Phil Simon's Blog, page 4

AI Dataviz Abominations

"Action expresses priorities."
—Mahatma Gandhi

Reneé Rapp's new album dropped a little under two weeks ago. Not surprisingly, the über-popular artist's latest effort quickly accumulated well over 50 million streams on Spotify alone.

Here's the BITE ME breakdown of Spotify track streams as of August 2, 2025:

BITE ME Spotify Streams as of August 2, 2025 | Click on the image to enlarge it.

Stats 101 tells us that the stream distribution wouldn't be remotely normal. Rapp released the catchy “Leave Me Alone” as a single on May 21, 2025—more than two months after the proper album dropped. I must have listened to the first track 30 times myself.

It's Visualization Time (Again)

I had already given Claude's MCP permission to access my Spotify account. It subsequently blew my mind. How would it do in an encore performance?

To find out, I entered the following prompt:

Claude Prompt and Response With a Key Word Highlighted | Click on the image to enlarge it.

AI's Promethean Moment

ℹ️Excerpted from my keynote talk Proceed With Caution: The Promise and Peril of Generative AI.

"The real question is not whether machines think but whether men do."

—B.F. Skinner

No one would have ever called Anthony Dwayne McRae a saint.

In 2019, police arrested him for carrying a concealed weapon without a permit—a felony. He later pleaded guilty to a misdemeanor for possessing a loaded firearm. For the crime, he spent 18 months on probation.

I wish that McRae’s story ended there.

The conviction did not preclude him from purchasing more guns upon his release.

All Hell Breaks Loose

On February 13, 2023, the 43-year-old entered a building on the Michigan State University campus in East Lansing and opened fire. McRae then moved to another building and continued shooting. On that horrible day, he murdered three people and injured five more. After police confronted him, McRae turned the gun on himself and took his life.

Welcome to America in 2023.

MSU officials immediately canceled classes for the remainder of the week. Students and their supporters predictably protested against gun violence. Progressive lawmakers once again promised gun-control reforms.

The folks at Vanderbilt University’s College of Education and Human Development wanted to do something more than offer the hackneyed “hearts and prayers” refrain on social media. Two days later, its Office of Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion (EDI) emailed the whole Peabody community. Here is the message in its entirety:

Lessons From My Accounting System's Sudden Crash

On a recent June afternoon, I attempted to pay a vendor who was helping me move from WordPress to Ghost. Paying a vendor isn't rocket surgery. It's a rudimentary transaction that I've successfully completed hundreds of times over the past five years in different accounting systems—most recently, in Wave.

Ho hum, right?

And then Wave presented me with this error message:

Wave Error Message | Click on the image to enlarge it.

In this post, I'll briefly describe the nightmare that ensued and lessons you can learn from my ordeal.

Photo by Money Knack / UnsplashBackground

I'm set up as a single-person LLC and have been for years. Number of proper employees at Simon, Inc.: zero. Even I don't draw a salary. I eat what I kill.

This legal designation absolves me from needing to run payroll every week, month, or quarter. You needn't be an accountant to understand the distinction. (In point of fact, my decade as an enterprise systems consultant means that my knowledge of HR and payroll systems exceeds that of most people reading this post. Hell, I wrote a whole book about the subject, but I digress...)

At least I wasn't trying to pay my employees. Other Wave users weren't so lucky. Not surprisingly, many took to Reddit to express their dismay at their Wave-induced nightmares. Maybe that's why its former CEO recently left. Go down that rabbit hole if you like, but let's get back to the subject of this post.

Enough Outrage. Let's Analyze the Problem.

Web Browsing Is About to Get Much More Interesting

Those of us of a certain age remember when web browsing was magical.

We haven't seen too much innovation over the past fifteen years. For a long time, Chrome has reigned supreme. Here are the latest stats:

What Every Software Vendor Should Learn From This Glorious Ghost Alert

I've ranted before about the sad state of software notifications. I'd love to see a proper research paper, but I suspect that few apps and systems give users the timely and relevant notifications they need to do their jobs effectively. Instead, enterprise apps far too often bombard employees with duplicate alerts and irrelevant messages while missing key ones.

Type I Errors: Frustrating False Positives

Near the top of my list of alert bugaboos today: the iPad app for my beloved Notion repeatedly displays phantom notifications. bells, Margaret, we had no idea.

I wish.

The company has acknowledged the bogus red badges signifying exactly nothing, but has chosen not to fix the issue. As its support and engineering teams recently confirmed with me:

Notion Focuses on New Features, Not Fixing Current Issues

It's beyond frustrating, but not unexpected behavior from large software vendors. In another ironic twist, Notion alerts also fail in another important way. I don't know about PC users, but Mac owners have to manually check if Notion needs an update after the company drops one. Latest doesn't pick Notion's most recent versions up either.

Today, AI and enterprise search are all the rage in Notion world. Sadly, the company is doing a poor job communicating basic app changes. This page would work if Notion actually kept it current, in contrast to Zoom's timely release notes. But I digress ...

Photo by Ed Hardie / UnsplashOutlook's Non-Alerts

To paraphrase the great Gary Gulman, I've profiled this criminal before. Notion is hardly the first software company to prioritize sexy new features over basic app maintenance.

The Generative AI Tool That's Blowing My Mind

"Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic."

