Random Musings

a.k.a. Miscellaneous, not pertaining to development or architecture

Falling down the GenAI Research Rabbit Hole

Scott S NelsonLeave a comment

Before GenAI, I would have a general plan of what kind of information I would gather to prepare for a task. Sometimes that plan would be modified as new information led to a better understanding of the subject. GenAI is so much faster, more detailed, and with fewer unwanted results that I have to remind myself that this is just the beginning of the task. Otherwise, I would just stay in research mode and never get started, where before GenAI I was likely to stop just out of frustration from sifting through all the crap resulting from SEO more focused on views than value.

From “Don’t Be Evil” to Disruption

Google’s early days were defined by a clear mission: organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful. Their unofficial motto, “Don’t be evil,” reflected a user-first approach that made Google the go-to research tool for millions. The results were clean, relevant, and genuinely helpful. Searching felt empowering, and the platform’s focus was on delivering value to users.

But as Google grew, priorities shifted. The drive for revenue and shareholder returns led to an increasing emphasis on advertising and SEO optimization. Search results became cluttered with paid placements and content designed to game the algorithm, rather than serve the user. The once powerful tool for discovery became bogged down by noise, making the research process more frustrating and less productive.

The progress shift of focus from user-friendly to shareholder-value opened the door for disruption. When a company that once prided itself on “not being evil” starts to lose sight of its core values, it creates an opportunity for new technologies to step in and fill the gap.

The GenAI Parallel

GenAI today feels much like Google did in its early years: focused on utility, speed, and user value. The answers are direct, the distractions minimal, and the sense of possibility is fresh. Outside the media buzz there is real value in faster answers, deeper insights, and fewer irrelevant results. But the lesson from Google’s trajectory is clear: success can breed complacency, and the temptation to prioritize profit over usefulness is always lurking.

Just as Google’s early commitment to usefulness made it indispensable, GenAI’s current focus on delivering value is what sets it apart. The challenge will be maintaining that focus as the technology matures and commercial pressures increase.

The Shift in Research

  • Faster answers mean less time wasted on irrelevant results.
  • Deeper insights surface quickly, sometimes revealing connections I wouldn’t have spotted on my own.
  • Fewer distractions no more having to go to page 3 of results because the first two were the result of the successful SEO strategies of clickbait and content farms.

But this abundance is a double-edged sword. The temptation to keep digging, to keep asking “what else?” is strong. Without discipline, I could spend hours exploring every tangent, never moving on to actually apply what I’ve learned.

Hopes for the Future of GenAI Research

As exhilarating as this new era is, I can’t help but wonder what comes next. Will GenAI search maintain its edge, or will it eventually succumb to the same pressures that eroded Google’s utility? The cycle of innovation and decline is a familiar one in tech, and I hope that as GenAI matures, it resists the lure of ad dollars and keeps user value front and center.

  • Transparency in how results are generated will be crucial.
  • User-focused design should always outweigh short-term profits.
  • Continuous improvement based on real user needs (not just engagement metrics) must be the guiding principle.

For now, I’m enjoying the ride, even if it means occasionally reminding myself to climb out of the rabbit hole and get back to on track (which may be how Google got to where they are).

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© Scott S. Nelson

Working the Plan is not Working for the Plan

Scott S NelsonLeave a comment

This post started with an entirely different approach.

I wanted to rant about how some statements of work are written with absolute certainty based on assumptions, and when those assumptions are proven wrong the work still proceeds with the obligation of fulfilling the SOW, resulting in lot of wasted effort spent on things that do nothing to further the goals of the enterprise. These same SOWs are also written with the absolute certainty of how much time it will take to do the job, so the time spent on the useless parts robs from the time available to work on what will make everyone’s life easier for the next SOW…provided history doesn’t repeat itself.

Instead, I got caught up in mangling metaphors and exaggerating erroneous errors about plans that are too rigid and wound up writing the following. Somehow it still represents the point I was trying to make… at least to me. Apologies in advance if it’s not as good for you.

Waterfall methodologies like RUP ruled the enterprise IT landscape back when it was mostly green fields, and that made sense. Projects were funded based on clear goals where the ROI had already been calculated. That ROI was calculated based on a set of business goals that were frozen once the project got the green light (yes, I know that scope creep existed even back when dinosaurs roamed the server rooms, but stick with me and then tell me if it really matters for the purpose of illustration). These goals were numbered 1 to n, then a person or a team (project sizes and budgets varying) would write functional requirements (FR) that meet those business requirements, numbering them 1.1 to n.∞. And then there would be development tasks, and test cases, all of which must have a compatible numbering systems, and each must tie back to one (and only one) functional requirement. Life was simple, and project schedules were measured in years. For some, enough years to add up to more than a decade.

