Although autonomous LLMs are inherently unreliable, there’s a long software tradition of building reliable layers on top of unreliable layers. That applies here too. We can’t guarantee that you’ll …| Jon Udell
In the mid-1990s you could create useful software without being an ace coder. You had Visual Basic, you had a rich ecosystem of components, you could wire them together to create apps, standing on …| Jon Udell
We mostly don’t want to read the docs, but we do want to converse with them. When we build search interfaces for our docs, we have always tried to anticipate search intentions. People aren’t just l…| Jon Udell
The great adventure of my birth family was the fifteen months we lived in New Delhi, from June of 1961, on a USAID-sponsored educational mission. So the destruction of USAID feels personal. I’…| Jon Udell
This Fresh Air interview with Hanif Kureishi had me riveted from the beginning, for one reason, and then at the end for a different reason. Kureishi is best known as the author of the 1985 British …| Jon Udell
A few years ago I abandoned Twitter in favor of Mastodon. Recent events validate that choice and underscore the strategic importance of a decentralized fediverse that can’t be owned by a single cor…| Jon Udell
The JavaScript industrial complex won’t crumble anytime soon. But the stage is set for a return to an ecosystem of reusable components accessible to business developers, only this time based on the…| Jon Udell
Perhaps, even though they are not themselves explainable, AIs can help us engineer explainable systems. But I’m not optimistic. It feels like we’re on a path to keep making systems harder for human…| Jon Udell
The first time I heard a critique of mediated experience, the critic was my dad. He was an avid photographer who, during our family’s year in India, when I was a young child, used his 35mm Ex…| Jon Udell
Earlier efforts to diagram software with LLM assistance weren’t fruitful, but this time around things went really well. I ended up with exactly what I needed to explain the architecture of a …| Jon Udell
“If you work with these cloud platforms every day, you have doubtless forgotten that you ever had questions like these. But every newcomer does. And on a continuing basis, we are all newcomer…| Jon Udell
There are plenty of ways to use LLMs ineffectively. For best results, lean into your own intelligence, experience, and creativity. Delegate the boring and routine stuff to closely supervised assistants whose work you can easily check. Mix Human Expertise With LLM Assistance for Easier Coding Part of the LLM series at The New Stack.| Jon Udell
In How and why to write letters to voters I discussed Vote Forward, my favorite way for those of us who aren’t in swing states to reach out to voters in swing states. The site works really well for adopting batches of voters, and downloading packets of form letters. As I close in on 1000 … Continue reading Making a Vote Forward checklist| Jon Udell
I was aware of The Geysers, a geothermal field about 35 miles north of my home in Santa Rosa, but I never gave it much thought until my first bike ride through the area. Then I learned a number of …| Jon Udell
On a recent trip I saw this pair of Latin phrases tattooed on the back of a flight attendant’s arms: Left: Deo absente. Right: Deum culpa. I took Latin in middle school, and could guess what the combination might mean. It’s not a common construction, and a search seems to confirm my guess. Both Google … Continue reading deo absente deum culpa| Jon Udell
Powerpipe dashboards can now connect not only to Steampipe but also to SQLite and DuckDB. This creates a combinatorial explosion of possibilities, including dashboards that use SQL to visualize large datasets read from Parquet files by DuckDB. SQL Translation From Postgres to SQLite and DuckDB Part of the LLM series at The New Stack.| Jon Udell
“Communities that want to build comprehensive public calendars will be able to do so using a hybrid approach that blends existing iCalendar feeds with feeds synthesized from web calendars. It…| Jon Udell
“Users of the WordPress API may enjoy the abstraction — and standardization — that a SQL interface provides. If you need to query multiple WordPress sites, Steampipe’s connection aggregator will be really handy. And if you want to integrate data from WordPress with data from other APIs wrapped by other plugins in the Steampipe hub, … Continue reading Building a Steampipe Plugin — and Powerpipe Dashboards — for WordPress| Jon Udell
“Some argue that by aggregating knowledge drawn from human experience, LLMs aren’t sources of creativity, as the moniker “generative” implies, but rather purveyors of mediocrity. Yes and no. …| Jon Udell
Here’s the latest installment in the series on working with LLMS: https://thenewstack.io/choosing-when-to-use-or-not-use-llms-as-a-developer/ For certain things, the LLM is a clear win. If I’m looking at an invalid blob of JSON that won’t even parse, there’s no reason to avoid augmentation. My brain isn’t a fuzzy parser — I’m just not wired to see that kind … Continue reading When not to LLM| Jon Udell
If you don’t live in a swing state, but would like to do more than just send money to help encourage voter turnout in those places, what are your options? For me the best one is Vote Forward,…| Jon Udell
My family, on my dad’s side, were Jews from Poland and Ukraine. His parents came to America before the shit hit the fan, but I grew up knowing two people who weren’t so lucky. Seymour M…| Jon Udell