—Arthur C. Clarke

Last month, I recorded a Caspio podcast to talk about the state of low-code/no-code tools and my book on the subject. Paul Quirk—the company's WP of Customer Success & Partnerships—and I chatted for about 35 minutes about citizen development. (I'll post the pod on the book's main page after it drops in a few months.)

It was only a matter of time before the subject of AI came up. Paul asked me about new AI and low-code developments that interested me most these days.

It didn't take long for me to answer.

Photo by Amauri Mejía / UnsplashMCPs

Model context protocols haven't been around all that long, but I'd be hard-pressed to overstate their implications. My friend and rockstar former student Jason Conigliari mentioned them to me a few months back, but I didn't fully appreciate their import until I got my hands dirty.

Now I do.

I Asked AI How My Writing Has Evolved Since 2009. Here's What It Found.

The famous cellist Pablo Casals continued his intense practicing well into his eighties and nineties. When asked why he still did it, he responded, "I think I’m making progress. I think I see some improvement."1

The timeless quote manifests his humility, but also something profound: the desire of many creators to hone their skills. The musicians, actors, and comedians I most admire refuse to be complacent; they need to keep raising the bar. (As an aside, if you fail to up your game after a prolonged period of time, it may be time to consider changing vocations. If not, then your profession will probably make that decision for you.)

In this vein, I was curious about how my writing has evolved since I started blogging in 2009. I asked AI to evaluate my words—and, by extension, me.

Background and Motivation

Before moving this website from WordPress to Ghost, I did my homework. Others had documented their journeys. A one-day project this was not. Yeah, AI could help. If I wanted my site to look good out of the gate, though, I would still have to:

Recreate all of my site's pages.Revisit my earliest posts. Fix plenty of broken images and links that had accumulated since I started blogging.Identify and remove all theme-specific shortcodes. Work with my developer to write new formatting and redirect rules.

I'll spare you the rest of the deets.

Even before I began the process, I knew that my writing had changed from 2009 in at least two ways: content and tone. With all of the blog posts, white papers, and books I've written and ghostwritten, I would have been surprised if my prose had remained constant over that period of time. Plus, I'm inherently curious—sometimes to my own detriment.

Specific questions included:

How has my writing changed? What were the shifts, and when did they occur? Would AI hallucinate, get it partially right, or stick the landing?Ultimately, is my writing somehow better or worse now?

Let's see what it had to say.

Enter Claude

Here's my prompt:

How AI Eased My Recent Website Migration

I recently detailed my decision to move from WordPress to Ghost. I knew ahead of time that the migration would involve significant time, effort, and cost. I strongly suspected that generative AI could reduce all three.

Was I right?

In today's post, I'll go deeper into the migration. I'll address these questions:

Would Google Gemini prove helpful or not?Would AI's juice ultimately be worth the squeeze?

Let's find out.

Background

I debated whether I wanted to port over every page from the WordPress site. Some just didn't generate much traffic. Case in point: the By the Numbers page.

Old WordPress By the Numbers Page | Click here to view a version of it on the Internet Archive.

Largely for SEO purposes and because I'm a completionist, I decided to give it a shot. The fact that I could easily access today's generative AI tools clinched it for me. Five years ago, I'm not sure that I would have dotted every i and crossed every t on this type of project.

🙃 SEO Silliness
I once counted a Fortune 100 company as a multi-year client. It paid dozens of people like me to contribute thoughts on enterprise IT. After inexplicably terminating the program, the company simply let the website vanish.Process

I started by grabbing the unformatted text from the original By the Numbers page. I then pasted its contents into the Online HTML Editor:

Why Most Niche Software Vendors Will Soon Perish

Historically, there have been two types of software. All-in-one solutions try to be everything to everybody. Oracle, SAP, Salesforce, Microsoft, Adobe, and Google are prime examples. By contrast, smaller best-of-breed applications specialize tackle a single niche. Here are just a few of today's popular ones:

Wispr Flow is probably the best dictation tool around as of this writing. Grammarly purports to be the ultimate writing assistant. Perhaps, but it doesn't analyze data. Plenty of folks swear by Riverside for podcasting, but you'll need a tool like Canva to design a sophisticated logo for your show.

One type of software isn't inherently better than the other; they're just different. As I've seen dozens of times in my consulting career, there are pros and cons to each.

The AI Disruption Tsunami

Large, diversified vendors are far more apt to survive tectonic shifts like the AI-driven one we're seeing now. There is, however, one key caveat: they must quickly embrace new technologies.

👩‍💻 Parallels
The same principle applies to programming languages. Python and JavaScript have remained industry stalwarts for many reasons. At the top of the list: they've contsantly evolved.

Make no mistake: size matters. Riverside may crush Adobe Audition, but it's far easier to envision a world without the former than the latter. Behemoths have grown bigger over past three decades—and not merely by organic growth. Oracle's list of acquisitions is extensive, as is Salesforce's.

This begs the questions:

What does the AI-driven future mean for best-of-breed software vendors? Will they continue to flourish, or are their days numbered?

I'll answer those questions by addressing another:

How does a souped-up AI tool with no particular speciality fare against a best-of-breed application today?

For my analysis, I'll focus on one of my areas of expertise: data visualization.

20 Percent Off the Plus Plan

I'm stoked about the new site and where I can take it.

For the next month, I'm discounting the Plus plan 20%. Here's how it compares to the Free one:

Plans as of July 28, 2025 | Click on the image to enlarge it.LET'S DO THIS