Writing Be ok with that

Your Writing

  • Less than 1% of your writing will be life-changing.
  • 3% will be trivial to write.
  • 4% will strongly resonate with others in a way you didn’t expect.
  • 5% will be quite good.
  • 15% probably should’ve never been published.
  • 26% will elicit a reaction you did not expect. Positive or negative.
  • 28% will become vastly better because you chose to edit.
  • 30% will start as one piece but finish as another.
  • 40% will be good solid writing.
  • 45% will do much worse than you expect when published.
  • 60% of your writing will never be finished. Be ok with that.
  • 100% of your writing is worth your time. 1
  1. Thanks to the folks at the Rands Leadership Slack for reviewing an early version of this piece. ↩
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Rands Sort your voting plan

“I Am Very Concerned About This Election”

Good, me too.

Over on the Rands Leaders Slack, we are almost thirty-four thousand. Fun fact: in the 2020 Presidential Election, three battleground states, Arizona, Georgia, and Wisconsin, the margin of victory was less than 30,000. In Georgia, President Biden won by just over 12,000 votes.

It makes you think.

It’s an, uh, interesting time in United States politics. If you happen to live in the United States, I enthusiastically encourage you to firm up your voting plan. Check your registration, figure out how and when you’ll vote, do your research, be a leader, and show them how it’s done.

https://www.vote.org/ can help with all of this. Click on that link. Thanks.

If you’d like to take more daily action, join the Rands Leadership Slack, send me a DM that you’ve got a voting plan, and I’ll explain how you can get your hands on a couple of Rands stickers.

Happy democracy.

# 1 Comment on “I Am Very Concerned About This Election”
Tech Life An essential service

WP Engine / WordPress, Briefly

In the early days of this weblog, I was on MediaTemple using MoveableType for a good long time. Three things happened during these many years:

  1. MoveableType was mostly abandoned during this time. I’m sure well-intentioned folks were working on it (and it appears they still are), but the vibrancy of development had faded from my perspective at the time.
  2. MediaTemple (now GoDaddy) was similarly abandoned. They were happy to take my money, but the level of service had a marked decrease by the simple measure of the amount of time from when I asked a question about the service to when I felt the question was sufficiently answered.
  3. I became increasingly busy. The amount of time I could devote to the care and feeding of the site and hosting significantly decreased. While this made me sad as I have a deep desire to understand how things work, if I was devoting time to the site, it was writing.

Late in my tenure on MediaTemple, a good friend and noted WordPress enthusiast, Alex King, volunteered to move the site to WordPress. At the time, I was concerned about performance with a dynamically generated site — WordPress had an unclear performance reputation — but Alex convinced me. We agreed on a new design and moved to WordPress, and everything was fine. It was instantly obvious that WordPress had a vibrant development community, with the core software constantly being updated, unlike MoveableType. Publishing platform. Solved.

MediaTemple was the next issue. Without warning, MediaTemple shut down my site because the now unused MoveableType site had been hacked in a manner I still don’t understand. No warning, and they blocked my access so that I couldn’t debug the issue. Worse, the only way to unlock the site was to pay MediaTemple money for a site cleansing, which I eventually did, during which they found nothing.

I started looking for a new service provider, and WP Engine showed up as a credible vendor after I spoke with WordPress knowledgable humans. I don’t remember what I was paying for MediaTemple, but WP Engine felt like quite a bit more. I went back and forth with myself and finally decided, “I am willing to pay for good service so I can just write.”

I vividly remember the migration to WP Engine not because it was flawless, but because when I had issues, I pinged WP Engine tech support, and they responded almost instantly and competently and the chat was not over until I told them that we’d resolved the issue1. This professional, high-quality tech support level has remained unchanged for many years, and I’ve remained on WP Engine.

Since my move to WP Engine:

  • I can’t recall a single outage. I have been sitting here staring out the window of this train for twenty minutes and can’t recall a single outage.
  • I’ve added several new paid services to my account.
  • I am mostly unaware of what is going on with maintaining my site. I upgrade WordPress and plugins when upgrades are available, but mostly I write and publish content, which is — ya’know — where I want to spend my time.

