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Month: September 2024

Who’s the Boss?

Who’s the Boss?

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Image by Mohamed Hassan from Pixabay

Everyone’s over the lockdown, and it seems that the world is returning to business as usual. In fact, Amazon CEO announced that as of January 2, 2025, all Amazon employees would be required to return to the office full time. “Andy Jassy, who took over from founder Jeff Bezos in 2020, said the move to end the company’s hybrid model was designed toward “being better set up to invent, collaborate, and be connected enough to each other and our culture to deliver the absolute best for customers and the business,” NBC reported. “He noted that the company’s three-day-a-week policy, instituted in 2023, had only reinforced the view that a full return was necessary.”

“Amazon has become the latest firm to end working from home in the name of company culture—a PwC reports suggests it could have the opposite effect”, said Fortune by way of MSN. “The Big Four accounting firm conducted 13 months of research and surveyed over 20,000 business leaders, chief human resources officers and workers for its new Workforce Radar Report—and it found that hybrid workers feel more included and productive than those who sit at their company’s desk five days a week…Working in the office 5 days a week to build company culture is a myth, PwC report says.

According to a global online office hours we recently attended, most companies in Europe all back to a work from the office only policy. But is that the right policy today, when companies were literally kept alive during the lockdowns, due to remote work? Were there no takeaways from this inadvertent test of a new corporate work model in this age of technology? Read More...

LLMs and the Way Back Machine*

LLMs and the Way Back Machine*

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Image by Pete Linforth from Pixabay

First, a bit of history. At the dawn of the Web 1.0 era, everyone felt the need to have a presence on this new information superhighway.  Something. Anything. Businesses/corporations started putting up websites, which by today’s standards were placeholders, for which they paid millions to early web-focused ad agencies/web dev shops. But consultants to whom they paid thousands/hour advised them that this was what they needed to do, or their businesses/corporations would become irrelevant in this new tech age. For context, HTML coders were commanding salaries well into six figures. A lot of money was being thrown at a lot of youth and inexperience – web shops where the founders knew nothing about business, luckily, working with clients who knew nothing about the web. If the young founders walked into a client meeting with a palm pilot, they were clearly members of the digerati and you needed to go along with anything they said.

These young companies were renting way more office space than they needed, hiring way more employees than they needed, and were running out of money, so they’d throw a party, get some press, and get acquired by a large company/corporation. Who’d learn too late that they’d acquired little more than smoke and mirrors. But what they really bought was the hype.

Which is a large part of the reason why the Web 1.0 bubble burst. Read More...

LLMs and the Way Back Machine*

LLMs and the Way Back Machine*

Comments 0 Comment
Image by Pete Linforth from Pixabay

First, a bit of history. At the dawn of the Web 1.0 era, everyone felt the need to have a presence on this new information superhighway.  Something. Anything. Businesses/corporations started putting up websites, which by today’s standards were placeholders, for which they paid millions to early web-focused ad agencies/web dev shops. But consultants to whom they paid thousands/hour advised them that this was what they needed to do, or their businesses/corporations would become irrelevant in this new tech age. For context, HTML coders were commanding salaries well into six figures. A lot of money was being thrown at a lot of youth and inexperience – web shops where the founders knew nothing about business, luckily, working with clients who knew nothing about the web. If the young founders walked into a client meeting with a palm pilot, they were clearly members of the digerati and you needed to go along with anything they said.

These young companies were renting way more office space than they needed, hiring way more employees than they needed, and were running out of money, so they’d throw a party, get some press, and get acquired by a large company/corporation. Who’d learn too late that they’d acquired little more than smoke and mirrors. But what they really bought was the hype.

Which is a large part of the reason why the Web 1.0 bubble burst. Read More...

Data Collection 2.0 aka Defcon 3

Data Collection 2.0 aka Defcon 3

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 Said the Wall Street Journal, “More companies and government agencies out in the wild want to read our body parts. The Transportation Security Administration, for example, started scanning passengers’ faces instead of checking IDs. These groups say the biometric processes are meant to eliminate friction, save time and reduce lines.”

Why is that always the party line? To make our lives easier? To save us time? Does it? Ask anyone who has been a victim of identity theft, and remember “the huge Facebook data breach, in which upwards of 533 million Facebook users from 106 countries had personal data leaked online, including phone numbers, Facebook IDs, birthdates — you name it,” The Verge reported. Not that Facebook even bothered to tell users.

Yes, your phone has your fingerprint or faceprint. Fine, that’s native to your phone – or so they say. What about once the info is sent to the cloud? Cybersecurity is not top of mind for many tech companies, as we well know by the number of hacks reported and that continue to be reported and FYI, Ransomware Attacks Reach Record Highs: Demands and Payments Continue to Soar – and are we even informed about what data of ours might have been compromised? Read More...