Lots of dancers, civic society organisations, artists, musicians, clowns are only on Instagram. Unfortunately, my mind finds the platform distracting and overwhelming – for my own accessibilty I need to tame it. I prototyped a web browser plugin for this in my week making something every day, and it’s now pretty stable. Try it out! […]
One of the projects in my week long hackathon was to make a system to sample my own mind with a random alarm. This was crudely based on Hurlburt’s Descriptive Experience Sampling – there are lots of papers about that method, for an introduction see this overview BBC article or my own post about a […]
I’m starting a meetup / online commnunity to share tips on skillful use of social media. Things like browser plugins that let you customise YouTube, tips on settings, social practices like how to form a healthy active WhatsApp group for a particular purpose. And so on. Sign up to the first event if you’re in […]
As a challenge, last week I made five things, one each day. Each had to be finished in some sense, and preferably published. This is what I made and what I learnt! Monday – Godot game My goal was to learn Godot enough to write some kind of video game and publish it, all in […]
This post has two sections, one about gas prices and energy savings, the other about Android automation and the Netatmo API. 1. What a smart thermostat is like and how much money I saved Last year, with gas prices going up, I decided to get smart radiator valves. I’d thought the saving from these would […]
These days I alternate mobile operating system. Partly because as an app-making professional I strongly feel I need to understand both, and partly because it slightly irritates people who are die-hard fans of one or the other. I don’t particularly love either – a plague on both their houses. I’d rather we all used a […]
Our brains have 100 trillion connections. Large language models have up to half a trillion, a trillion at most. Yet GPT-4 knows hundreds of times more than any one person does. Geoffrey Hinton, deep learning pioneer The recent surge in interest in generative AI was sparked by neural networks trained on high quality public, human […]
A book review of “Describing Inner Experience? Proponent Meets Skeptic” by Russell T. Hurlburt and Eric Schwitzgebel (2007) A couple of years ago I realised I didn’t have a visual imagination. This was ultimately quite inspiring – it’s led me to ask maybe a hundred people about their own inner lives. The answers so varied, […]
To my surprise this list is television heavy – I didn’t find any incredible new board games, and I was disappointed in most video games. It’s somewhat in order – my favourite is roughly last. Thanks everyone who recommended these to me – you know who you are! I’m not going to link to where […]
A three year old draft blog post I just found. Feels worth publishing – the improvements in AI since then if anything make it clearer, and all the “right now” caveats justified. It’s better to start by thinking of us as pattern matching devices first. Not simple ones – such as modern deep learning AI […]