X : What's the best way of writing a specification for a commodity?
Me : Your test suite.
X : Eh?
Me : Every novel thing starts with a few basic tests, as it evolves it gains more, your product should be built on those test and eventually they should help define the commodity.
X : What if we don't have tests?
Me : Does not compute.
X : Eh?
Me : Fzzz, whrr, fzzz, whrr ...
Me : Your business, hardware and software should have test driven development baked in throughout wherever possible. How do you change anything in a complicated environment without it. Every single line on a map is a relationship, an interface for which there should be tests ...
... those tests define the operation of the interface, they are the specification you hand to another, that you check a product against, that you test a commodity with and then determine the trades you wish to make. Those test should expand and evolve with the thing itself.
X : Yep, but we don't have any. We just test against the specification.
Me : What do you build the specification with?
X : By asking people what they need.
Me : Those are tests, they should be codified, monitored, adjusted and retired.
X : How are they tests?
Me : Build a test for that need, which you will fail because you're not meeting it and build according to those tests.
X : What if they have more needs?
Me : More tests. That's exploration. Is it a planet? Can I breathe on it? etc etc
X : We're in manufacturing.
Me : So is Tesla -
As @djwork77 would say, testing is the core part of what is corporate IP and he is not wrong.
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dX: How do you deal with strategy?
Me: First, we need to answer the Where question, which depends a lot on the what and why.
dX: And?
Me: Ok, some very simple steps ...
Step 1: Visualise your environment. That means getting people to discuss, collaborate & challenge in order to create a "good enough" map of your environment. Should be a couple of hours.
Step 2: Look at what's changing which is competitor moves, your moves & economic patterns.
Step 3: Using the map, determine where you could invest/focus on. You're not making a decision yet, you just want the options. By now, you could have spent four hours on the exercise.
Step 4: Decide where you should invest i.e. look at the options using why & what
Those born in the 1890s experienced electrification, telephone, radio, television, nuclear age, penicillin, two world wars, commercial flight, computer age and a moon landing. By the 60s we had AI, VR and 3D printing.
Today, we have the internet / www and have improved stuff.
Is it me, or is human progress slowing down? Great breakthroughs, moments of change, and radical transformations seem like a thing of the past. What we call "revolutions" in industry today seems mostly a marketing slogan.
If you think back to 1957 and the Mark I Perceptron machine that was built at Cornell, then consider the changes in the previous 60 years ... you can't help but think they would be bitterly disappointed with how slow we have progressed in the following 60 years.
We will be entering a phase in which the US high-tech industry (including the military complex) is highly dependent upon China, whilst China is not dependent upon the US.
For those who doubt how clear the intentions were ... go read Made in China, 2025.
China's government made its intentions evident in 2015. The US sabre rattling of sanctions reinforced that purpose whilst the US essentially continued with a misguided "market knows best" policy.
A couple of prompts with Claude 3 creates a Wardley Map for economic sovereignty in the defence space.
Not bad at all -
On par with political, military and defence folk I've spoken to. I'm also finding I can have a reasonable discussion about mapping with Claude 3.onlinewardleymaps.com/#clone:XvHskIi…
It's not perfect but it's not bad. There's more I want to interrogate Claude over ... i.e. the link to secure sourcing, the positioning of some components etc. But it's almost good enough that I can start a discussion over strategy and investment.
Anyway, upshot is that Claude 3, from my perspective, has left ChatGPT4 in the dust. Of course, I'll use Claude, ChatGPT, and Gemini to cross-compare for now but if I do start building anything more complex then the obvious path is AWS Bedrock which gives me Mistral etc.
dX: What is the single most significant problem facing AI today? Safety? Lack of skills? Inertia?
Me: Overinflated expectations by the business.
dX: You don't think AI will become widespread?
Me: Of course, it will; industrialised components are rapidly becoming cost of doing business. Don't confuse that with expectations. There will be an awful lot of disappointed businesses hoping it would create some advantage.
dX: I don't understand.
Me: Imagine you're just finishing off your plan for how AI will revolutionise your business. Six months for budget approval, one year to build team, 18 months to deliver something ... that's 3 years from now. Any advantage you thought of is long gone.
For those who don't know, I'm working increasingly on and with Glamorous Toolkit - ... I have become fascinated by our willingness to blame humans for problems that are created by our toolsets ...gtoolkit.com
... I saw this last night at Cloud Camp. Apparently, the issues with understanding, explainability and observability in AI are down to humans' inability to deal with complex environments... no, they're not. The problem is with the tools and the type of tools we are creating ...
... we've imported concepts from a physical world where tools are constrained by physics - hence a hammer is a hammer, a drill is a drill - into a world without such constraints. Rather than building contextual tools, we've built constrained tools.