WP Engine. Not cheap. I don’t care. As a lifelong user of online services, I have a hard-earned and well-defined rubric regarding what I’ll pay, which reads, “I will pay a premium if you are doing what you say you are going to do — all the time.”

I can’t comment on the WordPress v. WP Engine kerfuffle. It seems like a long time coming; it is super complex and increasingly heated. Drama usually means profound misunderstanding.

I can confidently say:

  1. I appreciate the hard work of many humans who invest unfathomable hours into WordPress and the vibrant WordPress plugin ecosystem. I eagerly pay for many of these services.
  2. WP Engine provides a valuable and essential service, delivering WordPress to me and my readers, for which I also happily pay. I pay for many online services and would rank WP Engine’s quality, reliability, and support in the top 10%.

As an eager user of the software and the services, I hope they’ll find a fair and symbiotic resolution.

  1. One issue I had during migration was that WP Engine did not allow a few plug-ins that I was using on MediaTemple. One was an old link checker that would go through old posts and find old links. WP Engine’s justification for disablement was, “This is resource intensive,” which made sense at the time. ↩
# 1 Comment on WP Engine / WordPress, Briefly
Management I am eagerly listening

Poets and Police

I was doing this talk, which I’d done dozens of times before. Good, well-practiced deck. I was speaking to CTO-types (current and aspirational) as a favor to a friend. This was a monthly morning coffee chat for this crew, and they invited folks like me to speak. It was on a weekday morning near Slack in downtown San Francisco.

No problem.

Practiced talk, small group, low stakes. I was editing the title slide to update the location and name of the event. No practice necessary; again, I’d done it before.

The piece was based on this piece called Stables and Volatiles. The brief pitch. Stables are those who happily work with direction and appreciate that there appears to be a plan and the calm predictability of a well-defined schedule. Volatiles are the opposite. Read the piece; I like it.

Finished quickly. I was told this was more about a discussion than a presentation. Fine with me. Q&A tells me precisely how well the deck landed, and I’d done this talk enough to believe the Q&A would be rich. Healthy banter. It started that way. Questions about my first stint at Apple and whether well-known people were Stables or Volatiles, but then Leo in the Back Row lost his shit.

“This is bullshit. It’s a false dichotomy.” Leo, the CTO in the Back Row, was pissed about my presentation. For those without ChatGPT at the ready, a false dichotomy is “the fallacy of presenting only two choices, outcomes, or sides to an argument as the only possibilities, when more are available.”

After some back and forth, I told Leo, the CTO in the Back Row, that, like most of my writing, I liked to describe humans in stark, clever ways. This often took the form of a “THIS or THAT” black-and-white structure, but I was 100% clear that the answer to humans was a hard-to-define grey area. My job was to get you to think, not to define every possible configuration of human behavior.

I’d delivered that answer before, and it worked, but Leo, the CTO in the Back Row, was having none of it. He was still angry and — now, I am guessing — because I’d wasted his time. He was promised a structured model, and I delivered confusing poetry.

Leo, the CTO in the Back Row, was the Police. And the Police don’t like poetry.

Guess What, Leo

I have another false dichotomy for you: the Poets and Police.

Poets:

  • Finish things. Usually.
  • Use rich language to describe abstract situations.
  • Believe well-formed, highly descriptive ideas make the world an understandable place.
  • Are fine with ambiguity because they understand it’s all just shades of grey.
  • Fall in love with ideas. They’ll fall in love with a single choice word.
  • Like to use the word “feel” because feelings are distilled intuition expressing themselves as inspiration.
  • Love thoughtful compliments.

Police:

  • Finish things. Wow, they finish things.
  • Crave well-defined structure and rules.
  • Believe rules make the world an understandable and measurable place.
  • Hate ambiguity because it provides no direction.
  • Deeply enjoy both debating and enforcing those rules. They believe this is how you make future measurable progress.
  • Will debate a single word that is out of place until clarity is achieved. (Poets do this, too.)
  • Are excellent at measuring anything with metrics. Are unlikely to believe unmeasurable truth.
  • Never use the word “feel” because feelings are irrelevant to getting the job done.
  • Appreciated well-defined accomplishment.

