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It's hard to believe that it's been 20 years since I left Australia. It feels like a lifetime ago, yet the memories of that time are still vivid in my mind. When I decided to leave, I was filled with a mix of excitement and trepidation. I had spent my entire life in Australia, and while I loved my home country, I also felt a strong pull to explore the …

LOCATION: Bristol, England WORDS & PICTURES: Andy Thatcher Eastern Bristol is speckled with commons. Go way, way back and this whole area was part of the Kingswood Forest, a royal Anglo Saxon hunting forest. This means that all the little verges, scrappy bits of wasteland and neat greens that I am about to find around the Bristol Ring Road are relics of hard-won ancient rights and custom. The day is …

Sebring-Vanguard was a U.S. company based in Sebring, Florida.

I was not going to write this 4 years of FIRE post but I’ve had a number of requests for it which made me do a little thinking. In the end I thought it might add a little value as it’s no secret that my FIRE journey has been a roller coaster of ups and downs around the personable side of FIRE with the financial side in hindsight actually being …

This post is probably too long, but I need someplace that I can refer to. As is often the case, I am writing this to sort my thoughts, primarily. But I am hoping to give voice to what I am observing in other people in our field but is rarely spoken about. I am not attempting to postulate a solution to a complex problem; instead, I am trying to provide …

I updated a couple of my minor apps today so that they look correct on the latest macOS releases. The first, Feed Compass which is an app to help you find, preview, and subscribe to blogs. I also updated Feed Curator which is an OPML feed list editor. I also added multiple select for a Reddit user who was needing it. It felt good to help someone out and to …

You ask, "Should I be making a new directory for this feature I'm building?" You expect a return value of: "yes" or "no." You had a 50% chance of guessing the "correct" answer...right? Four hours, 49 messages, 13 participants (4 whom you've never met?) later, you have not a boolean but instead something rather undefined: "What makes a feature a feature?" "Isn't everything in React a component?" "Where do I …

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I’ve spent a lot of time editing Wikipedia. I do it for many reasons, but one of the sillier ones floating around the margins of my consciousness is that I like to think that, by expanding Wikipedia, I am in some small way helping the advance of AI and speeding along the arrival of the singularity. After all, Wikipedia has historically been an important training corpus for AI models. But …

As we await the next generation of engineered writing, of tools like ChatGPT that are based on large language models (LLMs), it is worth pondering whether they will ever create truly great and unique prose, rather than the plausible-sounding mimicry they are currently known for. By preprocessing countless words and the statistical relationships between them from million of texts, an LLM creates a multidimensional topology, a complex array of hills …

One of the most interesting aspects of SwiftUI, at least from an architectural perspective, is how it essentially treats views as data. After all, a SwiftUI view isn’t a direct representation of the pixels that are being rendered on the screen, but rather a description of how a given piece of UI should work, look, and behave.That very data-driven approach gives us a ton of flexibility when it comes to …

I was a sceptic about the impact of the new tranche of generative AI tools until this week when two of my friends demonstrated how they could be used in genuinely transformative ways that go far beyond faking essays or acting as a search interface with poor boundaries and a tendency to invent things that look plausible. Last week in his regular Exponential View newsletter Azeem Azhar described in detail …

Preached at St Nicholas’, Leicester on Sunday 19th of February 2023READINGSExodus 24.12-end & Matthew 17.1-9SERMONAt face value, the Gospels are quite gritty affairs. Jesus in the dirt and the mud. Jesus in the dust. Jesus walking for miles. Jesus with no home to lay his head. Jesus in massed crowds, with the poor, the sick, the outcast.God has come to Earth to dwell with us - and the Gospels understandably …

⚠️ Disclaimer: This article is written with the help of a Large Language Model (LLM). This is a take. I’m selling you a take. Would you buy my take? Ideology as a service probably always existed, but it’s only now that it’s becoming more and more consolidated into a single, global superstructure with the surface area of the Internet. Can it be called an Industry vertical (with some unknown market …