Forcing master to main was a good faith exploit
I never actually cared whether we call it master or main. So when the racialized claims started over how calling the default branch in Git repositories "master" was PrObLEmAtIC, I thought, fine, what skin is it off anyone's or my back to change? If this is really important, can make a real difference, great. Let's do it. How naivé. Thi...
Imperfections create connections
The engine is in wrong place in a Porsche 911. It's hanging out the back, swinging the car like a pendulum. And that's key to why it's the most iconic sports car ever made. This fundamental imperfection is part of how it creates the connection. This is true of mechanical watches too. They're hilariously complicated pieces of engineerin...
Enough problems to go around
The worst kind of company is usually not the one where there's too much real work to do, but the kind where there's not enough. It's in this realm the real monsters appear. Without enough real problems to go around, humans are prone to invent fictitious and dreadful ones. This is the root of David Graeber's Bullshit Jobs analysis. That...
You're not guaranteed a spot on the team
I've always hated the saying "we're like family here" when it comes to work. Because it's obviously not true, and it's usually cynically invoked by management to entice an undue obligation of sacrifice. Implying that you should give it all to The Company -- constantly working weekends, always being available on vacations, and all the r...
Le Mans 2024
This will be my 11th attempt. The first time I showed up on the grid at Le Mans was in 2012 -- some five years after I had first driven a real race car, and even less time since I made participating in the world's greatest endurance race the ultimate goal. But it almost didn't happen this year. See, motorsports relies on a curious mix ...
Bad Therapy
This book nails it. What it's like to be a parent with school-age children in America right now. So many kids with a diagnosis of one sort or another, so much monitoring of children's every move, so much anxiety over the most trivial things, like the sugar content of a cupcake. Abigail Shrier ties all these threads together into a damn...
There is an upcoming STM integrity hub town hall
The link for this event is https://us06web.zoom.us/j/9862079621? and it will be on the 19th of April at 2pm BST, Joris from STM sent over the following: Join us for the second STM Integrity Hub Town Hall meeting! In this session, you will learn about: • Progress update on screening tools (now in use by 20 publishers) • First-hand exper...
BMJ launches new clinical evidence product
We are launching a new product into market - BMJ Clinical Evidence - https://clinicalintelligence.bmj.com/. The team have been working incredibly hard over the last while to look at creating a medically relevant knowledge graph that underpins much of the clinical evidence that we publish. Our belief is that by making this kind of infor...
The ICO have consolation out about GenAI
You can read about it here, it is relatively short, coherent, and worth reading over: https://ico.org.uk/about-the-ico/what-we-do/our-work-on-artificial-intelligence/generative-ai-second-call-for-evidence/ It sets out some positions for consideration around separating purposes of training from purposes of application building. I think ...
interesting post on governance
This short post on the AI Act - https://joanna-bryson.blogspot.com/2024/02/2024-brief-overview-on-llm-foundation.html is worth a read. The author Joanna Bryson is brilliant. My main takeaways from the post are the following: • Framing the GDPR was a huge win for tech companies in the US • I softly disagree that these tools cannot be us...
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