• This week I was back at work after both myself and Mrs R were off poorly most of last week. It’s actually been pretty hard going and every night after work we have been coming home, collapsing on the sofa and sleeping.
  • Unfortunately we failed miserably at seeing Jon Richardson as we were just feeling too sick.
  • At work I was running a tech due dilligence project with an edtech company which was really interesting and fun. Sometimes it is nice to be reminded about how other small tech companies operate and that the trials and tribulations that my co-founders and I face are often shared by others.
  • I received a lovely surprised in the mail: a mug with the abstract from my PhD thesis that my supervisor Amanda sent off for when I got the news that the final version of my work had been accepted.
A mug with my PhD thesis abstract printed on it courtesy of my supervisor Amanda

A mug with my PhD thesis abstract printed on it courtesy of my supervisor Amanda

  • This week I’ve been taking a break from non-fiction and reading Valor’s Choice by Tanya Huff, a veritable sci-fi cheese-fest that I added to my to read list after chatting with some fellow bookworms on Mastodon.
  • We had snow this week across most of the UK but where I live in the south we mainly just got rained on a lot.
  • I was reminded of this masterclass in game theory The Evolution of Trust which talks about what happens when strangers choose to cooperate or compete for resources (as per the prisoner’s dilema). This demo is super interesting.
  • Yesterday Simon Willison wrote about how he managed to get the new Llama language model running on a macbook pro and how exciting that is. As Simon says “It’s easy to fall into a cynical trap of thinking there’s nothing good here at all, and everything generative AI is either actively harmful or a waste of time” - I’m actually quite close to this train of though which you might find surprising for an AI/ML specialist. However, given that generative models are here to stay (nobody’s putting this genie back in the bottle), it is great that we are starting to see commoditization and democratization of them rather than letting a small oligarchy of huge SVL companies gatekeeping the technology.

Blog Posts From Me

Next Week

  • I’m giving a talk about my PhD research to some computer science PhD students at the University of Manchester this week.
  • Now that I’m feeling better I want to get back out in the garden - I’ve got some chitted potatoes that are ready to be planted in their grow bags and a whole bunch of general maintainence chores to do.
  • Ted Lasso Season 3 starts - we’ve been rewatching series 1 and 2 in preparation. We’re also planning on catching up on You as the second part of the new season just dropped.
  • Now that I’m feeling a bit better I’m hoping to spend some time on my hobby projects after work again. I’ve got one new website idea that I’m particularly excited about sharing when the concept is a little more proven…