Finish Strong

Just got back from the first weekend spent with a big group of friends in a long while. It was so good to spend time wandering about, eating and drinking together. Highly recommended.

It’s been a few weeks since I’ve written up my weeknotes (becoming more fortnightly, and now a week further than that). The dissertation is a bit of a grind for the moment. My experiments have been going well, and I seem on track as I get into the final stretch. Just 25 working days until it’s due, 33 including weekends. Nothing has changed drastically, there’s just a lot of incremental progress and I haven’t had much bandwidth on anything else. I still need to figure out my next stages after the dissertation, but my loose plan is to get out to Vancouver and work it out from there.

Because it’s been so long since the last post I’ve got a lot of reading links.

Reading List

• Gabriella Hirst: An English Garden
  • This work was censored recently by a group of Conservative councillors in the area it was located. It was an artwork that launched a discussion about Britain’s history of creating nuclear weapons, and testing them on unceded indigenous Australian land. This is an example of the worst ahistorical nimby English instinct.
• Concern trolls and power grabs: Inside Big Tech’s angry, geeky, often petty war for your privacy
• If You Want To Transform IT, Start With Finance
• Kremlin papers appear to show Putin’s plot to put Trump in White House
• Soldiers Angrily Speak Out about Being Blocked from Repairing Equipment by Contractors
• Four lessons from a year building tools for machine learning
• Why the U.S. once set off a nuclear bomb in space
• Majority of Covid misinformation came from 12 people, report finds
  • Great to see the White House calling out Facebook for their lack of enforcement and failure to remove these actors because it would reduce engagement.
• Pacific Northwest Heat Wave Killed More Than One Billion Sea Creatures
• Robotaxis: have Google and Amazon backed the wrong technology?
• Edward Snowden calls for spyware trade ban amid Pegasus revelations
• 10 Papers Every Developer Should Read
• Two ways AI technology is like Nuclear technology
• Night, Elie Wiesel
• It doesn’t take much public creativity to stand out as a job candidate
• Three degrees of global warming is quite plausible and truly disastrous
  • The pure, deadly statistics of climate change terrify me: “Britain’s Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office estimated that the likelihood of an extreme heatwave capable of wiping out the southern Chinese rice crop in a given year was 1 in 100 under 1°C of warming, but one in ten under 2-3°C of warming”. We’re expected to see between 2-3 degrees of warming, these weather events are already happening with increasing and alarming regularity.
• “Working within government means you can’t be honest about the issues, working outside removes your ability to even know how to fix them”
• Caml trading – experiences with functional programming on Wall Street
• TODO apps are meant for robots
• Close open loops
• About these notes
  • I love a digital garden, Andy’s has a really fascinating structure! I love the pagination and the wiki style linking. His design style of scrolling paginated windows is fantastic.
• Winnebiko
• Computing Across America
• Hundreds of AI tools have been built to catch covid. None of them helped.