Two things.

First, as a Poet, I know I am describing the Police from my perspective. Police will profoundly disagree with many of the attributes I describe. I am eagerly listening.

Second, yes, this article is similar to my much earlier piece on Organics and Mechanics, but I feel it’s stronger writing.

Third, I am making up a third thing. To annoy the Police who were keeping count because that is how we Poets roll.

Success is Both

As a self-declared Poet, I can confidently describe the Police because it is a job requirement that develops strong working relationships with these essential humans. I need them because the Police do the challenging work of keeping the trains on time. This isn’t simply holding conductors to a schedule but also maintaining the trains, taking care of the track, and ensuring we have a qualified staff of humans to do all this work. Oh, and how about a budget? How are we going to afford all of this? Someone needs to build a credible business plan for this train company so we can afford to keep the trains on time.

As a self-declared Poet, we also need to understand the aspirational goals of this train company. I also understand the importance of consistently sharing this vision with everyone. I know we need to listen because we need to understand how the company feels. I’m adept at organizing teams of humans with differing ideas and skills. It’s an endless puzzle that I enjoy attempting to solve. I love celebrating our victories. I feel our failures deeply, but I know that with the Police, we will learn from these failures.

Listen. Leo. The CTO. You there — in the back row. I get why you’re mad. See, while we differ in how we view the work, we are the same regarding what’s essential. We want the team to succeed, and we want them to advance. I’ve learned some of my favorite moves watching you work, Leo. I’ll work hard to try not to waste your time with too much poetry if you work hard to understand that poetry is part of how we describe and achieve the impossible.

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Management Leaders tell you where you are going

Words on Founder Mode

I’ve worked at three successful start-ups and one failure. I’ve also worked at post-IPO successes such as Borland, Netscape, and Apple, which means I’ve seen a lot of different founders who, if you measure success financially, were quite successful.

My backstory aside and with deep respect, most founders fail. You’ve heard of the stories of sucessful founder because they’ve become famous (or infamous). However, the majority of start-ups fail. No one tells and retells the stories of these companies because they never launch. No one became rich or famous. It is their defining characteristic. In his recent essay, Paul Graham talks about the successful founders. However, it’s not “Founder Mode,” it’s “Successful Founder Mode.” Lumping all Founders together would mean we should — statistically and more descriptively — call this “Failing Founder Mode,” which is neither clever nor inspirational.

As a person deeply in love with naming things, I like the framing of Founder and Manager Mode because it’s clever and instantly useful. If you’ve been reading me over the years, you’ve noted I’ve begun to detest the term manager for some of the reasons Graham highlights: unfamiliar with the details, management at a distance, lousy hiring, and siloed decision-making. I’ve gravitated towards the word leader both because I want to make it clear any motivated human can execute the skills of a good manager — leadership comes from everywhere — and, more importantly, I believe managers tell you where you are. Leaders tell you where you are going. It’s a philosophy thing.

It’s less clever and symmetric, but I would define these two modes as: “Founder Mode” and “Scale Mode” because one of the many things you need to do as a successful start-up is scale. Landing managers is one of those tactics, but it’s just one essential investment you make as you scale. Other tactics are equally important. Focusing on managers as the thing that makes you a larger successful company gets you… more managers. Gross.

My observation from three successful start-ups, three post-IPO starts where the founders still ran the show, and one failure: the founders were all eccentric humans. In a hypothetical room full of humans, which included these founders, you would eventually notice their behavior or conversational pattern. You would single them out in your head because the hair on the back of your neck stood up and wonder, “What… is going on there?” My one start-up failure? The founders? By the book, MBA types. Standard vanilla leadership. Trust me, you’ve never heard of them or the start-up.

