I’m David Knott. I’ve been working in enterprise technology for over forty years and I’m still learning. This blog is based on mistakes, failures, lessons and some things I find interesting:
Look! I made a machine do a thing!
When I am doing hobbyist computer stuff, I often have moments which can be summarised as, Look! I made a machine do a thing! These moments bemuse family and friends, who are summoned to witness the thing that I have made the machine do, only to see a splurge of text at the command line, or an underwhelming web page. (But look at it - it works!)
The feeling of successfully making a machine do a thing is such an important phenomenon in computing that I think we should give it a name: perhaps LIMAMDAT, or LIMDAT for brevity and ease of pronunciation. The history of computing has been full of LIMDAT moments, from the first decrypts and trajectory calculations in the 1940s, through rocket launches and Moon landings, to the birth and development of the Internet.
Why have FO when there’s no MO?
If you are a business leader in 2026 trying to deal with AI, you are surrounded by fear on all sides. Analysts, investors, vendors and the media are all telling you that if you don't invest in AI, you should fear being left behind. At the same time, lawyers, risk professionals, privacy advocates and employee representatives are telling you you should fear AI harming your staff, your customers and your company's reputation.
Fear is rarely helpful in an enterprise setting. I once knew a large corporation which was desperate to move to cloud because they feared that their aging data centres could fail at any moment. But, after spending many millions to get their cloud environments ready, they wouldn't move their data because they feared security breaches. Fear drove double cost and double complexity.
Are LLMs the air fryers of AI?
Do you know someone who got an air fryer for Christmas? Or did you get one yourself?
If you know someone who got an air fryer, then there’s a high chance that you have heard all about it, and how it has been a complete game changer. They can cook things in a fraction of the time it used to take! And it’s not a fryer at all - it’s really a mini-oven! If you got an air fryer yourself, then there’s a chance that you’ve used it for everything, and that, even now, you are thinking about what you could use it to cook next.
I don’t have an air fryer myself, but am old enough to remember when my family first got a microwave. We lived off jacket potatoes for at least a week, and tried microwaving many things that should not be microwaved (there’s a reason that roasts are called roasts). Eventually, we found, just as my friends with air fryers seem to be finding in the weeks after Christmas, that, while the microwave is a useful tool to have in the kitchen, it’s not the only answer, and certainly not the best answer for everything.