model didn't account for one or more unlikely events, I'd argue it's highly relevant to data professionals. We've been dealing with Ludic Fallacy for about fifty years, but have never called it out.