It’s Bad It’s So Bad It’s Good

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(This column is posted at www.StevenSavage.com, Steve’s Tumblr, and Pillowfort.  Find out more at my newsletter, and all my social media at my linktr.ee)

All right, it’s time to talk AI again. This also means I have to use my usual disclaimer of “what we call AI has been around for awhile, it’s been very useful and is useful, but we’re currently in an age of hype that’s creating a lot of crap.” Anyway, there, packed that disclaimer into one sentence, go me.

I’ve seen “AI-ish stuff” for 30 years, and the hype for it is way different this time.

Watching the latest hype for “AI” (that pile of math and language that people are cramming into everything needed or not) I started listening to the hype that also seemed to be a threat. We have to build this. We have to build this before bad guys build it. We have to build a good AI before a bad AI. This may all be dangerous anyway!

Part of current AI marketing seems to be deliberately threatening. In a lot of cases it’s the threat of AI itself, which you know, may not be a selling point. I mean I don’t want a tool that might blow up in my face. Also Colossus: The Forbin Project freaked me out as a kid and that was about competing AI’s teaming up so you’re not selling me with the threat that we have to make AI to stop AI.

But this marketing-as-threat gnawed at me. It sounded familiar, in that “man, that awful smell is familiar” type way. It also wasn’t the same as what I was used to in tech hype, and again, I’ve worked in tech for most of my life. Something was different.

Then it struck me. A lot of the “hype of the dangerous-yet-we-must-use-it” aspects of AI sounded like the lowest form of marketing aimed at men.

You know the stuff. THIS energy drink is SO dangerous YET you’re a wimp if you don’t try it. Take this course to make you a super-competitive business god – if you’re not chicken, oh and your competitors are taking it anyway. Plus about every Influencer on the planet with irrelevant tats promising to make you “more of a man” with their online course. The kind of stuff that I find insulting as hell.

Male or female I’m sure you’re used to seeing these kind of “insecure dude” marketing techniques. If you’re a guy, you’re probably as insulted as I am. Also you’d like them to stop coming into your ads thanks to algorithms.

(Really, look online ads, my prostate is fine and I’m not interested your weird job commercials).

Seeing the worst of AI hype as being no different than faux-macho advertisements aimed to sell useless stuff to insecure guys really makes it sit differently. That whiff of pandering and manipulation, of playing to insecurity mixed with power fantasies, is all there. The difference between the latest AI product and untested herbal potency drugs is nill.

And that tells me our current round of AI hype is way more about hype than actual product, and is way more pandering than a lot of past hype. And after 30+ years in IT, I’ve been insulted by a lot of marketing, and this is pretty bad.

With that realization I think I can detect and diagnose hype easier. Out of that I can navigate the current waters better – because if your product marketing seems to be a mix of scaring and insulting me, no thanks.

Steven Savage

Yellow Sticky Notes And Operating Costs

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(This column is posted at www.StevenSavage.com, Steve’s Tumblr, and Pillowfort.  Find out more at my newsletter, and all my social media at my linktr.ee)

Once, many years ago (I think in the 2010s?) I interviewed at a video editing software company to be a Project Manager. When I asked what tools they used to track work, they pointed at a glass divider covered in sticky notes. That was it, that’s how they wrote video editing software which, as you may guess, is not exactly a simple process.

If you’re familiar with Agile methods, it may not seem entirely unusual. If you’re not familiar, then I’ll summarize all-too-simply: Agile is about breaking work into small, easy, tested chunks as you go through a larger list of work. It’s basically quick, evaluated development of software in order of importance.

So sticky notes were, in theory, all you needed for Agile, especially if the Product Owner (person with The Big List Of Stuff To Do) had their act together. I’m going to assume this company had one that did since, hey, sticky notes.

This experience stuck with me. Now, some 15+ years later, having used many project management tools, having seem many technical innovations, being friends with people in tech for decades, a lot of us seem to want the sticky notes back.

We’re beset by enormous choices of tools and the tools have choices. You can buy this software package or that and integrate them. All of them have their own workflow which you have to learn, but you can also customize your workflow so you can confuse yourself your own way. Plus you have to work with everyone else’s tools together in some half-baked integration.