Graham hints at some of the attributes of Founder Mode but mostly says it’s not as well-defined. It is. Founder Mode is the culture of a company, and a culture is defined by the character of the founders. Here are the values I’ve discovered over and over again working with these humans:

  • The whole team is involved in the details. Anyone can argue about the product because everyone works to be a product expert.
  • Everyone does the work. The stratification of responsibility is a red flag not just in rapidly growing team, but any company. Everyone files bugs because everyone uses the product. Yes, there is job specialization, but there is also a belief that we are equally accountable for the product.
  • An organization chart doesn’t tell you who can speak with whom; it tells you who is accountable for what. It’s a map. Not a power structure.

And finally, hire leaders, not managers.

# 4 Comments on Words on Founder Mode
Management I know you can do this

Late Again

Awkward.

Seven of us now. Sitting around the table. Five minutes since the start of the meeting. We’ve used up our chit-chat allowance and wonder if you will show.

In the scheme of things relevant to a company’s success, showing up late to a meeting is not the end of the world. When it happens a lot, when it’s always the same person and that human is a leader, I have a severe tick when it comes to this human. Here is my chain of increasingly frustrated and snarky reasoning:

Here’s my inner dialog:

  • Do you know that you are late?
  • Do you understand why you are consistently late?
  • Do you understand the total cost of this lateness? It’s the room full of humans waiting for you, plus the repeat of the information they’ll need to hear when you arrive.
  • Do you understand the subjectively immeasurable credibility hit you take each time this happens?

With that out of my system, let’s get to the heart of my concern. If you understand the problem and further understand the cost of this behavior, why is it continually happening?

Many meetings are predictable. Look at your calendar first thing in the morning. Is this an achievable set of work? No double bookings. Good. Do you see where you are likely going to be time-constrained? You’ve got a meeting you must attend that always runs long — ok, move the meeting after it. You’ve got one meeting on the opposite side of the campus? Ok, build in travel time and adjust the calendar as necessary.

Some meetings are not. Day has started, and the universe is throwing you curveballs. It happens. A reliably stable meeting ran long. Did you tell the next meeting to move on without you? Wait, you need to be there? Ok, move to the next available slot — quickly and alert attendees. Loudly. An important meeting landed in the middle of your everything? Ok, what needs to shift? Shift it. Loudly and promptly.

But it just keeps happening. Five minutes late to everything. Too much on the calendar, too many curveballs. You are in a constant state of stress, and this is where I will stop us for a second to state the obvious.

There are leadership types who believe this level of busy is correct. They believe a key part of the job is this level of stress and scurrying hither and fro. Some humans find a modicum of pride in this state. You know, the meeting doesn’t start… without me.

To all the serial show-up-laters who meet this criteria,

You are a failing leader.

Strong words. You thought your consistent five minutes late was a quirk. A minor operational error, but in my book, it’s a strategic flaw because you are not identifying and fixing the fundamentals. There are so many minutes in a day, there are only so many meetings you can personally attend, and these are knowable quantities. Failure to address these fundamentals means you are not growing as a leader.

Who can go instead of you? No one? Why? What is so essential about you? Experience? Really? How does one gain experience? You give others the same opportunity that someone else gave you. You ask them, “Can you attend this review?” They look panicked, so you tell them, “Here is the essential context you need. These three things will likely happen; here’s what I do when they occur.” They look less panicked, and you finish with, “I know you can do this.” They grin. Nervously.

Delegation. This is one solution. There are many more, but I’m not listing them because it is your job as a leader to identify the problem that ails your team and be accountable for properly and permanently fixing them.

So you can show up for a meeting on time.

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Tech Life Something to say

Rands Useful App Awards 2024

You’re not going with that title, are you?

I might.

There are no actual trophies or awards.

Correct. There are three Rands Useful App Awards this year, but before I award them, I will define the criteria I used to select these products.

