Many thanks to the charismatic host, Carlos Ponce, for generously inviting me to share my views!

www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zj0Y...

Majority of people today hold that AI is “just fancy autocomplete” which belies the fact that they are uninformed, or barely informed.

And those compressed internal representations of the world consist of language-dependent concepts, such as time, space, causality, physical constraints, intents, social norms, conventions, consensus, emotional patterns, truths, lies, etc."

AI is then able to perform inferences over such compressed internal representations of the world.

Informed people: "AI is trained on pattern recognition. Once trained, AI is equipped with the compressed internal representation of the world, as captured by natural languages and the copious content available to all humans who can read.

Barely informed people: "AI is doing fuzzy search relying on probabilistic pattern recognition to bet that the next word in the word salad it produces will appear to make sense to human readers."

I've seen too many instances of sloppy code throwing an exception and then in the catch refuses to do anything useful, just bail and continue as if nothing happened. Terrible approach to engineering.

I'd prefer to design a system in which any time a proverbial gun goes off, the shot is very audible and the system responds immediately.

tech support crew is almost always in the position to understand the system better than the people who have actually built the system.

And to me, the key to success lies in mastering the system. Systems thinking, systems programming is the secret sauce.

While software developers tend to suffer from the infamous "nose to the grindstone" syndrome, where they get lost in the weeds and often cannot discern forest from the trees,

Well, after spending 35 years doing professional software development, leading, coaching, teaching and mentoring software professionals, I've concluded that, for me personally, the best mode of collaboration has always been with the tech support teams (I include QA guys in that bracket).

They go, "Alex, we want you to lead the SDLC transformation initiative, and you have two options:

1. Join and lead our team of software developers

2. Join and lead out team of tech support staff

What's your call?"

Believe it or not, I'd choose option 2.

Why?