I left the first energy provider. Not in frustration, exactly—frustration implies that the outcome was unexpected, and by the time I left I had a fairly precise understanding of what the system was and what it was not going to do.
I left because I had identified the constraint clearly enough to know that continuing to engage with it was not going to produce a different result.
[Read more]In the early years, building a website cost money. Not because the underlying technology was especially complex, but because the people who understood it were scarce and the tools were primitive and the range of things that could go wrong was extensive and not always visible until something had already gone wrong.
[Read more]In 1992, Professor Alice Mallard wrote that artificial intelligence was still largely a matter of explicit rules—systems that reasoned by applying formal logic to defined inputs and producing outputs that could be traced back through the inference chain to their premises.
[Read more]I sent a specific question to an organisation capable of answering it.
The question was simple, contained, answerable by anyone with access to the relevant information. It required no investigation, no consultation, no escalation to a specialist. It was the kind of question that exists precisely because organisations of this kind hold the information required to answer it, and people outside those organisations do not.
The reply arrived promptly. It did not answer the question.
[Read more]The word narcissist has escaped the clinic. It circulates now in ordinary conversation, in social media posts, in the accounts people give of difficult relationships and disappointing colleagues and parents who did not manage to be what their children needed.
[Read more]Fred shared my data. When I objected, he said: No ill intent meant.
The sentence was offered as a defence. It functioned as a dismissal.
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