General Thoughts
- God, getting back from holiday is the worst, isn’t it? It’s so strange watching that sudden influx of energy slowly draining away when faced with the reality of the modern world. This probably isn’t helped by my reading Slow Productivity (more below)
- STEM and AI education in the UK: I’ve been pondering education in the UK, and whether it’s failing us in the AI field (eg, why haven’t we got a “Bristral” yet). My main comparison point on this is probably the French education system, and my two working theories are that:
- Our research and PhD system is too separated from real work (eg, lots of spending 4 years pondering a hundred thousand words and not enough working in industry)
- Our education system really does have some failings in core STEM fields (eg, we all stop doing maths)
- Government and delivery: My reading of deliveris last week reminded me that I wrote neartly a whole PHD on policing risk ,and how disconnected it is from realty.
What I’ve Found
Converting scientific papers to HTML
- I’ve been trying to read more scientific papers on my Boox, and my god I still hate PDF, so I’ve been exploring options to convert research papers to HTML. Did you know that even if a paper on Arxiv doesn’t show html as available, you can either just replace the x with a 5 in the url, or use https://academ.us to get a totally passable html generation version?
UV is continuing to be awesome
They’ve now released 0.4.0. I think I’m finally putting vanilla pip to bed now?
Making gorgeous front-end with AI
There seem to be loads of tools now to make beautiful front-ends with LLMs, but I’ve been really impressed both withv0.dev, and MakeItReal from TlDraw (tldraw is also just exceptional, but that’s a whole other thing)
Is Obsidian still the best thing for my brain?
Someone recently recommended Anytype, and it is, to put it bluntly bloody gorgeous. I do also love their entity structure, but I’m not sure I’m ready to ditch my fancy obsidian just yet (especially seeing I’ve now made an extension)
What I’ve Read
Podcasts
The Black Box from the Guardian
I really wasn’t expecting this to be good, but it is!
Books
Slow Productivity
I’ve been pondering what being productive means a lot recently, and this just made me ponder a lot more.
Gideon the Ninth
Queer necromancers from space. That is all.
Articles
An Age of Hyperabundance
A good reminder that plenty of people really don’t want to be sceptical.
Social Media
It looks like Russian disinformation actors are hiring actors on Cameo to look legitimate
People are safe, but some people very definitely don’t feel it
Last week I wondered whether competence was enough to generate trust, and this post reminded me that at least in the policing and crime space, they absolutely do not: we’ve never been safer, but lots of people definitely don’t feel it.