Author: Robert Schlaff

A Hackers Mind

Post author By Robert Schlaff
Post date January 7, 2024

When most people hear the word ‘hacking,’ their minds go to a scary place of spies trying to break into computers and steal their credit cards. However, in A Hacker’s Mind, security expert Bruce Schneier points out that hacking is really something else. He defines hacking as “Something that a system allows but which is unintended and unanticipated by its designers.” Using this definition, Schneier looks at hacking as a method of creative problem-solving and critical thinking, challenging how one can extend a system’s capabilities beyond its designers’ original expectations.

ChatGPT

Crafting the Future: Building My AI Writing Partner with ChatGPT

Post author By Robert Schlaff
Post date January 6, 2024

Starting a New Writing Adventure

I’ve started on a fun new project: using ChatGPT to help with my writing. It should be able to help me with my writing by making suggestions and helping with the boring parts of writing. Essentially, it’ll help me get into the flow of writing more easily to get things done, improve my writing speed, and make writing more fun.

This is a blog post about how I’m creating that writing partner. It’s a bit meta because I’m writing a post about creating my writing partner. This is self-documenting code in a way so that you can build your own prompt of a writing partner. Also, it’ll help me as I iterate this model in the future.

Life Lessons

Reframing Perspectives: The True Distance Between First and Second Place

Post author By Robert Schlaff
Post date January 4, 2024

One of my favorite quotes if from Arron Sorkin’s “Sports Night”:

Dan: The distance is always 100 miles between first place and second place. You know, Jackie Robinson had a brother, and he ran the 200 meters. At the Olympics, he ran it faster than anyone had ever run it before, and he still came in second.

ABBY: I didn’t know Jackie Robinson had a brother.

DAN: That’s because it was the 1936 Olympics, and the guy who came in first was Jesse Owens.

Robinson’s exceptional performance, just a fraction of a second behind Jesse Owens, relegated him to a historical footnote. Because they get so much attention, we assume that the first-place finisher is fundamentally better than the second. This pattern isn’t limited to sports but is prevalent across our culture. Consider, for instance, that pinnacle of invention. The most brilliant inventor, Thomas Edison, and his most famous invention, the light bulb.

Product Management

Taking Control of My Goals

Post author By Robert Schlaff
Post date January 2, 2024

As we start the new year, I’d like to try something new. I’d like to try the empowered team thing. Instead of worrying about the details of the corporate goal-setting process, I want to own my strategy for the year at work, full stop. I’ll integrate the goals of seniors and needs of clients. Then, I’ll take the most important things and focus on that. Then, instead of dealing with all the individual corporate management processes individually, I’m going to use them as lenses to display and present my strategy.

ChatGPT

Meet Your New Intern! 5 Tips to Manage ChatGPT

Post author By Robert Schlaff
Post date December 28, 2023

Congratulations! You’re about to get a new intern! She may be named Microsoft Copilot, OpenAI, ChatGPT, or Google Bard. Whatever her name, she’s a large language model that can make you more efficient and creative.

Rather than thinking of this new assistant as just another tool, I’ve found it useful to think of her as a virtual intern. She’s a Large Language Model (LLM) built from neural networks that simulate the human brain. This makes her very different from other virtual assistants like Siri or Alexa. Rather than just providing you with the answers to questions, she can collaborate with you and help you develop your ideas.

ChatGPT Life Lessons

Improvising a Great Conversation

Post author By Robert Schlaff
Post date December 24, 2023

Navigating conversations can often be a bit of a tightrope walk for me. Sometimes, despite my best efforts, they don’t always go as smoothly as I’d like. Like a few weeks ago, I found myself deep in a chat with a new acquittance over lunch. We how public schools to tailor their teaching to individual students. It’s a topic I’m quite passionate about. Yet, somehow, right in the midst of this important discussion, things took an unexpected turn.

Judaism

Our Visit to Israel

Post author By Robert Schlaff
Post date December 18, 2023

We went to Israel in Passover of 2023. I wrote up my notes as we travelled but didn’t get to publish this until the atrocities of October 7th.

As I got off the overnight flight from Tel Aviv, I see a man standing at the end of the jetway with a sign that says, “Bennett, Naftali”. I know I’ve heard that name before, and I think he’s a member of the Knesset. But it can’t be that Naftali Bennett, can it?

The problem is, before this trip to Israel, I didn’t know much about the country. It’s like when I Ari, as a first grader, asked me, “Can you tell me about Andrew Cuomo.”

And I said, “Well… he’s the governor of New York… he’s a Democrat… and his dad Mario was also governor. People liked his dad a lot.”

Ari then shot back, “Tell me more. Like if you had to write a first-grade book report about Andrew Cuomo, what would you say?”

“Oh,” I said, “I don’t know enough about Andrew Cuomo to do that.”

Life Lessons

The Secret Blind Guy

Post author By Robert Schlaff
Post date November 11, 2023

In the book The Work Ahead office workers save the world with their knowledge of optimization and 80’s trivia. The protagonist happens to be blind. His blindness is only mentioned once in the book. To sighted readers like me, he seems just like you and me. It’s written by my friend Sameer Doshi. Sameer is an executive at Microsoft. During his interview, he forgot to tell anyone that he was blind and no one picked up on that fact. This made me think, “If he could tell a story where the protagonist was secretly blind, and he could interview for a job and no one noticed that he was blind, where else are there ‘secret blind guys’?” Amy Schumer has a joke about this in her Netflix special Emergency Contact:

Product Management

There’s Something Rotten in World of Disney (Digital)

Post author By Robert Schlaff
Post date May 9, 2023

This is a letter to my Zaid (Yiddish for grandfather) Norman Schlaff on what would have been his 95th birthday on June 4, 2023. Zaid died in 2012.

Zaid,

We went to Disney World with my in-laws last year for my father-in-law’s 80th birthday. While we had a wonderful time, there’s something that really bugged me. When you used to take us to Disney World, we all trusted Disney to create new and exciting adventures to surprise and delight us. After my last visit, I realized that Disney has lost its courage to invent, deciding instead to join the hoard of technology fanboys.

Life Lessons

When Zaid Came to Visit

Post author By Robert Schlaff
Post date March 4, 2023

Before he died, Richard Feynman said, “By the time people die, a lot of what is good about them has rubbed off on other people. So although they are dead, they won’t be completely gone.” My Zaid died a decade ago on December 20, 2012. After I had an accident skiing, Zaid surprised me with a visit.