  1. The application has substance. This is not a one-shot utility that does one thing well; the designers and developers have built an application, a service with deliberate weight. There is a richness in functionality and depth. This is because…
  2. The application effortlessly provides domain expertise. The humans who built this application care deeply about the domain for which this product was built. After you know the application, you think, “Gosh, I wish it does X.” It does X. It does Y. And it doesn’t do Z because you don’t need Z — what you need is Z++, and when you discover that, the application becomes indispensable because…
  3. Each of these products integrates many different data sources. This is not obvious to the end user because the designers and engineers have to great lengths to make this integration seamless and allow users to move between views of data effortlessly.
  4. A by-product of deep domain expertise is quality. A motivation to deliver a high-quality application or service can be created in many ways, but well-defined motivation comes from experts. The humans who understand the problem space and these humans will go the extra mile to ensure the product is built correctly and works as expected. They also…
  5. Obsess about every detail. Obsess? Too strong a word. Design, for design’s sake, makes the product approachable and perhaps more usable. Design motivated by deep domain knowledge gives each decision defensible meaning. When users encounter these design decisions, they think, “Uh, this product just read my mind. That’s amazing.”
  6. Finally, the product has voice. It has an opinion about what it is. This is the hardest attribute to define (and build) but the easiest to observe. When you fire up the product on your phone or web browser, the product has something to say.

With these attributes in mind, I give you the 2024 Rands Useful App Awards.

Really? Sticking with this whole bit? Ok.

Windy For the past two years, during the rainy season, I’ve been sending out an update to a Messages group composed of my Dad’s group. The point: give folks a heads regarding rain for the following week. A hyper-local forecast based on a handful of data sources. At the core of that forecast is Windy.

Weather nerds build Windy. Click on that link and observe the vast array of weather-related resources at your fingertips. Unlike WatchDuty, you’re on your own in terms of getting answers to your weather-related questions, but the answers are there in terms of wind, rain, temperature, cloud cover, waves, thunderstorms, air quality… and those are just the layers I can see in my current configuration. There are dozens more.

I augment my local forecasts with other sources besides Windy (Weather Underground is particularly accurate in my region), but Windy is where I start because Windy has a weather answer for everything.

WatchDuty WatchDuty provides a rich real-time map of nearby wildfires and firefighting efforts. This is probably less immediately interesting to you if you live somewhere with less combustible dry fuel, but we’re all going to care about this more over the next couple of decades.

Pre-WatchDuty, when a fire flares up nearby, you’ll spend hours discovering the following:

  • Major news networks are slow and lack detail,
  • Social networks are full of noise, and,
  • There is a dizzying amount of structured data regarding any fire in the form of maps, satellite imagery, weather forecasts, and other tools.

WatchDuty meets all the Rands Criteria™. I check the fire situation in California a couple of times a week, and — at a glance — I can quickly see hot spots in the state. It quickly conveys location, size, containment, and recent news updates. Also, seeing the real-time status of all aircraft involved in the fire is fascinating. These updates are the core of WatchDuty and are supplied by a curated set of reporters who are sifting through all the noises to find the best and freshest signal.

Flighty A recent addition to a familiar problem. Everything works when you’re flying except when it doesn’t. Complex systems fail complexly, and when they do, the difference between spending a night at a crap hotel in O’Hare and making the next flight to Newark is timely information.

Flighty will not rebook your flight to Newark, but Flighty will give you every opportunity to become aware of emerging complex disasters. The application crushes all the criteria listed above, but the outstanding aspect is, “These designers and developers fly. They fly a lot.” This is best demonstrated by the Flighy Passport, which clearly shows all your past flights, total number of miles, flight days, airports, and airlines. How do they know this? Because, of course, you put all your itineraries in TripIt, right? Of course you do.

The immense amount of pertinent travel information built into Flighty is staggering, but if you haven’t obsessively kept track of your travel for years, just put in the flight number of your next flight and see what Flighty can teach you.

A Function of Focus

I originally called these the Rands Indie Awards, and while each of the applications is some form of independent, I think the larger observation is they aren’t a product of a large company. Flighty looks like it’s three humans. Windy is owned by a billionaire but appears to be less than twenty developers. WatchDuty is a not-for-profit and appears to have less than twenty full-time humans.

