There has been a decades-long evolution towards creating an effective clinical diagnosis and treatment AI system, essentially automating the mental part of what doctors do. A solid basis for the content of the system has already been built in the form of medical text books, procedures, published databases, studies and clinical standards such as HEDIS. The major elements of a fully automated system have been built and put into practice in a variety of medical practices. When a comprehensive system will be built and deployed is impossible to predict. No fundamentally new tech needs to be invented for this to... Continue reading

About a third of US citizens had their private data and medical records stolen in early 2024 in a ransomware attack on United Healthcare -- yes, the same company whose CEO was recently murdered. Big important people are outraged. How could this happen? The headline of the WSJ article is Shun This Basic Cybersecurity Tactic and Become a Target for Hackers A lack of multifactor authentication opened the door to cyberattacks at UnitedHealth Group and others The Chair of the Senate Finance Committee, Ron Wyden, is demanding that various agency bureaucrats impose more security regulations on healthcare companies, particularly MFA.... Continue reading

How often do software projects fail? While it’s never talked about and rarely makes the news, the fact is that software projects fail with alarming frequency. Exactly how often do they fail? The shocking answer is, despite there being august professors of Computer Science and Computer Engineering falling out of the woodwork, doing research, pronouncing their deep knowledge in papers and teaching the next generation of students, the truly shocking answer is that no one knows! Or cares! Oh, they say they care about teaching people how to create great software, all you have to do is learn the intricacies... Continue reading

There is a massive secret process in election vote counting. It’s invisible, so observers won’t help. It’s subject to error and fraud. Existing standards, even Virginia Governor Youngkin’s Executive Order 35 ignores it. It’s not a hard problem to solve. Standard practices in database and data warehousing software that have been proven and refined in decades of use can be applied. The fragmented group of semi-custom voting equipment, largely driven by software-ignorant bureaucrats and regulators ignores this technology, if they’re even aware of it – no one is asking for it, so why bother? The process is simple in principle;... Continue reading

Governor Glenn Youngkin issued Executive Order 35 to assure voting security in the state of Virginia. The summary and the Order itself are worth a read. While some of it talks about existing procedures, together it’s an excellent foundation for assuring election integrity. The procedures include effective voting list maintenance, ballot security and machine testing, using only paper ballots. If all states adhered to this standard, our elections would be more secure than they are. The biggest vulnerability remains the numerous local voting machines (ballot counters), supporting computers and officials. In this post, I describe the intense feelings some local... Continue reading

Suppose some adult who had never played baseball, even for fun as a kid, was quickly taught the rules and played for a day. How well do you think they would play? Suppose they tried again two years later and then again a few times, each with a two year gap between tries. Do you think they would know what the infield fly rule was, much less be able to hit a pitched ball? That’s what it’s like for the people who administer the voting machines at the more than 170,000 voting precincts in the US on voting day. You... Continue reading

While not much discussed or broadly recognized, the vast majority of efforts to build computer software are disasters. They take too long, cost too much, and result in varying degrees of crap. Lots of solutions have been been promoted and tried. None of them have worked. There are exceptions, of course. The exceptions prove that it really is possible to create good software quickly and efficiently. It is highly unlikely that the cause is that the methods taught in academia are good, but screwed up when applied; instead, it’s likely that nearly everyone has it wrong, just like doctors did... Continue reading

The new ChatGPT technology answers questions in English in a way that can be hard to distinguish from what a human would have written. This is scary! What will happen to all those highly paid knowledge-worker jobs? Notice how none of the stories talk about the history of AI. AI has been on the verge of ousting human beings from important jobs since the 1950’s. First it was checkers. By the mid-1960’s, ELIZA and SHRDLU were having conversations with people in English. ELIZA impressed many with its conversational, interactive abilities, while SHRDLU could not only talk but it could answer... Continue reading

