Technology and Innovation Musings - Alenka Caserman

So ChatGPT, large language models, generative AI etc is so awesome, right  Well, let me tell you a little story. Yesterday I had to renew two Microsoft certifications. Renewal exams are open book so you can search the internet to find the correct answer. I'll interpret that as, "you may use ChatGPT / Copilot / whatever to help with exam questions". They were the two "solution architect expert" certifications too that I really don't want to let expire. I won't say I was lazy, but I was feeling particularly unenthusiastic about having to use my brain on that day when I just wanted to get out of the house ASAP and go spend my time on something useful, such as... building a boat, for example. A brilliant idea popped into my head - hey, why don't I copy paste the exam questions into Copilot as fast as I can and smash through this renewal exam in like 15 minutes. I did just that. Now I won't say I'm proud of doing...

  Today, I decided to organise my bookshelf to make some space for my more recent favourite pieces. I opened the bottom "closed" section of the bookshelf, which already acts as an archive space of some sort, and I immediately chuckled at these three rather chunky volumes. SQL Server 2005 - that's ancient history! I purchased these books more than 15 years ago, in the early days of my IT career, when I was studying for my first Microsoft certification exam. Many years have passed since then I had a very successful career as a software developer and solution architect. I can definitely say C# is still one of my favourite programming languages and I could whip out some C# code with ease even if you roused me from sleep a 3AM. It's well and truly time to throw these out.

Well, the other day, I got really frustrated with an app I've been using on my Garmin watch to track my wing foiling sessions. It kept crashing while I was on the water and I had to restart it several times when I noticed it crashed. I wasn't sure if the crashes meant the session recording data was completely or only partially lost. This is definitely not something I want to be worried about when I'm out on the water having fun wing foiling. I would also prefer to have my sessions recorded reliably as a single session so I can see how my skills are progressing and have reliable session statistics available in the Garmin Connect dashboard. This wasn't the first app I installed from the Garmin App Store either. Oh no, I think I installed and tried at least four, and some of them didn't even start or run to a point where I'd be able to test them. App crashing was a disappointingly common occurrence. When I came home that day, I decided to look into Garmin app devel...

Unless you’ve been living under a rock, you will know that the year 2023 in tech was all about Generative AI or GenAI for short. I’m sure the hype will, of course, continue well into 2024. I’ve worked in the tech industry for long enough to see many hyped-up new trends and promising emerging technologies come and go through this hype cycle. Even Gartner places Generative AI on the so-called peak of inflated expectations in its 2023 report on the Hype Cycle for Emerging Technologies [1]. GenAI is a subset or an emerging field of models and techniques within the field of artificial intelligence, that goes beyond what we already know as descriptive, predictive and prescriptive analytics and is capable of creating or generating various types of data such as text, images, code and audio in response to descriptive text prompt. In this article, my thoughts refer particularly to text generating capabilities of GenAI which are currently the most mature and readily available for consumption in t...