Even when Pmanagersaurous (the p is silent) ruled the cube halls, there were businesses (and even some rebellious departments within enterprises) that used a different approach. To those who kept getting their ties caught in printers spewing out detailed requirements to be bound, distributed, and shelved, this alternative method seemed like some cavemen cracking their knuckles and banging on keyboards, intent on creating fire or agriculture or quantum computers. Much of what they built has gone the way of GeoCities and MySpace, but some of it went the way of either owning or replacing the big companies with the big projects and the big budgets. And they taught others their secrets. So many that it stopped being secret.

Then the legacy companies decided they wanted some of this high-margin, low-cost, no-longer-secret sauce for themselves, so they hired agile coaches. Of course, the ones that were really good at doing agile were off doing agile and becoming rich and famous. So the coaches would sometimes wing it, or steal from other processes to differentiate themselves. The legacy companies, being legacy, would pay the coaches lots of money, and thank them profusely, and then start requiring a business case before green lighting an “agile” project. The business cases had numbered paragraphs, and the business leaders wanted to know how things were going every moment of the day, so they insisted that the paragraph numbers be included in the “stories”, and it was Epic.

The little agile companies merged with competitors and became big legacy companies. To compete with even bigger legacy companies, they hired their executives, who needed to know everything that was going on so they could “take it to the next level”. So all of the highly skilled, highly productive people began applying half of their skills and productivity in doing what they have always done best, and half matching numbers to lines of code. Working for the plan.

And then AI came along, but that is post of a different order.

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© Scott S. Nelson
Snake oil salesman with clocks

Buyer Beware Time Savings

Scott S NelsonLeave a comment

People throw around terms like “a fraction of the time” meant to express doing something much faster.

They are trying to confuse you with the similarity of the phrase “fraction of a second”, which is generally considered very fast. But… 59.9 minutes is a fraction of an hour (time), and yet not a time savings you would be willing to spend money on.

Do your own research!

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© Scott S. Nelson
UpNote Vs Evernote

UpNote or Evernote? The Journey and Decision

Scott S NelsonLeave a comment

This is a sequel to Will UpNote replace Evernote?

I don’t make new year resolutions, and if I did, I wouldn’t pick procrastination as something to work on because I know I would end up putting it off. Like this post, that would have been great to finish right when I thought of it and even better to push out with the flood of New Year’s resolution posts like how to get organized and reduce unnecessary spending, both of which UpNote has helped me with. So, here we go (and I guarantee I will also procrastinate editing before posting).

First off, rather than a big conclusion, that would be much shorter for you and much harder for me (one of my favorite quotes is “I would have written a shorter letter, but did not have the time.”), I am going to share my (mostly) raw notes that I posted on my original blog post as comments to track the journey.

And here is the TL;DR – I made the switch from Evernote to UpNote driven more by my annoyance with Evernote (specifically, Evernote under Bending Spoons) and less by being enamored with UpNote. But, while there are a few features I miss from Evernote, now that UpNote has become part of my daily (almost hourly) life, I do find that most of the user experience is happier (especially now that I have added many keyboard shortcuts to muscle memory), and the support is so incredibly superior as to be no comparison.

June 25, 2024 / 5:50 am

Since no one ever comments here, I feel free to do my addendums in the comments for now (until I break this up into a series?).

While the cheaper side of me really wanted to use a monthly subscription to try out the Evernote to UpNote migration and only commit to the lifetime after trying it out, the time management side of me won out because

“You can switch from a monthly subscription to a lifetime upgrade from the Premium screen (go to Settings ? Premium). The app will first ask you to cancel your existing subscription to avoid being charged twice, and then let you purchase a lifetime upgrade.”

(https://getupnote.com/support.html).

The migration is fairly easy, (though not so much if you want to experiment like I did).

I first imported with the option to turn tags into notebooks. The resulting layout was a flattened hierarchy, which means I have to recreate (and finally reorganize) my tag hierarchy.

I was curious if using tags instead of folders would be more suitable, so I deleted all of the notes to re-import again. This is when I discovered there is no mass delete for notebooks, only their contents. Well, I would use them again anyway, so I wasn’t too annoyed.