For a long time there were only two essential things that I carried everywhere: keys and wallet. Two was a manageable number of objects that I had to remember to put into pockets, and two was a manageable number of pockets to put them in. Then my first phone bumped that number to three. When … Continue reading The things we carry| Jon Udell
Here’s the latest installment in the series on working with LLMS: Although streamlined publishing of screenshots is nice, the biggest win comes from reviewing and revising in Google Docs; whi…| Jon Udell
Here’s the latest installment in the series on working with LLMS: It was only after I deployed the function and used it in three different dashboards that the penny finally dropped. This had …| Jon Udell
Here’s the latest installment in the series on working with LLMS: I keep returning to the theme of choral explanations (#4 on my list of best practices), and it’s especially relevant in…| Jon Udell
Here’s the latest installment in the series on working with LLMS: Writing documentation from scratch is as uncommon as writing code from scratch. More typically, you’re updating or expanding …| Jon Udell
Here’s the latest installment in the series on working with LLMS: Creating a GPT Assistant That Writes Pipeline Tests. Once you get the hang of writing these tests, it’s mostly boilerplate, s…| Jon Udell
Here’s the latest installment in the series on working with LLMS: How to Learn Unfamiliar Software Tools with ChatGPT. Ideally, tools like GeoGebra and Metabase provide interfaces so intuitiv…| Jon Udell
I’ve happily used MS Paint as my basic bitmap editor since Windows 3, almost 25 years ago. Mostly I’ve used it to create images from screenshots, but that has suddenly become way harder. Formerly, when I’d cut a region, the now-empty region would display using the default white background. Now it displays a checkered background … Continue reading You say feature, I say bug: the enshittification of Microsoft Paint| Jon Udell
Here’s number 12 in the series on LLM-assisted coding over at The New Stack: Let’s Talk: Conversational Software Development I keep coming back to the theme of the first article in this serie…| Jon Udell
Last week I had to convert a table in a Google Doc to a JSON structure that will render as an HTML page. This is the sort of mundane task that burns staggering amounts of information workers’…| Jon Udell
When Twitter changed hands last November I switched to Mastodon; ever since I’ve enjoyed happier and more productive social networking. To enhance my happiness and productivity I began workin…| Jon Udell
In Mapping the wider fediverse I showed how a new table added to the Mastodon plugin — mastodon_domain_block — enables queries that find which servers are moderating which other servers…| Jon Udell
In Mastodon relationship graphs I showed how to use Steampipe to map Mastodon network neighborhoods. When I use the word map here, I’m channeling Denis Wood’s The Power of Maps: Every m…| Jon Udell
On a recent episode of You’re Wrong About, Sarah Marshall delivered a crisp summary of how the 24-hour news cycle came to be. This led me to realize that many among us do not remember when ne…| Jon Udell
The Fediverse is wired together by protocols like ActivityPub and WebFinger which, as yet, I know very little about. That’s because the Steampipe plugin, which supports the dashboards I’…| Jon Udell
The Mastodon dashboards I’ve been developing and describing in this series are backed by a Steampipe plugin that translates SQL queries to Mastodon API calls. Like all Steampipe plugins you c…| Jon Udell
Since the early days of the blogosphere I have cherished the ability to view the world through the eyes of people more qualified than me to understand and explain what happens in particular domains…| Jon Udell
The new release of Steampipe is all about relationship graphs. Our blog post shows how these graphs provide contextual awareness for devops and security pros who can now see all the resources relat…| Jon Udell
In Lists and people on Mastodon I showed how I added a list column to the following tab of the Mastodon browser I’m building. That was a step in the direction of easier and more powerful list…| Jon Udell
Buoyed by the success of my LLM-assisted refactoring exercise, I set a new and (for me) more ambitious goal. While the refactoring task was a bit challenging, I didn’t have to learn new conce…| Jon Udell
I’d been needing to refactor the pagination logic in the Mastodon plugin for Steampipe. After a couple of abortive tries, I took another run at it this week with the help of the latest genera…| Jon Udell
My original Mastodon account was on mastodon.social. I chose it because it’s the largest instance, it’s operated by the developers of the service, and it runs the reference implementati…| Jon Udell
Welcome to episode 17 of the Steampipe+Mastodon series, in which we introduce a new subplot: timeline history. So far, the examples I’ve shown and discussed work with current timelines. We…| Jon Udell
I began this journey convinced that Steampipe could help the Fediverse evolve, but not sure exactly how. My first thought was to use Steampipe’s API-wrangling superpower to study patterns of …| Jon Udell
I hadn’t thought to use Mastodon lists until I read the Frustration with lists chapter of Martin Fowler’s Exploring Mastodon, in which he writes: I like lists because they allow me to d…| Jon Udell
I’ve been discussing Mastodon UX wishlists with some new acquaintances there. This excerpt from A Bloomberg terminal for Mastodon concludes with part of my own wishlist. In a Mastodon timelin…| Jon Udell
As I mentioned last time, the Steampipe dashboard for Mastodon has evolved in unexpected ways. I imagined that the components — a| Jon Udell