Totally A Thing

About 130 years ago, a scientist made a discovery that he could expose photographic paper to emissions from a glass tube and it went straight through human flesh and formed an image. It was astonishing, interesting, and he reported it and the entire world went batshit crazy, completely bananas. We all think, apparently, that we’re just doing all this — the so-called “AI revolution” — for the first...

The Attention is All You Need paper started the LLM gold rush, but it initially came from Google scientists who only expected it to do language translation. As more data was used in training sets, and the number of parameters grew orders of magnitude it was less easy to understand what the model was doing. Emergent Instruction Following In Ars Technica from 2023 we have this summary of how the “em...

Chris Lehane is making our Governments Work for creepy AI companies This screenshot from a recent Karen Hao / A More Perfect Union video shows unintentionally what is going on: Lehane is like a disinformation grenade lobbed out of OpenAI at government. His job is not to make better AI. He is a PR guy, a spin merchant. His job is to create the second leg of these failing AI company’s financial stra...

Anthropomorphising generative AI is wrong: we know that . But making the ChatGPT product successful includes hooking folks on its sycophantic charms and confident - but often wrong - pronouncements. So OpenAI and other vendors keep packing anthropomorphic language & features into its product. This has the dangerous effect of eroding the self-concept of its users , and causing them to drop their gu...

Why do investors think AI companies are like Uber or AWS (big spend for years, big profits in the end) when the truth is they’re more like WeWork, FTX and Theranos? If you are not an investor, but someone who uses AI — please, for the love of all that is holy — divest now. Delete the app going into the holiday season, and learn to live without whatever you thought it was doing for you. Call your f...

I worked on Google’s ads serving infrastructure as a software engineer at their Mountain View, California HQ from 2007-2009. The system was complex, and included two AI clusters involved in predicting the best ads to show against a given search result. Google also had a very innovative market for ads, where advertisers could bid for words that folks searching on Google had used in their search ter...

Data centres for AI use huge amounts of electricity and cooling water. But there’s folks that want to muddy the waters about these facts, and so they are using AI to generate junk science. As I say in the video quibbling over water that is “consumed” versus “withdrawn” is pointless argumentation used by AI boosters to cloud the facts. When climate change denialists wanted to attack clean energy in...

Hey all, I’ve looked better and felt better! But after getting out of hospital I just wanted to show that I am on the mend, and will be back writing in the coming days. Hospital stays are not fun, and for 7 days involving rigors and being on a drip was awful. But I’m back, and getting healthy again. Also I have a qualification that I’ve been studying towards (to allow me to teach in Australia, in...

Working through a series by Lesser Dog Tutorials on how to make a LucasArts style point and click adventure in Blueprints, I have instead of using Blueprints I have been translating everything into C++, and it’s so much fun. Totally a Thing is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. Feels like doing a crossword and a ha...

I have been struggling to write this article, and figure out what to do with this cartoon / diagram I made about the alleged use of stolen books by AI companies for weeks now. The sheer scale and brazen bullying greed of these guys just astonishes me. I believe startups and technology have the ability for great good. But it’s being used to enrich the most powerful at the expense of the little guy....

Engineers love to deal in absolutes. We are trained for it, when we study mathematics, electronics and disciplines like finite element analysis or software development at University. It seems to us like everything in the world can be reduced to ones-and-zeroes, true and false. Business is not like that. You have to prioritise. It is a constant balancing act. Every time you choose to execute on an...

Why? In my previous talks on how to build an app I’ve discussed source control briefly. Github, owned by Microsoft, is probably the most popular cloud service for source control. OK, but how does that help me? If your app based startup is going great, then your team will be implementing product features and code for that will be going into your source control system many times a day. But what abou...

Google’s AI Preview is driving me insane! I just want web pages! Instead when I type a search, what happens? It thinks for a moment or two, then produces this bargain basement guess, summarised from whatever blended together soup of opinions it found on the web. I don’t want that! I never asked for that!! When I’m researching for my writing I need the actual facts. Many topics are highly dependent...

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit totallyathing.substack.com There’s some really great apps in the App Store and Google play store! When I was consulting, building apps for people in business, they’d show me Augmented Reality apps like Pokemon Go, or the Uber app with its live location tracking and ask “Can I get an app like that for my business?”

Welcome to the second post in my series on team dynamics. Last time I talked about communication and how it’s the best bang for your buck when it comes to solving issues that crop up in your app based start up.  I talked about how teams at any given time have a set level of competency which is not quickly changed. And I went on to cover how trying to motivate your team with pep talks, or worse bro...

This is the fifth post in my series how to build an app. We’ve already covered how to get your team together, shape up a product and build an app. But when that app and our team is working together as a business what does it look like? Milestone Release. Are We Done? When the team has been pushing for a milestone, and it comes to release, there's pressure to ramp up marketing and cut development c...

Imagine the throughput of your team is defined by this triangle - in this model the sides remain in constant proportion. Once you have hired someone competence is fixed. Lets assume you have a team and you want to make the best of them. Motivation - the mistake some leaders make is thinking what they have to do to get their team producing output is to crank up the motivation. Introduce crunch time...

In this episode the rubber hits the road and our app is being put to the test. Will it succeed or fail? To get to this point an appreneur — either an app-based startup, or an existing business creating an app — should already have things sorted, as laid out in previous episodes: * Business plan with fixed and growing costs, unique value and revenue * Product tested by selling value via a duct-tape...

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit totallyathing.substack.com In part 1 I looked at the Product Owner and UX Designer. I’m going to jump straight in to the next specialist in the team — the engineering manager . Related roles are team lead , project manager or scrum master . Their job is to resolve problems that may stand in the way of the success of their developers, UX...

This is a tie-in for my series on How to Build an App. Please checkout the other posts in that series, but especially the one on App Startup Canvas. Use the App Startup canvas to define the ground zero for your app development efforts: your team, your expertise, your plan to get revenue that will offset costs. Listen to the above to understand some important takeaways: * Your app is at the end of...

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit totallyathing.substack.com The traps that end many app startups are covered in this talk as they apply to how you and your team work to build your app. I’ll talk about the cycles, milestones and how those fit with launches. Then I cover the role of two critical professionals in the app development team: the UX Designer and Product Owner...

Hey, I have a great idea for an app! Can you tell me, just roughly is fine, how much would it cost? This question was one I fielded literally hundreds of times in the decade or so I was doing mobile app development in startup co-working spaces, after quit Google and Nokia to run my own app consulting business. The number one thing I that stopped more than half of these starry-eyed appreneurs from...

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit totallyathing.substack.com Apps are part of the fabric of the Internet Apps seem simple when you look at them! But we know companies like Facebook and Google; Twitter and Snapchat have hundreds, even thousands of people working on apps.

Get the benefit of 20 years of experience in mobile development to understand the real factors that should play into your choices about which platform to build your startup’s mobile app on. This is a free episode! Enjoy. If you get something out of this one, or on hearing my background want to find out what else I have in store on tech, culture, apps and startups then definitely subscribe - you ge...

Have you ever wondered what goes into building an app? What different kinds of apps are there? How can I get an app built? Follow this series of blog posts (indexed below) to find out the answers to these questions and all your other questions about building mobile apps. I’m Sarah Smith and I have been working with apps for over 20 years. I worked for Google and Nokia and then began building apps...