Why is the size of the team important? The size of the team directly correlates to how well they can focus. For each of these products, it’s clear they picked a domain or a problem space they deeply understood, and with a small set of hands, they focused on building a substantive, high-quality product with voice.

# 3 Comments on Rands Useful App Awards 2024
Management Listen to the room

Seven Conversation Hacks

  1. Say their name if you think they aren’t listening. In a meeting with five or more humans, it’s ok if someone checks out of part of the conversation. Not every topic is of equal interest to all humans. When you know the conversation is steering back to a human who isn’t listening, say their name.
  2. Repeat the hard part when you don’t understand. Or, repeat the last thing they said and add a question mark. Ask questions if you don’t understand.
  3. Pause if you need more time to think. Let the conversation breathe.
  4. Move your line of sight below theirs. Hunch over a bit. This changes the sense of who is in charge of the conversation. I learned this subtle move from a fascinating book about improv. We, as humans, react to the relative position of another’s gaze. Higher, they are driving. Lower, they are receiving.
  5. Look them in the eye if you think your point isn’t landing. Or if it’s important to them. Repeat the point. Once. A variant of saying their name, except in this scenario, you have their attention, but it’s unclear if they understand the point.
  6. Stop talking. Ask them what they think. Or slow your cadence. I get on a roll often, conversationally, and what feels like a delicious conversational tale to me is rambling. When the room starts to tell me this, I stop. I stop for five seconds. In five seconds, you can effectively reset the tempo of a conversation. Possibly my favorite conversational move. s
  7. Listen to the room when you are done to see and hear what they heard. Does the conversation continue immediately on the same or related topic? Excellent. Is there a painful, long silence where it’s clear you didn’t deliver your message? Keep trying.
# 1 Comment on Seven Conversation Hacks
Tech Life I typed "Thank you"?

The Robot Report #2 — Her

There are two classes of songs I listen to when writing. Words and no words. Word songs are used when I the writing does not require flow — deep thought. The problem with words is they get in your head, bump around, and start creating more words. At a time when I am attempting to focus on a specific set of words, word songs are not the solution.

Nonword songs have no words and are deployed to encourage the correct words. The lack of work but the presence of melodic feeling (plus one to three cups of coffee) is the perfect partner for new word writing.

Since the release of Spike Jones Her in 2013, the perfect reigning champion of non-word songs continues to be Dimensions by Arcade Fire or Owen Pallett> — it’s unclear who wrote it1.

“Her” was back in the news recently with the report that Scarlett Johansson was super pissed that OpenAI allegedly trained on her voice for the 4o2 release of their model, which included scary impressive voice interactions. Since these allegations were revealed, OpenAI has been diligently releasing information that proves they trained on a totally different person… who kind’a sounds like Scarlett Johansson. It was reported that one of Sam Altman’s favorite movies was Her, where Johansson uses her trademark semi-gravely voice to give life to Joaquin Phoenix’s AI companion.

This important kerfuffle regarding protecting actor’s persona is not my point. My point is: Her is a profoundly sad piece of cinema (that I deeply love). It beautifully documents a not-too-distant future where we no longer ignore each other with our faces jammed into our phones; we’ve been liberated and now freely walk the world talking to our phones… ignoring each other.

The Proper Interface

Yesterday, I was working on a future piece regarding my beliefs regarding team size and organization depth. I have shared this information for years: the ideal team size is 7 +/- 3, and the ideal organization depth is 5 — not including the CEO. I concluded this thought with the closing point, “And these constraints fan out nicely; you can build quite large organization following these guidelines.”

But I didn’t do the actual math. I estimated. With the ChatGPT omnipresent on my desktop, I described the above constraints and asked, “How big of an organization can I build?” There were typos and colloquialisms in my question, and ChatGPT answered it instantly and correctly. When it was done, I typed, “Thank you.”

I typed “Thank you”?

Who was I thanking?

There is a spectrum of how humans think about large language models (“LLMS”). On one side, some declare, “They are superhuman-level autocomplete engines,” on the other end, we have those who believe, “They are partially sentient future destroyers of the world.” As is custom, the answer is someone in the middle.

