Voice of the DBA

Author: way0utwest

  • The Degradation of the Turing Test

    The Turing Test from Alan Turing was proposed as a test of an intelligent system. Could a human determine if the other party in a conversation was a machine? This was an interesting way of imagining how powerful a computer might grow and the types of answers it might give to a human. Interestingly enough Turing didn’t argue about the correctness of the answers, just that they appeared to be from a human.

    In some sense, I wonder how many people would have been fooled by the GPT-3 bot on Reddit. It posted comments for a week to a variety of threads. You can look through the posts by the “thegentlemetre” user, but this one caught my eye, and as I read it, I was surprised how much this looks like things I’ve seen posted on the Internet.

    Is this AI bot intelligent? I don’t know, but I do think that the quality of comments and posts on all sorts of threads and articles seems to go down over the years. Maybe it’s humans that are becoming worse at online communications rather than computers are getting smarter. Really, I think both things are happening.

    AI/ML systems are getting better at mimicking what humans do, and I suspect that in many cases, especially in small samples, they can fool many people, perhaps most. That’s disconcerting, especially as I already feel many people are a worse version of themselves online, without feedback and social cues directly available. Having bots add to the volume of poor communications and comments doesn’t seem useful to society in general.

    While I do think that AI systems can dramatically help us with mundane tasks and tedious work, I also think there can be problems if they become rigid in their actions, without allowing for some flexibility. Humans have discretion, and while they might not use it fairly, or even in ways that their organizations approve of, but they are flexible. Seeing these posts, I wonder if the AIs can learn to be flexible as well. I think they can be.

    Steve Jones

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  • Daily Coping 15 Oct 2020

    I started to add a daily coping tip to the SQLServerCentral newsletter and to the Community Circle, which is helping me deal with the issues in the world. I’m adding my responses for each day here.

    Today’s tip is to look out for positive news and reasons to be cheerful today.

    I actually tend to look for positive news in social media, but only in a couple places. The first is Instagram, where I post some pictures, primarily for my Mom and friends. I have a few accounts I follow, and I like to see what other people post, what captures their imagination, and often, what makes them smile.

    Often, that’s a lift for me because most people share the exciting and happy moments.

    The other place is LinkedIn, where I tend to see less complaining, but more people showcasing what they’ve done well in their careers. I can like, comment, and praise them for their efforts.

    There is good news elsewhere, but often buried in lots of no-good news.

  • Bean Counting to Burnout

    I was listening to a story about healthcare in the US recently. This was an interview with Vivian Lee, the author of The Long Fix, which proposes some ways to improve the system under which I live. I thought it was a good interview, and I am looking forward to reading the book.

    There was one stretch in the interview that caught my ear, and that was on the struggles of many modern doctors in the US to avoid burnout. A part of the reason for this is the amount of paperwork they must complete, which takes away from many of the reasons they got into practicing medicine.

    I know that many people in IT professions work long hours. We have lots of deadlines to meet, on call responsibilities, and the pressures to ensure that our systems work well for customers and clients. We don’t necessarily have the upside that doctors do, so working harder doesn’t necessarily lead to more compensation.

    On top of the work we do, there seem to be no shortage of meetings in many companies, though I don’t hear too many complaints about paperwork. However, with the move to more OpEx and cloud services, I wonder if we will have to deal with more paperwork in the future, more reporting, and more accountability for the financial side of our departments.

    I would like to think that we will continue to work with technology most of the time, and I hope that after this pandemic that most managers will cut down on meetings and start to trust more people to get work done without oversight. We certainly have enough of a risk of burnout without the added burden of unnecessary meetings and paperwork.

    Steve Jones

  • Writing Output from Powershell

    One of the things we often want to do when building a PoSh script is to get some output. I first learned about Write-Host, but I learned over time that this isn’t the best way to do this. Most of the early scripts I saw used this, so I was confused until I went through a few of this post: Write-Host Considered Harmful. This is from Jeffrey Snover, the inventor of PoSh.

    In the post, he notes that most of the time we don’t want to use Write-Host, because this means we can’t use the output of a command in the pipeline. For debugging you might think that this doesn’t matter, but Write-Debug is better.

    He recommend Write-Output, which is something I want to start to use. That, or Write-Verbose, so the user can get more or less output as needed.

    Hopefully this will help me to better write PoSh code that others can easily use.