Happenings

  • First week back at work after the half-term break. Not a tonne to report here.
  • Little one has been waking in the night again D:.
  • Pretty nice weekend — saw my parents for the first time since they took a holiday to Cananda (we have family there). We went to a local town event where there were some animals to pet and also a BMX/trial bike stunt show, which was really fun and didn’t cost us anything.
  • The next day we took the kids to an open farm event. Lots of animals to see (even though I obviously don’t dig animal agriculture, I do like my children to see these animals up close and develop empathy for them), and lots of cool farm machinery that you could sit in the cabs of.
  • It almost ended in disaster, however. A young child, probably four or so, sat in the cab of a foresting machine and, well, someone had left the key in the ignition. The child accidentally started the machine off in reverse. His siblings were hanging around the machine. Luckily, no one was crushed, and a farmer was able to catch up to the machine, leap up to the cab, and pull it into neutral before it crashed and harmed its unwitting driver. The farmer had a minor injury from when he reached in, but it could have been much, much worse. The family left immediately after in shock.

Links

  • Demand for low-tech tractors booming. I’m not connected to farming in any way other than living near a lot of farms, but this story stood out to me as I was looking at all the machinery on the open day. The modern tractor is loaded with computers and, alarmingly, DRM that prevents unlicensed repairs and can brick your tractor. Among the tractors I saw at the weekend were many beautiful older “low tech” machines. I don’t know how many of them were still in service but they were well maintained and clearly running well.
  • OpenClaw vs. Amish. Road trip + reflections on agentic AI. The vlogger, Chad Whitacre, was a notable figure in the Open Source movement until he got disillusioned with AI and quit altogether. Strangely peaceful video though.
  • Two videos on the recent “An LLM just solved an old geometry problem” news story. First is two economists hyping it up, then Cal Newport bringing it down a peg. Newport’s sober AI reality checks are actually really good.
  • ChangeNames.co.uk scam. I have changed my name by deed poll and it is true, there are a lot of shysters out there who will try to sell you dodgy deed poll services. The fact is anyone can make their own deed poll in the UK. No lawyers are needed. This guy is doing good work calling out the scammers and providing free deed poll templates.

Playing

Some small progress with Chrono Trigger.

Code stuff

I’m still making very slow progress on my (as yet unlaunched, unfinished) maths practice site. I started porting the code over from JavaScript to TypeScript. I’m a total TS noob, so it’s not super clear whether this will pay off in the long run; what I do know is keeping track of types mentally was starting to get a bit of a headache even though the project is only small.