Everyone wants software that does what it’s supposed to do, runs fast without down time and can be changed quickly without causing problems. Who doesn’t want this? For more details on software goals, see this. Everyone claims that their methods are great at achieving those goals. Sadly, such assertions are mostly baseless and in fact the touted methods do a terrible job. But they’re standard practice! I’ve written extensively about they way to meet the goals in dozens of blog posts and a couple of books. Here is a specific step-by step way to move from standard architecture to one... Continue reading

There is a conspiracy to prevent innovation. It’s widespread, strong and effective, more in some domains than others. Like all conspiracies, it goes to great lengths to conceal its actions and goals. The members of the conspiracy are desperate not to be revealed, because they would certainly be subjected at least to ridicule, if not total ostracizing. More important to the active members of the conspiracy, they would lose power, if not their jobs. The anti-innovation conspiracy is at war with the transformative power of radical improvements of computer and networking technology. Computer evolution, which continues to follow Moore’s Law... Continue reading

Many software projects fail, or in various ways don’t achieve the expected results. This is widely known. Loads of people offer cures, for example the fact that the critic’s favorite software development method wasn’t used, or it if was used, wasn’t used correctly. Training! Consultants! More SCRUM masters! Not just stand-up meetings, but stand-on-your-tippy-toes meetings! There is a fatal flaw that often causes software projects to turn out badly. It’s rarely discussed. It’s sometimes called motivation, but it comes down to whether the people doing the actual work – you know, writing the lines of code – feel ownership in... Continue reading

I got an email update from the SSA It said: Your Social Security Statement is streamlined and easier to read than ever before. That is because we have redesigned the Statement to provide you the most useful information up front and at a glance. ... You can access your new Statement by signing into your account at socialsecurity.gov/reviewyourstatement. Now that you can access your Statement instantly and anytime online, we will not automatically send one by mail. We hope you find your new Statement useful and informative. i decided to check out this wonderful new statement that's available "instantly and... Continue reading

Which is more scientific: Computer Science, which is all about numbers and data and exact algorithms, or cat litter, which is all about giving cats a way to poop and pee while reducing the annoyance of their human servants? Seems obvious, right? It’s obvious until you understand the practical disaster of creating software as detailed in these posts, https://www.blackliszt.com/2023/04/summary-software-quality-assurance.html https://www.blackliszt.com/2023/04/summary-computer-science.html and until you pay careful attention to the information typically found on a box of cat litter and observe how closely the litter does what it’s supposed to do. Result: the litter wins by a mile. Check out the information... Continue reading

This is a summary with links to my posts on the many ways that large organizations including government, big business, big tech and the rest diligently apply modern software procedures as taught in academia and required by professional management; they consistently produce disastrous results in software quality, cost, security and everything else that matters. There are of course issues that are common to all these large organizations, for example in cybersecurity. https://www.blackliszt.com/2015/06/systemic-issues-behind-the-cyber-security-disasters-at-opm-citi-anthem-etc.html Government Government software disasters are government-as-usual, so much so that disasters that wreck lives barely make the news. For example, over 10 million people world-wide enter a government-run... Continue reading

This is a summary with links to my posts on software experts. For medical experts see this: https://www.blackliszt.com/2023/08/summary-the-medical-industrial-complex.html The hype about experts is so extreme, it’s important to take a bit of time mocking it. After all, experts confirm that experts are super-smart and never make mistakes! https://www.blackliszt.com/2021/04/experts-are-super-smart.html Medical doctors considered blood-letting to be a standard part of medical practice until well into the 1800's. They continued to weaken and kill patients with this destructive "therapy," even as the evidence against it piled high. The vast majority of software experts strongly resemble medical doctors from those earlier times. The evidence... Continue reading

This is a summary with links to my posts on regulations. Regulations are supposed to make things better. Most of the time regulations make things worse by preventing innovation, increasing costs and failing to achieve the goals for which they were created. The negative impact of regulations, whether government or corporate, is greatly magnified in software and technology. The reason why our ever-growing number of regulations fail to protect us is simple. In the vast majority of cases, they spell out, often in great detail, how to accomplish the goal, instead of plainly and simply defining the goal and leaving... Continue reading

