Predicting the future of posts on the FAA Home Page

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(Future Spot Ad from the FAA)

For those of you in Florida, you can get a free small Frosty at Wendy’s tomorrow if you go to Miami or Jacksonville Center and participate in “Be an Air Traffic Controller day!”

At best, the 10% reduction in flights may slow down the ATC staff deterioration. I don’t think it will stop it. 

That assumes the cuts actually provide relief in the right places. Getting it right will take time, and frankly they don’t have the time.

If things are not back to normal a few days before before “the day before Thanksgiving”, it will be a mess… and that mess will be bigger news than folks trapped in an airport on Turkey Day. 

Login Frustration

A blog, which is basically intended as some sort of public exercise in narcissism sharing your thoughts with the planet, is pretty useless if people can't access it. 

When I put this thing together... 

OK, threw it together... 

OK, flipped some switches in the UI and hoped for the best...

I clicked on the "adult content" switch because sooner or later I'll say something a bit out of bounds. Seemed like the right thing to do. Try to make the Internet a bit better through individual action.

NOTE TO SELF: Next time I run tests WITHOUT being logged into the Google ecosystem...

Basically, while my intent was good, instead of getting just the typical click through "Hey, be careful in there" type UI control... it was asking folks to log in to verify age.

Now, Google at best can take a guess at your age. And, AFAIK, they don't offer age verification as a service. So, why do this?

Likely because someone at Google saw an opportunity to collect more data. Not really a benefit for me, or you. Sure, there is that content warning speed bump. And, yes... I get the whole "free so you are the product" thing... but we don't have to make it easy for Goog...

So, in theory, you should be able to read this post without a login.

Of course, how would I know if you can't? LOL.

AI is scary, but...

I've been dabbling with AI. Like many overly hyped IT technologies before it, I'm skeptical. One of my clients sees the potential in AI, so I'm trying to give it a fair shot. So far, AI isn't winning me over.

I recently needed some code to run in an environment from Vendor X. Even though Vendor X is huge, their documentation sucks. Some basic things were eluding me, and where search engines used to help with this easily... not any more. A ton of slop, 20 minutes ad padded videos, and the usual snark from certain "help from the expert" websites is all you get nowadays.

So this is a Vendor X tool set. I turned to Vendor X's AI for some assistance.

Much to my surprise, it gave me a working example of the function call I had been struggling with. That was 100% useful to me. 

Then I made the mistake of asking it to define some constants for me. This should have been trivial, find the constants table in the documentation, and a little rewrite to turn it into code. A lookup table of colors, like "red" pointing to a set of numbers that define red in the UI.

Should have trivial... Uh huh, pull the other one.

The code for the table looked perfect. Until you realize the colors are wrong. And their system is very careful about colors. In fact they warn you about it in their documentation... which the AI apparently read and forgot about it.

It took quite a number of tries to get the AI to actually look at the correct documentation. And a few more to get it to read it... Just a stupid mad lib generator with short term memory issues. Useless.

So, overall... it was a lose. More time correcting the idiot than saving time/effort. This stuff sucks and a lot of people are ignoring that. So, short term... yes, be concerned because people have too much faith in this matrix math garbage.

But long term, it will still be junk. And like any human fad, it will collapse under its own weight.

That's a totally unscientific opinion. But, unlike AI... it is an honest and truthful one. We will get through this... let's hope the next trend in IT is something fun, like large scale resurrection of legacy hardware level fun.

My advice, learn the AI tools and figure out what small things they can do to make your life easier. But, remember that it is a clumsy, random tool like a blaster. Not a civilized weapon for a more civilized age...

Tweaks

I'm still on Mastodon, although my experiences there this year have been less than stellar. Not a platform problem, a people problem. Mastodon is still generally less nasty content-wise than BlueSky or Twitter.

After trying to use the default RSS gadget for Blogger for my Mastodon feed (works, but useless and ugly) I am now trying https://mastofeed.com/ with the HTML embed gadget. We will see if this works, and if so... I'll start contributing to their hosting fees.

Blogging with a broken compass?

Well, I decided to start a blog again. This is probably driven by my general distaste in Social Media trends. Or perhaps, I just need a place to ramble on. No idea. We will see where this goes, if anywhere. It is easy to start a blog, keeping it up to date... and interesting to anyone, including me, is the difficult part.

Why use Blogger? Sheer laziness. Managing such systems can be fun, but it interferes with the process of content creation.

No ads here. 

We will see where this goes.