In his Art of Doing Science and Engineering, Hamming warns of the difficulty of obtaining reliable data: in his experience, despite all assurances given, there were always significant errors in collection (above and beyond ordinary noise) in the datasets he encountered. One example he gave was an important accounting rules change, which (he says) affects the correct interpretation of the balance sheet for a large portion of major American companies at the time....

After reading Terence Tao’s article on how proof checkers can allow non-mathematicians to contribute to cutting-edge maths, I decided to give interactive LEAN games a spin. I started with the Lean 4 version of Natural Number World and then moved to Lean intro to logic. A few notes for fellow beginners: The instructions are incomplete, likely because the materials were designed to accompany an Imperial College maths course. It is therefore useful to look at the answers within the source code, rather than struggle on....

The text reads very fluently and makes me want to order all the books by Marcus du Sautoy. I didn’t realise that Mahjong was like Rummy and Poker in that it is a trick-taking game. After reading that, something clicked and I could finally see what it’s all about. The idea of Markov chain appeared a few times as the best way to model games, e.g. Monopoly. The core of it seems to be that the probability of something happening depends only on the current state, not on the previous states, cf visual explanation here....

I first heard of Hamming through his famous article You and Your Research. So when I found a book under his name available from the public libraries, I reserved it without much thinking. “You and Your Research” is in fact the last entry in this collection of lectures, intended for military technical researchers (i.e. engineers and scientists) about the start their careers. It was written in 1997, so much of the content is of historical interest only....

TL;DR I deployed a simple alpha website with python code, where: the user inputs a paragraph-referenced Word (.docx) document website automatically generates a paragraph-referenced Chronology in Word for download and further editing. These are the first lines of python I have written / glued together with large language models (LLMs). And the approach taken in the code borders on the absurd. But the story may make good reading for those interested in how current (2024) LLMs affect people early in their programming journeys....

In his memoirs, Edward Snowden spoke of an era where computers were still the preserve of a small minority, and random strangers would go to extraordinary lengths to help each other in online chats (something which predated the world wide web, which meant this took place outside of the web browsers e.g. Chrome or Firefox). He saw control of one’s own computer as key to privacy and integrity, and was scathing of “cloud computing” which misleading implies that your data is naturally and comfortably held “in the cloud”....

Recently I find that when engaging with abstract theoretical texts (e.g. Tom Bailey’s Ambiguous Sovereignty, it is often helpful to make a website out of it. The technical barrier of entry is low: LLMs can readily generate scripts that would allow me to split the text into smaller files and then create separate HTML files out of it. For a journal article, the whole process may take no more than 1-2 hours, and the process of playing around the text lets concept sip in and permits me to say (only with some exaggeration) that my eyes passed over all the text once (when I am testing out the website)....

TLDR: how I modified and deployed this programme with little knowledge of Golang 1 Background and motivation I began picking up the standard web development tools (Javascript, HTML and CSS) around a year ago, and hand wrote some websites in plain HTML and React with minimal help from LLMs. Around a month ago, I was introduced to the Next eco system, and began heavily using LLMs. I have worked through the Next quick start myself, but the front end of every project has been drafted by V0....

I attended two events (with Disruptive Tech London and with OpenUK Ambassadors) that gave me much food for thought on the open source economy. In gist: Open-source tech businesses survive (and sometimes thrive) because they give clients great service and clients have the option of walking out of the relationship at any point. But it is still unclear how one can fairly reward the creators of open-source software, who arguably create the most value in the ecosystem and are not compensated proportionately....

I was listening to Vercel founder Guillermo Rauch’s interview in the background, and fell into a reverie about changes of fashion in technology. The first, most obvious point is the almost ubiquitous equation of technology with computers in contemporary parlance. Just one or two generations ago, “technology” would be most connected with analogue hardware: cf. 董啟章’s 天工開物‧栩栩如真. And so much changed has happened even with recognisably modern computers. There was the birth of UNIX in the 1960s, the first popular operating system that is written in a high level language and meant to be portable across different machines: cf....