Personal Newsletter 2023 Q1

Loss and Distance

For the past couple of months, my Facebook usage has started to diminish. In the past, I used to post quite a bit, and I dare say probably 10 years ago to the point of oversharing. It seems to me that the popularity of Facebook has been dropping in my network to the point of many people completely withdrawing. It is hard to imagine, but empires in tech eventually fall (hello Internet Explorer, Netscape, or Friendster anybody?), and it is not hard to imagine Facebook joining one of those empires someday.

Last year when we were traveling through Chile, we made some new friends during a tour. At the end of our excursion, we exchanged contact information, and they wanted my Instagram handle to keep in touch. I was pretty surprised as back in the day when traveling I remember adding people to Facebook to keep in touch, but it seems like times are changing.

6 months ago I was mindlessly scrolling through Facebook and one post caught my eye. Facebook feeds are kind of weird, because our feed is a collection of family, close friends, and acquaintances.

For better or for worse Facebook creates a fake close friend illusion because if a friend posts often and you consume it often, you know everything on what is going on in their life. But does that mean you are actually close?

The post that passed by my screen was from Lara. After I graduated from the University of California, Irvine (UCI) with a degree of Information & Computer Science (ICS) in 2003, my friend Jesse started an alumni chapter.

I was pretty fortunate as my ICS cohort constituted of a bunch of nerds. They pushed me to study more and do better in my classes, and after graduating we all looked out for each other and got each other jobs. One of our complaints is we had no help from our upperclassman or alumni, so my friend took it upon himself to start a program where alumni would help each other network and help mentor current students in their career journey.

Lara worked in the division called external affairs. That entire group’s primary responsibility would be to facilitate communication and events with external groups. Jesse helped lead several events and there was one event I remember distinctly where I was part of a panel to talk to prospective ICS students applying to UCI.

At the event were about 300 high school students where the dean of ICS was there. The panel constituted of myself with some friends and the moderator asked us if we were still using what we learned in university in our current jobs. The panel all answered that we didn’t use what we learned in school, and as we continued our answers we noticed the dean of the school turning a bit white.

Noticing this, we pivoted our answers to how we “learned how to learn” and got out of that networking event without causing much more damage to our school’s reputation.

My communication with Lara would primarily be through these events, and we chatted every time there would be a networking event. However since 2008 I really haven’t talked to her in person and only casually have kept track of her life on Facebook.

The post that came across my feed was her mentioning she had leukemia. As the months progressed I would see her progress in fighting to get better and at one point it seemed she really turned a corner. However only 2 weeks ago I saw this post.


“Well, folks, this is nearing the end of the road for me. The leukemia is back and it’s not good.

Why is this happening? I don’t know, but I can only hold on and go along with it.

If we don’t get to say goodbye, know that i treasure our friendship.

💕”.

Then a couple days later, there was a message that she passed away on Facebook.

It’s weird you know, to find someone who passed away from Facebook. Also strange because I knew her, but really wasn’t close to her. I think we have these defined rituals of funerals for those we are close to, where we can grieve with family or friends. But the passing away of acquaintances has no defined ritual or rite for anybody to fall back to.

Chat GPT

By now I’m sure now you have used or heard of Chat GPT. In short, it is the acceleration of something called large language models.

I was actually playing around this with my techie friends quite a bit, and I cannot stress how revolutionary this tool is. I’m sure a lot of people have been playing around with it to write e-mails and do essays, but at my work in software engineering we use it every day.

For me it came really natural to use because I watched a lot of Star Trek growing up. The premise of the show is there is this star ship, and it has a sentient-ish computer. You would just describe the scenes and then it would happen.

Similar stuff happens to Chat GPT. In my line of work, engineers are describing a problem and then asking Chat GPT to actually generate code.

One day I had an engineer approach me with kind of a weird problem. He told me there were a thousand production databases, and he needed a way to dynamically retrieve the meta data from back-up files to obtain the database name.

He showed me a query he performed on a back-up file then we proceeded working on the problem.

1. First with ChatGPT we established the parameters of the problems
2. Then we asked it to generate a script in powershell
3. The script looked good, but we asked for some refinement on how the data was being displayed

Below is a script generated all by Chat GPT

SCRIPT: See the prompts here

# set the SQL Server instance name and the backup file path
$serverName = "localhost"
$backupFilePath = "C:\backup\backupfile.bak"

# create a SQL Server connection object
$connectionString = "Server=$serverName;Database=master;Integrated Security=True"
$connection = New-Object System.Data.SqlClient.SqlConnection($connectionString)

# create a SQL command object to execute the RESTORE FILELISTONLY command
$commandString = "RESTORE FILELISTONLY FROM DISK='$backupFilePath'"
$command = New-Object System.Data.SqlClient.SqlCommand($commandString, $connection)

# open the SQL Server connection and execute the command
$connection.Open()
$resultSet = $command.ExecuteReader()

# loop through the result set and retrieve the file names
$logicalName1 = ""
$logicalName2 = ""
while ($resultSet.Read())
{
    $type = $resultSet["Type"]
    if ($type -eq "D") {
        $logicalName1 = $resultSet["LogicalName"]
    } elseif ($type -eq "L") {
        $logicalName2 = $resultSet["LogicalName"]
    }
    $physicalName = $resultSet["PhysicalName"]
    # do something with the file names
}

# close the SQL Server connection
$connection.Close()

# Output the logical names
Write-Host "Logical Name 1: $logicalName1"
Write-Host "Logical Name 2: $logicalName2"

From what I have learned so far, ChatGPT actually works bests for experienced engineers. The results are only as good as how good the questions you ask it.