After re-importing with the tag-to-tag option, I realized that since I couldn’t bulk delete notebooks, this would leave me with the too-tedious-to-consider process of moving notes to notebooks individually (in Evernote, across 3 notebooks, I currently have ~3k notes).

I thought I would be clever and try re-importing the same notes with the tags-to-notebooks option with the hope that it would recognize that everything was a duplicate and just put them in notebooks. Alas, I just wound up with duplicates of every note, half with tags and half in notebooks.

UpNote, if you are reading this, you should offer an option to create both tags and notebooks (at the same time) when importing!

So, I deleted all the notes again and imported as notebooks. I do like the ability to create my own notebook covers (on Windows 3.1, I had icons on folders because that’s the kind of childish nerd I am). And I really like the ease of finding notebooks to link to notes. It reminds me of how easy Evernote was to use when it was a note organizing app and not an investment vehicle.

June 26, 2024 / 6:13 am

Continuing my transition description, I have only migrated my personal notebook from Evernote, leaving my work notebook for later. The work notebook has more notes (~1400 vs ~850), which partly informed the choice. Another difference is I use my phone more often for personal notes than work notes, so this gives me more opportunities to note how it works across devices. My initial observations is that search is much faster in UpNote, which can be attributed to the smaller amount of content. But the key thing for me is how Evernote change the home screen from what used to be notes with links to other features to a list of the other features where I have to first select notes (the only function I use!) and only then can I start using the app for its primary purpose. In UpNote it opens directly to the notes, and that changes in notebooks and tags do not change the sorted order of last updated (as some recent changes in Evernote do).

June 28, 2024 / 6:28 am

If the visual representation of your current tag hierarchies in Evernote are numerous, complex, and important to you, migration is going to be disappointing. Even if you select for the imported tags to be converted to notebooks and to import into a notebook, the result is that all of the notes are imported in a flat list in the selected notebook and all of the tags become notebooks at the root level without their prior hierarchy.

If I were in a rush to move, this would be a deal breaker for me. Fortunately, I have a little over 3 months for this migration, and the re-creation of my hierarchies and cross tags (notebooks in UpNote) is interesting, even fun at times…so far. A couple thousand notes to go, so we’ll see…

June 29, 2024 / 8:41 am

One features from Evernote that UpNote could benefit from is drag-n-drop for the notebooks. Yes, they are tags in Evernote, but since UpNote doesn’t have a tag hierarchy, UpNote Notebooks are feature parity to Evernote Tags. I do like being able to customize the notebook covers in UpNote (used to do that to folders on a Windows 3.1 desktop), but drag-n-drop is a much more practical feature, especially for those of use migrating. The click, select, select, click process is fine if one doesn’t organize much but gets really tedious with 100’s of folders to re-organize after migrating.

July 7, 2024 / 10:46 am

It took 3 weeks to finish re-organizing my personal notebook and a notebook from a former job in UpNote after importing them from Evernote. I used UpNote for all personal notes during that time as well.

To summarize my thoughts and experiences so far:

  • UpNote notebooks are the equivalent of tags in Evernote based on Evernote tag features, so if you use the tag hierarchy in Evernote have UpNote convert them to notebooks on import.
  • The ability to customize the covers of Notebooks is nice.
  • Many will want to use the colors provided or the pre-loaded images.
  • I created my own, which suits my own way of sorting and provides a great source of procrastination activity.
  • UpNote doesn’t have the feature clutter of Evernote.
  • No calendar and no events.
  • Tasks are integrated into notes (if the note has a checklist it is categorized as a task in UpNote).
  • It is great to be able to go straight to notes again instead of having to click through the cluttered Evernote UI.
  • UpNote doesn’t change the edited date when changing metadata (a recent bug in Evernote that is driving me nuts!)

In the negative column for UpNote:

  • No reminders.
  • No feature to email the contents of a note from within the app.
  • No drag-n-drop for nesting notebooks

However…

  • UpNote lifetime pricing: $39.99
  • Evernote annual pricing: $129.99
  • Monthly options: $1.99 vs $14.99

Click Cancel Evernote

I really will miss the reminders and being able to email notes to myself for follow up through my in-box, and I expect that UpNote will eventually add these features. And I am not looking forward to a month of re-sorting a decade of content when I bring my work notebook in. In fact, if Evernote had stuck to the $49.99 per year, I would have dealt with the mobile UX going down hill to keep the features and save the work. But Evernote went from supporting users to supporting investors, and Bending Spoons just wants users to bend over and pay even more for AI features that are available one window away for free, so I will not be renewing my subscription next year, ending almost 20 years of customer loyalty.

