Have you ever seen that popular movie where the silent loner student suddenly stands up in the school cafeteria and threatens his classmates with a bag of Cool Ranch Doritos?
“After football practice Monday night, Taki Allen chatted with friends outside Kenwood High School while munching on Cool Ranch Doritos. When he finished his snack he put the bag in his pocket. Minutes later, several police officers pulled up, pointed their guns at him and yelled for him to get on the ground, he said.”
So why did Taki (I’ll get to his name later) receive police attention?
“The false alarm was triggered by Baltimore County Public Schools’ AI-powered gun-detection system, Omnilert.”
Yes, it…um…appears that the AI-powered system thought the Doritos bag was a gun.
“In this case, Omnilert’s monitoring team reviewed an image of “what appeared to be a firearm” on the person at Kenwood Monday night, said Blake Mitchell, a spokesperson for Omnilert.
“”Because the image closely resembled a gun being held, it was verified and forwarded to the Baltimore County Public Schools (BCPS) safety team within seconds for their assessment and decision-making,” he wrote in an email.”
Although not explicitly stated, it appears that the image was sent for human review…and the human thought it was a gun also.
So how can a Cool Ranch Doritos bag look like a gun? Let’s see the picture.
“Mitchell [noted] that their privacy policy prevents them from sharing the image.”
I probably spend at least 30 minutes a day playing smartphone games, which means that I probably spend at least 15 minutes a day watching ads.
I’m convinced that “games” are in reality ad delivery vehicles whose sole purpose is to lure you to download other ad delivery vehicles.
But back to the topic. I’ve seen some ads countless times, which means I’ve seen this misspelling countless times over the last few months.
Source not revealed.
And apparently no one at the company (a U.S. based firm) has noticed yet.
They would…if they reviewed their existing content on a set schedule with regular content review cycles.
This is a trick I picked up in the proposal world, one I try to implement when possible.
But not always. Apparently some people are still downloading my old SIX content questions from somewhere on the Bredemarket website. Gotta track that down and fix it.
I frequently refer to myself as the “biometric product marketing expert”…and my expertise has been verified multiple times by independent entities.
For those who don’t know, there are a number of companies that put experts in touch with investors to provide insights. There are very strict rules governing these conversations: for example, experts are strictly prohibited from revealing confidential information. But in the end the investors receive insights, and the experts receive a small renumeration for their time.
For obvious reasons I can’t talk much about it, but I have participated in these conversations with multiple investors.
There are multiple entities that arrange these conversations, but the process usually works like this.
The entity approaches you and says they have an expert opportunity to talk about a particular topic.
You answer questions concerning your knowledge about the topic.
You agree to confidentiality, non-disclosure, and other critical terms.
The entity gets back to you and says the opportunity won’t happen.
Yes, that’s the usual process, at least in my experience.
But occasionally you DO succeed in booking a meeting, provide your expertise, and get paid as a result.
Over the last few years I have successfully participated in multiple meetings arranged by two of these entities.
But I recently was approached by a third entity, and the email went something like this.
“Hey, I’m Jim-Bob Jones with KnowledgeRUs. I saw your LinkedIn profile, and I believe KnowledgeRUs could use you as an expert to discuss Green Widgets. Can we talk about this?”
So it appears that Jim-Bob saw my LinkedIn profile…but appeared to be completely unaware that KnowledgeRUs has approached me before. I don’t know why he didn’t research any previous interactions between KnowledgeRUs and me, but it obviously wasn’t critically important for him to do so.
If Jim-Bob had performed his research, he would have realized that KnowledgeRUs has approached me.
Multiple times.
All resulting in…nothing.
So I had a choice:
Do I talk to Jim-Bob and spend one or more hours going through the process again, with the likelihood that I’d be rejected again?
Or do I instead spend my time providing services to Bredemarket clients, or perhaps to one of the entities that HAS provided expert consultations for me?
In the end I chose the latter.
Because I can provide my biometric product marketing expertise much more effectively when I work directly with you.
Sometimes I think that half of the people writing on Substack are telling people how to write on Substack. So they can in turn tell people how to write on Substack.
But the people promoting Substack success are nothing compared to the ones promoting LinkedIn success.
Bredemarket currently manages four LinkedIn pages, and recently received a notification from LinkedIn that someone commented on one of Bredemarket’s LinkedIn posts, and why haven’t I engaged with the commenter?
“Are we ready for better identification systems? Let’s explore potential solutions. 🔑 #Innovation”
LinkedIn.
Frankly, that comment sounded…formulaic. And I had a hunch that the commenter had left similar comments on other posts.
I was right.
LinkedIn.
Obviously the well-meaning commenter had read some advice on How To Maximize Your LinkedIn Profile Reach With Text, An Emoji, And A Hashtag. And frankly, it doesn’t matter whether the comments were self-written or bot-written. Either way, they’re ineffective.
I was going to have Bredebot write a response to the comment for me, but in the end I didn’t bother.
Avoid rote steps to success. Be yourself.
And yes, I will probably post this to the same LinkedIn page, in case the commenter revisits.
I just asked Google Gemini to conceive an illustration of the benefits of orchestration. You can see my original prompt and the resulting illustration, credited to Bredebot, in the blog post “Orchestration: Harmonizing the Tech Universe.” (Not “Harmonzing.” Oh well.)
Google Gemini.
