November 17, 2025
Good morning!
October weather in November never felt so good!
And, Herb is still alive.
- To brew the morning pot of coffee at our house (for about 50 cents) requires twenty-six separate movements or independent actions.
- I’ve counted several times and I think 26* is accurate.
- If the beans are depleted and the grinder needs to be refilled, add six more specific actions — for a total of 32*.
- (*Note: Doesn’t include shopping for the beans or purchasing them.)
- Name a kitchen tool you use >10x more often than you used it 20 years ago: Scissors
- They are transformative; I was too late schmart — and too soon oldt.
- Better for an apple to be crisp or flavourful? (If it can’t be both)
- The pendulum swings
- Forty percent of young people are now purposefully pursuing so-called blue collar jobs — as opposed to viewing them as inferior to jobs requiring a post-secondary degree.
- Many of these jobs offer wages approaching six figures while also providing generous perquisites.
- The pendulum swings…
- “Customs do not concern themselves with right or wrong or reason. But they have to be obeyed.” (Twain// Clemens)
- Book: Nations Apart, Woodard.
- I shudder — and I’m embarrassed — to think of the times when I failed to take my own advice.
- Conducting effective, exhilarating, and productive meetings is among my bigger failures.
- The thing about meetings in most organizations is they tend to go onto automatic pilot while descending to mediocrity.
- Once you establish a pattern — time of day, day of the week, location, pro-forma agenda, length, communication style, Etc. — it’s very difficult to change the pattern.
- Comfortableness sets in while the highest-paid, supposedly smartest and best-informed people in the organization are duped by circular logic and a suffocating routine.
- The leader has an awesome responsibility to not let this happen.
- And yet it happens — everywhere.
- According to data reported by Maor and others, changes to the way in which weekly executive-level meetings are conducted doubles the chance of successful transformation.
- It’s the biggest single variable from among nine researched.
- This assumes the changes will be positive, of course — and who will measure those? (Maor, Etc., et al., 2025)
- Courtesy of MIT Sloan Management and author, Rama Ramakrishnan (September 2025), I thought we could together learn a bit more about the generative artificial intelligences…
- … this time from the bottom up — or from the inside out.
- This is perhaps somewhat analogous to learning how to build, maintain, and repair a jet engine.
- Just one bite at a time… no pun intended (get it?!)
- Disclaimer: We detest the abbreviations and acronyms, but will use them here (LLM = Large Language Model; i.e., the data banks making artificial intelligence possible)
- And, GENAI = Generative Artificial Intelligence; e.g., ChatGPT, Alibaba, IBM, SalesForce, Claude, Etc.
- OK… here we go:
- Q: If the LLM makes a mistake and I correct it, will it update itself immediately?
- A: No, the LLM will not update itself immediately…
- If you are using tools like ChatGPT or Claude, your correction might improve future versions of the model IF
- … IF your chat history is included in a future training run…
- … but, those updates happen over weeks or months, not instandly.
- Some applications, such as ChatGPT, have a memory feature that can update in real time to remember personal information, however…
- … this memory is used for personalization and does not appear (yet) to be used for correcting the model’s knowledge or reasoning errors.
- So, in other words, NOT like Wikipedia, for example.