Someday, there will be tools that actively help you build occamal software. I imagine that the tools will resemble a modern IDE, but will have assists, wizards, visual representations and other methods of helping you see actual and potential commonalities. In addition, there will be common components, both part of the development environment and part of the execution environment, which will make building occamal software easy and natural. Until such tools and components exist, the work and imagination of the developer will have to fill the gap. Remembering that we live in the real world, our goal is not to... Continue reading

Modern software orthodoxy endorses the notion of collections of code that are separated by high walls. Object-oriented thinking codifies the supposed virtue of data hiding, and keeping all the code that works on a particular block of data (a class) behind a wall. Everyone seems to like the idea of components; people will talk in terms of assembling applications out of component building blocks (when has this ever happened except in seminar rooms?). Finally layers or tiers are supposed to introduce discipline to an application. The idea is you have the user interface (top) tier; then you have the application... Continue reading

Quite a few years ago I had the problem of creating a product that would help printers create estimates for potential printing jobs. We had one of the early micro-computers at our disposal, and the only programming tool that was available for it was a macro assembler. We had to get the product out in a ridiculously short period of time, and were very limited in the amount of memory we could use. We got together and realized that we had a fairly simple problem. The ultimate goal was to create printed estimates. Each estimate was calculated based on a... Continue reading

I don’t think I can improve on Chris Date’s formulation of the issue. His basic point is that most computer programs solve problems by taking an imperative approach, telling the computer how to accomplish a given task. He argues strongly in favor of a declarative approach, telling the computer what needs to be accomplished, and having a core set of application-independent functions that accomplish the goal in an optimal way. Date’s favorite domain is databases. His approach works for databases by writing a program that knows about schemas (tables and columns), data (rows) and SQL statements (Insert, Select, etc.). If... Continue reading

This is a deep subject, and challenges the way many programmers think. It is rooted in the most fundamental assumptions about the way computers work and the way we program them. In my experience, the ideas first strike people as being simple, obvious, and uninteresting. They seem irrelevant to anything important, and even seem like far-out crank talk. One way to approach this is to imagine that you stop a computer and examine its memory, byte by byte. At one level, it’s all data. By definition, what’s stored in a computer’s memory is data. But in practical terms, every single... Continue reading

A VC firm I worked for made a (sadly, in retrospect) passive, non-controlling investment in an emerging PLM company that was all over model-based, declarative development. They didn’t use silly, made-up names like “Occamal” to describe what they did, but they were fully self-conscious of the power of meta-data, and used it fully. The CTO chose Microsoft as the target technology stack, and ran into the fact that most programmers who specialize in this stack found the meta-data approach to be a foreign one. He overcame the problem by getting his programming done by a group of mathematically-oriented programmers in... Continue reading

Here are some basic thoughts to help understand Occam’s razor for software as it is applied in practice: Build only the software you need to build in order to be successful. With rare exceptions, shorter programs are better than longer programs. The goal of programming should be to produce the minimum lines of code in order to accomplish the job. Always keep the “parts count” of your program in mind, and make it your goal to keep the number of “unique parts” to a minimum, with each “thought” expressed exactly once, with everything that “uses” that thought generated from the... Continue reading

I am not aware of a set of terms I can use to make a technically clear definition of “Occam optimality” for software, so I’ll just re-use some existing ones. I suspect there’s an exact, more mathematical way to do this. I’m hoping someone will pull it off. My goal here is to express the most basic relevant concepts in rough terms. By “program” I mean the entire source text that is required to build the executable program. If the program uses a DBMS, the schema definition is part of the program. If there are “include” files or resource files,... Continue reading

Anyone who has programmed for a while knows that all code is not alike. There are important broad categories of code. I wish there were a generally agreed to categorization, but there doesn’t seem to be. Many years ago, there were these categories (from lesser to greater in terms of perceived expertise and prestige): Operator (your hands actually touched a physical computer!) – low status! Applications programmer (many variations here, from business analyst to debugging and maintenance). And even they are not all the same! While I was working in a COBOL shop, I discovered that there is an intense,... Continue reading