#operations
8 posts on this topic.
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Software doesn’t age by being used
Running a program doesn’t wear it out. It ages by being left alone — and whoever lets that go far enough ends up buying not maintenance, but the application all over again.
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A machine will read the invoice. Telling who it’s from is harder.
A document can be read entirely correctly and still nobody can tell who it belongs to. That’s where the expensive part begins — and you can tell a good system by what it does when it isn’t sure.
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When a machine retypes the invoices
With incoming invoices, the easy part is reading them, not deciding what can be trusted. So when the owner asks why artificial intelligence isn’t retyping them from PDFs instead of the bookkeeper, the short answer is that it can.
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A website without a consent banner
A consent banner isn’t a tax on counting visitors — it’s the price of storing something in their browser and recognizing them by it next time. Yet whenever visitor numbers come up with a new website, the same worry follows: that counting will be paid for with an annoying banner to click away.
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AI that your data won’t leave
Companies want AI for summarizing and sorting text, but they’re afraid of sending their data outside. A language model can also run on a computer of your own — its answers are worse than the big online ones, but for plenty of tasks it’s more than enough.
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When a system is slow, don’t buy a more powerful server
One screen took over half a minute to load. Rather than the more powerful server that was the first idea, all it took was finding the one place where the time was really going — and checking that the faster version still calculates the same thing.
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A deployment I don’t have to be there for
New versions of a system used to go live in the evening, by hand, in the hope that it would work out. For one client a machine now does it — and what goes live is exactly the version that was tried out on the test system beforehand.
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How I took down my own website
I let AI work on my website, and along with the test copy it shut down the live one too — not once: the site went down and came back up seven times. I’m writing about it because it’s exactly what I want a client to know about me before they hire me.