Episode 212 - CISA updates, taxing IT professionals, and standing by generative AI

Welcome to Episode 212

At 212 degrees fahrenheit, water becomes steam. At 211 it’s hot. At 212 you can move a locomotive or make electricity. We are happy to bring you episode 212 of the Killing IT Podcast!

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Topics:

Topic 1: CISA update

If the US government is not going to be helping small businesses with security alerts, who will step in to provide this service? Is there anything we can do to get CISA to help, or will this be another function we simply defer to Europe to provide the leadership?

Doing nothing is not an option? What are you doing to stay tuned to security alerts for your clients?

Topic 2: Taxes for IT consultants. Maryland and Washington announce new taxes. Who's next?

Not to say we told you so, but …

Whether we like it or not, taxes are coming to online services and tech support. Maryland's tax appeared very quickly, and then narrowed down to only SMALL IT consultants.

Dave mentioned this in his Business of Tech podcast, and the National Society of IT Service Providers addressed this on their blog at https://nsitsp.org/those-who-do-not-organize-get-taxed-lessons-from-marylands-3-tech-tax/.

Now is a great time to decide where we as an industry stand on this.

Topic 3: Under what circumstances should we rely on generative AI?

There's a growing disillusionment with generative AI. There continue to be problems with hallucinations and outright falsehoods. And there are continuing examples of just plain laziness - without any meaningful accountability.

We discuss a really great, Boolean decision tree. See the graphic at https://guides.lib.usf.edu/c.php?g=1315087&p=9678779. That graphic also provides a very short, very straight-forward description of the answer.

Does it matter if the output is true, accurate, or helpful? Do you have the knowledge and ability to determine whether the output is accurate?

Feedback always welcome!

:-)

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