Our final talk in our software stuff for financial organizations is coming up tomorrow. Above is a little anecdote that Darran made to me as we were working on it. If you’re into security, compliance, that kind of thing, check out the third part of our series: “How Cloud Native Improves & Ensures Security, Governance, and Trust in Finance.”

Summarizing Articles with ChatGPT Works Again

Recently, I’ve been complain that I can't use ChatGPT to summarize things anymore because it won't pull from URLs. This was what I ChatGPT for the most when it first came out. It was amazing! It’d good for more than just summarizing. I’d also use it to see if I wanted to spend the time to actually read the article in more detail; the ChatGPT summaries are a little shallow, of course, but they’d be good at telling me if it’d be worth reading more. Second, if you use the same chat session for multiple summarization requisitions, you can keep a log of things you’ve looked at and ask things like “make a list of things I summarized today” or “what are some common themes, etc.”

Anyhow, this stopped working several months ago.

But, now you can do dit again! If you have plugins, enable Link Reader, and then it'll work again.

Instead of creating a new chat window for each article, I create one chat window every day or so where I just keep getting summarys. I'll rename the chat something like "20230710 tl;dr" with the theory that I'll go back and look at these some days.

Here's the prompt I've been starting the chats with: "When I paste a link here, retrieve the text of the article and summarize the article in detail using bullet points. Simplify and clarify the writing. Output in rendered markdown. Start by listing the title of the article and make the title of the article a link to the URL. Then write a paragraph summarizing the most interesting/novel points, and then make a bullet point summary of the article."

With that, I can just copy-paste a URL in there and get summaries.

Garbage Chairs of Amsterdam

Wastebook

• Headstone: “Ran out of Takes.”

• We think of the hype cycle more in terms of time and maturity of new tech. A neglected point of it is that most new technology has unrealistic hopes and dreams, like 20x reality. That is: most new tech will be a lot less group breaking than you think. Thus, when the new tech fails to deliver on its promises, the new tech isn’t so much a “failure” as your early calibration on its outcomes.

Relative to your interests

• Pulling On Threads - I forgot about the “bring your whole self” thing.

• Unleash developer productivity with generative AI, McKinsey survey - Their survey says it’s good in four areas: Expediting manual and repetitive work, Jump-starting the first draft of new code, Accelerating updates to existing code, Increasing developers' ability to tackle new challenges.

• Adopt Platform Engineering to Scale Application Security Practices - “Gartner Survey Data Reveals a Missed Opportunity - Platform teams focus on improving developer experience, developer productivity, software quality and delivery speed. According to Gartner’s 2022 Software Engineering Leaders Role Survey, only 25% of respondents cited “reduced security risks’’ as one of the top three goals for platform engineering and only 6% ranked it as the topmost goal.” // Here we are, about to finally have a moment that’s just focused on making appdev better, and of course security has to come in and try to grab all the attention. This already happened with Kubernetes in the past few years. And: maybe it was a good idea to keep all this stuff separated in its own team so that each team can focus.

• Steve McQueen by, John Dominis - That guy made being cool look easy.

• Island Series: 6 Pack - These look like more amazing notebooks from a boutique shop.

• Threads, The Fastest Growing Product Since ChatGPT - ’Threads, it hit 30 million sign-ups in less than 24 hours, which would be 60x faster than the 60 days it took ChatGPT to hit 30 million (as I hit send, I’m seeing rumors its passed 50 million, but nothing’s been confirmed yet)’ // This characterization is a little unfair. If Threads had just been a feature added to the Instagram app, no one would be calling those sign-ups. A sign-up should imply that people wanted something so bad that they put up with the friction of creating a new account. But, whatever: the point is still valid. // Also, this is a take if Threads with a positive tone instead of the usual shit-all-over-it mission.

• ChatGPT web traffic falls 10%, analytics show - Indeed. I think I’ve found the limitations. The main one is the limit in the text you can feed it. If I could build up my own training data, that’d be something! The Link Reader plugin solves the summarizing web pages problem that I was having. What needs to happen now is just to get it integrated into enterprise software, and all the data ownership privacy stuff that goes with that. That’ll take at least six month, if not a year, to get through the security, legal, etc. people. So, check back in in 2025?

• Scratch Pad: Fireworks, Bootlegs, Spock - “I remain convinced that most categories of online services are akin either to hair salons, to grocery stores, or to movie theaters.”

• Porter’s Five Forces and the social web - There’s something interesting to do here in applying Porter to contemporary tech.

Upcoming

Talks I’ll be giving, places I’ll be, things I’ll be doing, etc.

July 11th How Cloud Native Improves & Ensures Security, Governance, and Trust in Finance, online talk. July 19th Stop Tech Debt and Start Using Faster, More Secure Paths to Production. August 21st to 24th SpringOne & VMware Explore US, in Las Vegas. Sep 6th to 7th DevOpsDays Des Moines, speaking. Sep 13th, stackconf, Berlin. Sep 14th to 15th SREday, London, speaking Sep 18th to 19th SHIFT in Zadar, speaking. Oct 3rd Enterprise DevOps Techron, Utrecht, speaking

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See y’all next time!