Category: Managing Technology

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Boosting Productivity: Unleashing ChatGPT’s Potential with SRE Insights

As a seasoned Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) expert, I’ve witnessed the transformative impact of SRE principles on cloud systems’ reliability and efficiency. The real eye-opener was discovering their relevance to other areas of work through my use of ChatGPT. It’s been a game-changer.

Even for those without a technical background, these fundamental principles can be leveraged to enhance the performance of any conversational AI, including but not limited to ChatGPT, in everyday tasks. Here’s how you can do it:

Reliability Principles

Note: I’ve taken the liberty of changing the names of principles as necessary to be clear to non-SREs.

Embracing Risk

Balancing the use of ChatGPT for innovative tasks with an understanding that not all outputs will be perfect. Accept that some responses may need tweaking and even error correction. AI is best used as an assistant working along with you.

Setting Clear Goals

Define specific goals for ChatGPT’s performance. For example, when creating a prompt to generate an output for a specific task, track effectiveness by how much manual tweaking is necessary to send the finished product.

Reducing Repetitive Tasks

Use ChatGPT to handle repetitive tasks like drafting emails or generating reports. This frees up your time for more valuable activities, similar to how automation reduces workload (toil) for SREs.

Monitoring Performance

Regularly assess how well ChatGPT is performing in your workflow. Keep an eye on the accuracy and usefulness of its responses to ensure it meets your standards.

Automating Processes

Integrate AI into your automated workflows. This could mean having Microsoft’s Copilot (where ChatGPT runs under the hood) write macros to automate custom actions in Microsoft 365.

Ensuring Consistency

Regularly update and refine how you use ChatGPT to maintain high-quality results. Test any changes to make sure they don’t disrupt your workflow.

Keeping It Simple

Use clear, straightforward prompts when interacting with ChatGPT. Simpler inputs typically lead to better outputs, just as simple system designs are more reliable.

Conclusion

Implementing these principles can boost ChatGPT’s impact on your daily tasks. Embrace risk wisely, set clear goals, reduce repetitive tasks, monitor performance, automate where possible, ensure consistency, and keep things simple. Adopting these strategies can elevate your productivity and effectiveness at work through ChatGPT.

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Microsoft is Out of Touch

It’s become clear that Microsoft is focusing more on its products than its customers. Where is their research into how humans relate to touch? Steve Jobs said explicitly that Apple found in its research that users disliked touch screens over the long term. They tired of holding their hands up all the time. Microsoft should have seen this coming.

(Full disclosure: I wrote this post on an iPad.)

Microsoft’s bet on touch PCs fails to pay off | Computerworld

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Louis CK: Live at the Beacon Theater…Cheap!

Louis CK: Live at the Beacon Theater:

The show went on sale at noon on Saturday, December 10th. 12 hours later, we had over 50,000 purchases and had earned $250,000, breaking even on the cost of production and website. As of Today, we’ve sold over 110,000 copies for a total of over $500,000. Minus some money for PayPal charges etc, I have a profit around $200,000 (after taxes $75.58). This is less than I would have been paid by a large company to simply perform the show and let them sell it to you, but they would have charged you about $20 for the video. [emphasis mine] They would have given you an encrypted and regionally restricted video of limited value, and they would have owned your private information for their own use. They would have withheld international availability indefinitely. This way, you only paid $5, you can use the video any way you want, and you can watch it in Dublin, whatever the city is in Belgium, or Dubai. I got paid nice, and I still own the video (as do you). You never have to join anything, and you never have to hear from us again.

(Via The Loop.)

Information on the internet is costly to produce, near costless to distribute, but marketing can be an issue, a costly one at that.  Louis CK has an established brand so he can take the risks in production and let the viral nature of the Internet do its thing.

The experiment was successful but it’s not a game changer for Louis CK per se.  (If you doubt that, you put out $250,000 for production and see how viral your show goes.)  He just cut out a middle man, made more money and we saved some.  That’s the game changer for the big distribution, really marketing, companies.  Social networking is not good for their business model.  Not at all.

Read his whole post.  A lot to learn there.