Category: Blog

IT, Data, Work

  • What I am Missing in Most GenAI Conversations

    When people talk about Generative AI, the focus is usually on:

    • Prompting
    • LLMs
    • Chatbots
    • Proofs of Concept (POCs)

    But what I am missing a lot in those conversations are:

    1. Try classic automation first
    2. Process integration: Can I add it into a process so that it fixes a problem?
    3. Data privacy
    4. Security
    5. Works council/employee representation (if applicable)
    6. Observability (not just the usual observability but also prompts and responses)
    7. Robust data pipelines (a.k.a ETL)
    8. Model Selection
    9. Model decay & re-evaluation (How often will you need to update? Currently about ~1x / year)
    10. Regulatory Compliance AI Act (EU)
    11. Costs (Tokens, maintenance, scaling — over years, not demo days)
    12. Scalability
    13. Latency & Performance:
    14. Testing (“it works in demo” ≠ “it works in production with real users”)
    15. Human-in-the-Loop (HITL):
    16. The other 95% of the app (The “boring” software stack around the AI)
    17. APIs (If it’s meant to automate, it needs to talk to other systems)

    If there’s a user interface:

    • Interface design & UX (no one uses what they can’t understand)

    And the elephant in the room:

    • How do you address the fear—justified or not—that you might be innovating people out of their jobs?

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  • The Architect I Never Knew I Was

    For years, whenever someone asked me what I do, I described my projects and activities, like “I worked on a cloud migration, reduced technical debt, refactored systems to be cloud-native, designed environments for scalability, cost effectiveness and security, …”. But I could never express in a TL;DR what I really did. My official title “Senior Process Manager” wasn’t very helpfull as well.

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  • Why Your Favorite AI Tool Might Be Isolating You

    AI chat tools are a remarkable invention. Their rapid adoption speaks for itself: instant access to information, tailored feedback, and the ability to explore ideas or discuss one own thoughts or questions without friction – never before did we have such opportunities. But this power can come with a risk.

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  • Don’t promote your most talented technologists into people management

    I just attended an event where Casey West also demoed some stuff. Just now I found his blog at https://caseywest.com as well. And scrolling through, I saw his post A Call for More Tech Leadership from 2015 where he writes:

    Don’t promote your most talented technologists into people management. Promote them into technical leadership roles instead.

    Casey West

    Well it’s 10 years later and still just true!

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  • How to guide your teams to use GenAI effectively while avoiding the pitfalls

    We often see and hear a lot of hype and – unfortunately – enshittification when it comes to GenAI. Despite knowing that there are indeed some valuable use cases for the application of AI to solve some issues, I rarely read about a employee friendly adoption of GenAI.

    The article AI for Network Managers: Leading Teams in the Age of Intelligent Automation was a quite refreshing read in that regard!

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  • A Vacuum Robot should not Require a permanent Internet Connection

    Today morning I read a really nice article / blog post “The Day My Smart Vacuum Turned Against Me“. The whole story is about a guy who disallowed his smart vacuum cleaner to access the internet. After a while it failed, got repaired, failed again, got repaired and after all stopped working.

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  • Github Copilot is the Coach I always Wanted

    We hear a lot about the bad side of AI Code Generation etc. But there are also quite some good sides that should not be ignored.

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  • Open Source Resilience: Forks and Kindness

    For a while now, I’ve been considering running my own RSS aggregator … for a couple of reasons (that don’t matter here). In my shortlist were two popular candidates: Tiny Tiny RSS (ttrss) and FreshRSS. Due to lack of time and other priorites, I had not made a decision, which one to follow ..

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  • Should We Welcome Bots for Fact Checking?

    In today’s digital age, we’ve all noticed how rapidly fake news can be generated, especially with the help of generative Generative AI. Just today, I found myself having to do a fact-check for something I posted — and I decided to leverage to test it. And I have to admit, I was genuinely surprised at just how easy and efficient it was.

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  • Mistral – the European ChatGPT

    OK, I admit that I’m sometimes too focused on technology to realise that not everyone is aware of all the different AI services out there. — This week, I mentioned Mistral.ai to a colleague and was surprised that he hadn’t heard of it. But, as I said, you can’t know everything.

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