Wherever you lie on that spectrum, you are skipping the most important innovation of these LLMs: the conversation.

Return to the example above and explain how I would complete the same task in Google. I wouldn’t. I’d start scribbling the math on a piece of paper and figure out the potential size of these organizations. Maybe if I were stuck, I would type “common math equations regarding measuring organization sizes” and stare dumbly at a wall of ads and possibly valuable equations.

Read that last sentence again. I wrote, “I would type,” not “I would ask.” Typing keywords versus asking a question. It’s an entirely different mode of thinking for me. If I’m typing something in a search engine, I’m trying to figure out the keywords that give me a page that might answer my question. If I’m asking a question, I’m using my natural and familiar language to describe the problem I am trying to solve or the question I am attempting to answer.

Here’s my prompt:

“If I have a rule that teams can only be seven to ten in size and there can only give five levels of management, what is my maximum organziation [sic] size?”

Google’s response included:

  • Did you mean? Where it corrected my typo.
  • A bunch of ads for Microsoft Teams.
  • Then, there is a link to an article from a VP at Stripe who describes how to size and assess teams.

ChatGPT’s response answered the question and showed its work so I could verify the math.

There’s more. Because I was in a chat mindset, I asked for follow-ups. What were the organizational size caps of with different constraints? What if I added one more layer? And when I was done with my queries, I typed, “Thank you.”

That final thank you feels like a throwaway conversational flourish until you think like a robot. It didn’t parse that as thanks; it parsed it as “This human believes my answer was correct.” This is essential data to help future queries.

Comparing Google and ChatGPT is not a fair comparison. It’s comparing a search engine to a large language model. Two vastly different stacks of technology. Guess what, it doesn’t matter. Your average human is searching for the lowest possible friction means to get the highest possible quality answer. I’ve been twisting my brain into mental knots for decades, trying to figure out the proper set of keywords and searching for the proper web page that might answer my questions.

ChatGPT answers my question because I ask my question like I’m talking to a human.

Yes, ChatGPT is aggressive and confident even when it’s impressively wrong. Guess what? That makes it more human than robot.

Profoundly Sad

When the iPhone was first announced, a recurring debate amongst my friends was, “The touch screen makes or breaks this device.” See, we’d been promised touch screens for years before the iPhone — they existed, but every single screen before the iPhone had discernible lag. From the moment you began to touch and drag on the screens, there was a bit of distracting lag. This brief moment of dissatisfaction ruined the magic. This is another touch screen that reminds me of its technology.

Technology is magic when it meets our expectations and reflects our reality. When you touch and drag a screen, you expect it to react precisely as when you perform the same actions in the real world.

The magic of the ChatGPT 4o voice interaction demo wasn’t the bajillions of engineering hours that went into powering the models that allowed the robot to respond, it’s that she responded how you expected. She responded instantly. She understood your half-words. She stopped when you interrupted. She laughed at your dumb jokes. It was magic because it met our expectations and reflected our reality. This is how I expect a conversation to work.

It is still just a tool.

Her is a profoundly sad movie because it intimately describes how these tools we love have driven us apart. Scene after scene shows vast crowds walking public areas in a low-grade conversational murmur. All the humans are pleasantly talking… to their devices. This was not the primary intent of the movie; it’s a story of the search for love, but it also describes the need we humans have to connect.

Like social media before it, I remain steadfastly exuberant about the potential for this next generation of technology to help. Still, I’m now properly educated that the potentially unimaginable consequences could outweigh the benefits.

It’s a tool. It’s not a human. It’s not Her.

  1. True story. For years and years, the soundtrack for this album was not available. A handful of the jams were available, but the album, the bulk of the music, was strangely not released. Someone was fighting with someone about something. The original score was finally released in 2021, which means from 2013 until 2021, I searched the dark corners of the internet for this song. This contributed to its uniqueness. ↩
  2. Version numbers are arbitrary, and I’m confident they didn’t call this ChatGPT 5 because they wanted to quench the “they’re moving too fast” vibe. ↩
# 2 Comments on The Robot Report #2 — Her