Machine Learning
Beige… Beige everywhere…
I was a lot more naive when I was starting out. I thought that everyone had every resource in the world to have the best technology available to them. And with that naivety, if I saw a problem that could be solved with a technology solution, I would recommend the dumbest things to clients. Effectively, I’d suggest bringing a nuclear button to a knife fight - overkill and useless.
It took a while, but I eventually learned the obvious - that companies don’t invest in the latest technology because the value proposition just isn’t there. Its not a priority and the juice isn’t worth the squeeze. It’s usually not a problem until something breaks and you realize that everyone that knows how to fix the old thing has already retired.
But another really common reason I saw that wasn’t so obvious, and still continue to see, is that many times people with a problem are either not speaking up or don’t have the tools to speak up. As I matured, I realized the most value I was able to provide to my clients was not in the technology know-how, but providing the soft skills to identify problems, solutions, and massaging their message to define their problems and convince others on what they need.
With all the buzz about AI automation stealing everyone’s jobs, ChatGPT being weird, StableDiffusion and Dall-E in lawsuits, Google Bard, Microsoft’s Bing upgrade, I have to remind myself of the people that are impacted by all externalities.
I’ll still laugh out loud when I see a Walmart fan in the middle of a server room, though.
This comic was pretty involved, mainly because of how I wanted to depict the clustered mess of the server room. My speed in producing the comics is going up. But as I increase speed, and perhaps proficiency, I’m increasing the scope of these things. Oddly, the amount of time to create each one is actually staying the same. I’m having a ton of fun creating every single detail - the magnetic tape of the mainframes, floppies everywhere, the tangled wires on the floor. Oh, and the dot matrix printer is my favorite. I think I’ll try to my next one will be much more simple though and see how I like it.
Maybe I’ll ask ChatGPT…
Ramen