July 15, 2024 / 6:17 am

I still need to turn these comments into the Part of this post. Meanwhile, ran across an interesting read today that leads to the need for a note app, though for the use case given One Note would be sufficient: https://fev.al/posts/work-journal/?utm_source=tldrnewsletter

July 17, 2024 / 6:45 am

Forgot to mention: The idea of importing back into Evernote isn’t supported by either app. Reminds me of portal platforms back in the early 00’s when they were all proprietary to lock customers in, then later in that decade they all started using “open” standards, which resulted having proprietary formats that would fit in those standards. In this case, both will export to HTML or Markdown but the outputs drop all of the organization.

Crossing my fingers that UpNote gets the long ride Evernote has had.

July 20, 2024 / 9:17 am

I reviewed the FAQ page about security. For a non-technical person it can be very confusing. For a technical person it is still confusing. I truly don’t think this is intentional.

To summarize:
There are two key questions whose answers are relevant…
UpNote stores data on the Firebase server (which is a service provided by Google). The Firebase platform is certified to major privacy and security standards and fully supports the EU General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) and the California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA). Firebase encrypts your data in transit using HTTPS and encrypts your data at rest. You can learn more at https://firebase.google.com/support/privacy. We also take great care to ensure that your data is secure and only you can access it.

and
End-to-End Encryption (E2EE) is an advanced security method for encrypting and decrypting data and is designed to protect highly confidential information. Due to the complexity of implementation, UpNote currently has no plans to support E2EE. If you wish to store sensitive information such as passwords or credit card numbers, it is recommended that you use a password manager application specifically designed to encrypt sensitive information.

The gist of which is that the data is not encrypted on your devices. This is a bit of nit-picky difference but worthwhile to note that the weak link in the chain is how you manage security on your device. There is also the bit about UpNote developers being able to access your content. They are up front about that, and also up front about storing private data in secure manner, like a password manager.

July 28, 2024 / 10:08 am

In Evernote, tags exist as a flat hierarchy, with the nesting only being at a visual level. For example, if I have a tag Misc and then move it to be under Foo, I cannot create a tag under Bar named Misc. While UpNote also manages tag in a flat hierarchy, Notebooks are truly nested, so I can have a notebook named Misch under Foo and a different notebook under Bar also named Misc. I can then cross reference between notebooks using a tag such as #reference. This is much more how these things work in my head. Your mentalization may vary.

August 1, 2024 / 7:37 am

I love the Collapsible Section feature in UpNote. I often used Evernote for presentation notes. The first annoyance in Evernote was when they added wide margins, making it impossible to have both my notes and a presentation on my desktop at the same time. I would use a tablet or my phone to make up for this problem until I eventually got a 35″ monitor (not for that purpose, but a nice bonus point for the monitor upgrade).

Not only can I size the UpNote window to any width I want, I use the Collapsible Sections to make it easier to scroll through the content based on each slide. The keyboard shortcuts are nice touch, too.
UpNote Collapsible Sections with PowerPoint Presentation

August 24, 2024 / 10:50 am

Finally parting shot at Evernote: In preparation for closing my account I went to delete all of my notes. It would be useful if it gave some error message that the default notebook couldn’t be deleted. I eventually figured it out, created a new notebook, and set it as default. Still, 1000 notes wouldn’t delete when deleting the notebook. Finally I had to delete at the note level, which is limited to 100 at a time. Hey, Bending Spoons, it is all the friction to standard note management tasks that drove me away from 21 years of use. Making the final steps as difficult as possible helps to reinforce my decision.

Oh, and then when I actually cancelled the subscription I first had to confirm again (acceptable), then scroll through a huge list of features that I was losing (annoying but predictable), then give a reason from a list, but only ONE reason (ridiculous) and then was finally offered a discount of 40%, which if they had offered that in response to any of my complaints over the last two years I may have accepted, but having just spent two months migrating to UpNote, wasn’t going to happen.

Epilogue

UpNote has become a seamless part of my computing life. It took me so long to post this follow up to the original article partly because I am more productive with UpNote, and partly because it is so smooth to use that I don’t really think about it…except on those rare occasions when there is an issue with an update, the last of which inspired me to finally write this post because of the quick turn-around for the fix as a new update, without any of the “do [some really annoying work around] until we can get to the issue”, which is pretty much the response I get from most vendors, and extra annoying because I include the work around in my support request.

Oh, and after you get your own license, be sure to follow the great user community at https://www.reddit.com/r/UpNote_App/.