Note the second of the two benefits listed in Bredebot’s AI-generated illustration: “Reduced Complexity.”
On the surface, this sounds like generative AI getting the answer wrong…again.
After all, the reason that software companies offer a single-vendor solution is because when everything comes from the same source, it’s easier to get everything to work together.
When you have an orchestrated solution incorporating elements from multiple vendors, common sense tells you that the resulting solution is MORE complex, not less complex.
When I reviewed the image, I was initially tempted to ask Bredebot to write a response explaining how orchestrated solution reduce complexity. But then I decided that I should write this myself.
Because I had an idea.
The discipline from orchestration
When you orchestrate solutions from multiple vendors, it’s extremely important that the vendor solutions have ways to talk to each other. This is the essence of orchestration, after all.
Because of this need, you HAVE to create rules that govern how the software packages talk to each other.
Let me cite an example from one of my former employers, Incode. As part of its identity verification process, Incode is capable of interfacing to selected government systems and processing government validations. After all, I may have something that looks like a Mexican ID, but is it really a Mexican ID?
Mexico – INE Validation. When government face validation is enabled this method compares the user’s selfie against the image in the INE database. The method should be called after add-face is over and one of (process-id or document-id) is over.
So Incode needs a standard way to interface with Mexico’s electoral registry database for this whole thing to work. Once that’s defined, you just follow the rules and everything should work.
The lack of discipline from single-vendor solutions
Contrast this with a situation in which all the data comes from a single vendor.
Now ideally interfaces between single-vendor systems should be defined in the same way as interfaces between multi-vendor systems. That way everything is nicely neatly organized and future adaptations are easy.
Sounds great…until you have a deadline to meet and you need to do it quick and dirty.
Google Gemini.
In the same way that computer hardware server rooms can become a tangle of spaghetti cables, computer software can become a tangle of spaghetti interfaces. All because you have to get it done NOW. Someone else can deal with the problems later.
So that’s my idea on how orchestration reduces complexity. But what about those who really know what they’re talking about?
Chris White on orchestration
In a 2024 article, Chris White of Prefect explains how orchestration can be done wrong, and how it can be done correctly.
“I’ve seen teams struggle to justify the adoption of a first-class orchestrator, often falling back on the age-old engineer’s temptation: “We’ll just build it ourselves.” It’s a siren song I know well, having been lured by it myself many times. The idea seems simple enough – string together a few scripts, add some error handling, and voilà! An orchestrator is born. But here’s the rub: those homegrown solutions have a habit of growing into unwieldy systems of their own, transforming the nature of one’s role from getting something done to maintaining a grab bag of glue code.
“Orchestration is about bringing order to this complexity.”
So how do you implement ordered orchestration? By following this high-level statement of purpose:
“Think of orchestration as a self-documenting expert system designed to accomplish well-defined objectives (which in my world are often data-centric objectives). It knows the goal, understands the path to achieve it, and – crucially – keeps a detailed log of its journey.”
Read White’s article for a deeper dive into these three items.
Now think of a layer
The concept of a layer permeates information technology. There are all sorts of models that describe layers and how they work with each other.
“In modern IT systems, an orchestration layer is a software layer that links the different components of a software system and assists with data transformation, server management, authentication, and integration. The orchestration layer acts as a sophisticated mediator between various components of a system, enabling them to work together harmoniously. In technical terms, the orchestration layer is responsible for automating complex workflows, managing communication, and coordinating tasks between diverse services, applications, and infrastructure components.”
(The prompt: “Create a realistic photograph that visualizes a scene in outer space. The scene represents the ecosystem between an orchestration platform and the technology partners that are orchestrated by the platform. The visualization should graphically communicate the benefits of orchestration.”)
You want your prospects to feel distinct emotions when they consider your product—the stronger the better.
When your prospects consider the, um, prospect of life WITHOUT your product, they should experience fear or anger because your product is not available to them.
But when your prospects consider the alternative of having your product at their disposal, they should not only feel a quiet satisfaction but should feel power and joy. Your product equips them to perform the tasks that are important to them.
But before I launch into my rant, let me define the acronym of the day: AFOID. It stands for “acceptable form of identification.”
And for years (decades), we’ve been told that the ONLY acceptable form of identification to board a plane is a REAL ID, U.S. passport, or a similar form of identity. A REAL ID does not prove citizenship, but it does prove that you are who you say you are.
“The Transportation Security Administration (TSA) is launching a modernized alternative identity verification program for individuals who present at the TSA checkpoint without the required acceptable form of identification (AFOID), such as a REAL ID or passport. This modernized program provides an alternative that may allow these individuals to gain access to the sterile area of an airport if TSA is able to establish their identity. To address the government-incurred costs, individuals who choose to use TSA’s modernized alternative identity verification program will be required to pay an $18 fee. Participation in the modernized alternative identity verification program is optional and does not guarantee an individual will be granted access to the sterile area of an airport.”
I’ve love to see details of what “modernized” means. In today’s corporate environment, that means WE USE AI.
And AI can be embarrassingly inaccurate.
And if you want to know how seedy this all sounds, I asked Google Gemini to create a picture of a man waving money at a TSA agent. Google refused the request.
“I cannot fulfill this request. My purpose is to be helpful and harmless, and that includes refusing to generate images that promote harmful stereotypes, illegal activities, or depict bribery of public officials.”
Bredemarket 