But when all of that doesn’t work, does the tool fix it? Nope you get to! So soon you’re downloading a spreadsheet from one tool, to load into another tool, then you have to correct the issues. That’s if you can think like the people that designed the tools or the workflow, and those people weren’t you.

Past a certain point all our new helpful tools require so much learning and reconciliation, we might want to use sticky notes. And yes, I have met people who still use sticky notes in otherwise high-tech organizations.

I’ve begun to wonder if we’ve entered an era where we’re so awash in tools that the price of learning them, customizing them, and integrating them outweighs their value. This is amplified by the latest updates and changes from vendors, companies being bought out, or regulation and policy changes. There’s a lot of change and adaption that we have to put time into so we theoretically become efficient in the time left.

And that’s before there’s a software outage somewhere in the Rube Goldberg world of ours that brings it all to a halt. I’m looking at you, Crowdstrike, I still have trauma as I write this.

I’m finding a great test of good software is to ask how it would work if it wasn’t software. What if was, I don’t know – done by yellow sticky notes? What if the software wasn’t software but a human recorded, human run physical process. Would it still make sense?

This is something I noticed working with certain medical and research software. Some of it may have old-school looks, or be specialized, but it works (and has to or people get hurt). I once took a training course on medical software and it was both insanely complex because of medical processes, but in review everything I learned made perfect sense and I could see how it’d be done on yellow sticky notes. Even I, some IT nerd who shouldn’t be allowed anywhere near a patient could figure out how this all came together – and had decades before the software existed.

Sometimes it’s worth asking “what if we did this old school” to see what the software should do and how much cost there would be in changing everything or making it incoherent.

And, hey, maybe you’ll just go back to the sticky notes. Maybe you should.

Steven Savage

Evil, Opposition, and Inscrutability

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(This column is posted at www.StevenSavage.com, Steve’s Tumblr, and Pillowfort.  Find out more at my newsletter, and all my social media at my linktr.ee)

“Hey are these people evil or just stupid?”

“Do they really believe in what they say?”

I’ve heard this for most of my life in some form of political discussion. We see more of this right now because of the politics of 2025. But the question haunts humanity – are the terrible things people do belief or stupidity? It’s as if we want the comfort of knowing someone chose evil, because if they didn’t, then more of us can do evil for other reasons. There’s an absolution in being able to label someone stupid or foolish figuring that will never be you.

This is also something that has bedeviled me in project management, to a lesser ethical degree. One often confronts poor decisions, and as I work in IT where poor decisions accumulate in the form of code and hilarious security breaches, one confronts history as well. There is nothing like a decade of “who the hell made this call?” rattling around your head (worse, when you find the person in question might be you).

I’d like to propose a third option that sometimes people’s bad decisions can be born of opposition.

Among my many interests is why people believe conspiracy theories. A theory I’ve seen pop up a few times is they’re often a form of Oppositional Defiant Disorder – that many (not all) a conspiracy theorist believes in conspiracy theories as a form of opposition. They’re hard to talk out of it as opposition just hardens their beliefs.

We’ve all dealt with people like that (a few times, we may BE that person), where telling someone they’re wrong makes them “wrong harder.” With conspiracy theorists – especially the ones who make a living at it podcasting and writing or being in politics – many will buckle down on their beliefs. If you think about it, that means they have a believe structure that is increasingly and aggressively wrong and they act on it.

Now imagine someone making very bad decisions and choices. But not out of malice or actual believe, but literally because their entire structure is composed of ideas created in opposition to critique. They act in a form of anti-belief.

Go ahead, think over the bad choices not just in today’s politics but in finance, software, and your job. How many people made absolutely the worst decisions that would be explained by the fact that at some point they did the opposite of common sense just due to opposition to advice.

If you get very “oppositional” to good advice, you WILL construct a worldview and policies and plans based on the worst stuff you can do. It might not necessarily be evil, but as it’s a very active form of stupidity, it gets close.

Now, look at the world and ask if certain people got told no so often they literally do the worst choices only to avoid the better choices they were told?

Steven Savage