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© Scott S. Nelson

You’ll have to pry my cup from my cold, dry hands

Scott S NelsonLeave a comment

Does Coffee Really Dehydrate You? My Quest for the Truth (With a Little Help from Perplexity.ai)

Let me set the scene: It’s Monday morning, my laptop is already making that faint whirring noise that says, “I’m trying, boss, but I might just give up any second.” I’m on my third cup of coffee, which, let’s be honest, is the only thing standing between me and a nap on my keyboard. In a moment of noble procrastination, I stumble onto this YouTube video by Dr. Seth Capehart, Navy Special Ops, ER doc, and all-around high-energy guy. The video is called “Doctor Reveals the SECRET to Sustained Energy Used by Military SPEC OPS”, and it’s packed with tips for being a high-functioning human being-something I aspire to be, at least until about 2:30 pm, when my productivity falls off a cliff.
Dr. Capehart is talking about hydration, and he drops this line:
“Most of you are dehydrated. Yes, you. Mild dehydration screws up your mood, your memory, your focus, your energy levels… so grab a water bottle and sip it throughout the day. And know coffee doesn’t count. It’s a diuretic, it actually makes you pee more. Drink actual water.”
Cue record scratch.
Wait, what? Coffee doesn’t count? As in, all these years of clutching my mug like a security blanket, I’ve just been fooling myself into a slow, shriveled, dehydrated state? I mean, I get it-water is important, and I’m not about to run a marathon on espresso alone. But is my beloved coffee really leaving me high and dry?

Enter: Perplexity.ai, My Digital Lifeline

Now, here’s where I admit something: when it comes to health science, I’m about as qualified as a goldfish with a FitBit. So, I did what any self-respecting, slightly skeptical, and caffeine-dependent tech enthusiast would do-I asked Perplexity.ai, my trusty AI assistant, for the real scoop.
And folks, the answer was… surprisingly comforting.

The Truth About Coffee and Dehydration (According to Science, Not Just Internet Comments)

Short version:
No, your morning coffee is not secretly turning you into a human raisin.
Longer version (because you know I love a tangent):
  • Yes, caffeine is a diuretic. It makes you pee a bit more, especially if you’re not used to it. But unless you’re chugging coffee like a sleep-deprived squirrel (guilty), the effect is pretty mild.
  • Coffee is mostly water. Like, 95% water. So, every cup you drink is actually helping you hydrate, not sabotage you.
  • Regular coffee drinkers build up a tolerance. If you’re a daily drinker (raises hand), your body basically says, “Oh, caffeine again? Yawn,” and doesn’t flush out extra fluids like it might for a newbie.
  • Science backs this up. Multiple studies show that moderate coffee consumption hydrates you about as well as water. It’s only if you’re drinking five-plus cups a day and not getting any other fluids that you might run into trouble. (Also, if you’re drinking that much, maybe check your pulse and your life choices.)
So, while Dr. Capehart’s advice to drink water is solid (and, frankly, your kidneys will thank you), you don’t have to banish coffee from your hydration plan. Just don’t rely on it exclusively-unless you want to risk the jitters, the 3 pm crash, and possibly writing blog posts at 2 am about hydration myths.

Practical Tips for the Caffeinated Masses

  1. Drink water, too. Yes, I know, boring. But keep a bottle handy and take a sip every time you check your email (or, in my case, every time your computer freezes).
  2. Enjoy your coffee guilt-free. It counts toward your daily fluids! Just don’t let it be your only beverage.
  3. Don’t overdo it. Five cups a day is the upper limit for most folks. More than that, and you might start vibrating at frequencies only dogs can hear.
  4. Listen to your body. If you’re thirsty, drink. If you’re tired, maybe try sleep instead of a sixth espresso. (I know, radical.)

Final Thoughts (and a Friendly Challenge)

Look, I’m not about to give up my coffee. It’s the glue holding my mornings together. But I’m also not going to ignore the wisdom of drinking plain old water-even if it doesn’t come with a frothy latte art heart.
So, next time someone tells you “coffee doesn’t count,” you can smile, sip your mug, and know that science (and Perplexity.ai) have your back.
If you’ve got your own hydration hacks, coffee confessions, or just want to commiserate about the endless quest for energy, drop a comment below. We’re all in this together-wired, tired, and occasionally hydrated.
Stay caffeinated, stay curious, and don’t forget to drink some water (your future self will thank you).
If you found this interesting, please share.

© Scott S. Nelson