“I was in Boston recently and visited Old Ironsides at its berth, coincidentally at a time when the ship was being painted. I chatted with one of the supervisors and asked him about the length of the government specifications for this particular job. He said it numbered two hundred pages and laughed in embarrassment when I told him to take a look at the glass display case showing the original specification to build the ship in 1776, which was all of three pages.” - Ben Rich, from Skunk Works: A Personal Memoir of My Years at Lockheed

“The Turing test, developed by Alan Turing in 1950, is a test of a machine’s ability to exhibit intelligent behavior equivalent to, or indistinguishable from, that of a human.”
- Wikipedia

I’d heard this neat story recently, on the More or Less Human episode of Radiolab, on how it has become easier to write a chatbot that passes to Turing test, because how we communicate has changed.

Over the last 5-10 years, most of our chat clients (eg: Messages, WhatsApp, Android Messages) have auto-complete, canned responses. Often, when you try to type something unique, the chat client suggests something else.

One of the benefits of commuting across the top of Toronto on North America’s busiest highway is I have lots of time to listen to my favorite podcasts.

One series I follow is called Revisionist History, a podcast hosted by Malcolm Gladwell, an author known for writing about research in social sciences, often presented alongside observations and stories. This season has started with a discussion between Malcolm Gladwell and Adam Grant, where, among a number of topics, they talked about the impact of teams on individual contributions and outcomes.

A co-worker recently came back from training, and shared some of the techniques that were presented.

One that sounded interesting was, in planning, try swapping roles to elicit different ideas. For example, have a developer act as product owner, and speak to priorities, and have a product owner speak to effort and commitment. Role playing is more common when identifying personas to help define user stories, but I hadn’t heard of anyone doing this within a scrum team - we typically go into a planning session as our assigned roles. This is also similar to the ideas presented in Edward de Bono in Six Thinking Hats, where he suggests you try to place yourself in a specific mode of thinking (eg: emotional, creative) to approach problems from a different perspective.

Although not related to IT, there are ideas worth considering as we think about our systems in the following book:
Antifragile: Things That Gain from Disorder by Nassim Nicholas Taleb

“Just as human bones get stronger when subjected to stress and tension, and rumors or riots intensify when someone tries to repress them, many things in life benefit from stress, disorder, volatility, and turmoil. What Taleb has identified and calls “antifragile” is that category of things that not only gain from chaos but need it in order to survive and flourish.”

I spent a good portion of my childhood in front of a Commodore Amiga 500, an amazing home computer for the late 1980s. I purchased mine used, after having saved months of hard-earned income delivering newspapers.

When author Brian Bagnall created a Kickstarter campaign to fund Commodore: The Amiga Years, a book about the history of the Amiga in 2015, I backed it. As Kickstarter projects go, 2 years later, I received it (now you can buy it on Amazon).