New year, new focus You know on Twitter when someone announced they were leaving? Well, I'm going to follow that trend here, but not quite yet. Yes, I'm bailing out, but first I'm going to write a blog post about it and include a link in my farewell. Yup, a whole exit speech! Lucky you 😉

Let's not forget that for every man with a Glock, there's also a man (many in fact) who just loves photographing nature. And that's why it's all worthwhile. Happy New Year.

If everyone makes the same mistake in a language, the language is the problem. If only we moved the software development profession forward with each new language rather than looping back to the beginning each time.

The more of these I see the more it feels like Python has forgotten all the lessons learnt with previous new languages. The most important of these lessons being don't have features in the language that are bound to become common problems for new users of the language.

Sometimes, if it's a mistake everyone makes, it's a mistake in the language syntax not the people

Ads. Still the biggest revenue stream in town.

Yup. This is I like to call the snow shovel effect. You make rapid progress at first but you're building up a huge wall of snow in front of you. Pretty soon you grind to a halt and there's no easy way to get moving again. We know how this goes because we've seen it so many times before.

Schrödi says Merry Christmas!

IMO conciousness is both binary and linear Binary: A neural network (artificial or biological) either has the necessary architectural features for consiousness or it doesn't. Linear: If it does, then the level of consciousness is related to the network size LLMs do not have the necessary features

Space news is the best. Like, what do you mean there's a runaway supermassive black hole 10 million times bigger than the sun moving through space at 2 million miles per hour www.space.com/astronomy/bl...

Ah. I see Bluesky found their revenue stream and, rather unimaginatively, it's you.

"I am Connor MacLeod of the Clan MacLeod. I was born in 1518 in the village of Glenfinnan on the shores of Loch Shiel. And I am immortal!"

Love it or hate it, I think Disney just made a power move. Yes, the link is to LinkedIn, but please bear with me - it's the best way to connect all the context. Please do follow the link and give it a read. I'd be interested in your thoughts.

I hate how much I enjoyed this BIG NERD DESIGN ENERGY 🫦

Honestly, if your transcription tool doesn't replace whole sections of your meeting with "blah blah blah", is it even AI?

Took my kid Charlie to Cambridge for an interview at Trinity College. It's like going back in time to an era where everyone wore hats and scarves, and bicycles were a thing.

Schrödi loves Christmas

We really should be getting a lot less excited about GenAI and a lot more excited about this. We should be celebrating less billionaires, entertainers and athletes as role models, and presenting people like this as role models. Human endeavour and ingenuity at its best:

The core thing that drives someone to become an engineer is the insatiable desire to know how things work If you use LLMs to code but don't know how they work, that's fine, but don't call yourself an engineer. You probably don't have an engineering qualification & you clearly don't have the mindset

This is riddled with ethical concerns as it is, but as someone who accidentally trained a neural network to identify sunny days instead of tanks in a forest, I can confirm you need to know where & when each photo was taken AI will find a pattern but you can't be sure it's the pattern you wanted

You can criticise boomers (& gen X) all you like, but at least those generations tried to make technologies that would improve things. They were horribly naive but they tried Millennials made Uber, Lyft, Airbnb, Spotify, Deliveroo, GenAI A veritable cornucopia of exploitative convenience

For a car to be useful to you, you don't have to believe it can fly, but to use it safely and effectively, you do need to accept that it can't. The same goes for LLMs and thinking (or intelligent reasoning).

Remember this next time someone says "but they have autonomous robots". These machines are certainly advanced in mechanical and control terms, but they're not able to do human activities. The humans do them. Same goes for Boston Dynamics.

can't stop watching this clip of a tesla Optimus teleoperator taking his headset off before properly logging out the robot

And still every segment looks very clearly like AI. In the same way as each generation becomes attuned to the differences between CGI and reality, so it is with AI. The morphing of one 2D image to another never quite reflects 3D reality because there is no underlying 3D model to be rendered.

We got an advent calendar for the cats this year with all sorts of cat toys in. One of them was a decorative collar. Schrödi was very interested in it so we put it on him. He definitely knew he looked good in it and proudly posed for photos. He's so vain. (We didn't leave it on for safety reasons)

The Apple Vision Pro tanked and now Meta... $77bn down the pan chasing the VR dream. You have to remove the barriers first, and so far no-one has.

On #r4today this morning, Michael Rosen read out the opening paragraph of his new children's story, written in collaboration with Helen Oxenbury and @bigissue.com Kid's books sometimes get a bad rap in literary circles, but this was a veritable lesson in evocative writing. And it's for charity.

On the first day of Christmas my true love gave to me, a partridge in a pear tree. Ate it.

Remember when we used to adopt technology in industry based on evidence backed business cases rather than feels?

Are there? Can you name them? I ask this genuinely because I worked in tech comms for years and I honestly can't think of a single AI tech proponent who can meet both the "useful" and "energy efficient" standards, even with tools specifically designed to help with climate and environmental projects.

Please, Apple, do this one right. Neuromancer by @greatdismal.bsky.social finally gets a TV series. Could be amazing, but expectations will be high from all of us who read these books when we were young. Count Zero was a personal fave.

User needs first Service design second Operating model third Technology fourth This order is still reversed way too often.

@system76.bsky.social Any news on when the 6.17 kernel issue is likely to be resolved? I'm currently booting PopOS into 6.16 because 6.17 won't boot.

"Coding LLMs will replace software developers" Nope. Software development is first and foremost a thinking exercise with a bit of creativity thrown in for good measure. LLMs definitely don't think, and they're regenerative, not creative. They're a tool for developers, not instead of developers.

Looks like my prediction regarding the Ineos Grenadier diversification move is coming to fruition. Further validation of the Business Evolution Map as a prediction tool. (Too many words for Bluesky so I posted it on LinkedIn)

Looks like my prediction regarding the Ineos Grenadier diversification move is coming to fruition. Further validation of the Business Evolution Map as a prediction tool. (Too many words for Bluesky so I posted it on LinkedIn)

No. He must know this is nonsense, surely?

Early-Bird tickets are now on sale for next year's Agile Manchester conference (13-14th May): agilemanchester.net/tickets "Agile Manchester is designed to create and nurture ‘change agents’. We provide actionable insights, practical tools and new ideas" / @agilemanc.bsky.social

The text talks of using AI to discover "causal links" in historical content. The problem with that is that LLMs don't discover causal links; they find semantic links. You might think this is the same thing but it's not. Connecting things semantically is how you become convincingly wrong.

A better analogy would be "AI is to intelligence what a photograph of a person is to the actual person" In other words, LLMs appear intelligent because they reproduce the output already created by intelligent humans. They are little more than a snapshot.

For generations people have been persuaded that the ability to regurgitate information is intelligence. No surprise then that they're so easily fooled into thinking an LLM exhibits intelligence. IMO, intelligence requires the ability to use knowledge to solve novel problems. LLMs can't do this.

The article doesn't say it, but this cool solar forecasting software uses no large language models, the thing people usually think of when they hear "AI." It uses a fairly simple convolutional neural network that's readily trained on a laptop. No data centers or LLMs involved. Research paper here:

AI will, of course, survive and even thrive when the bubble bursts, just like the world of dot com did. But there will be economic fallout for years.

Businessess hoping to use AI to automate job roles and cut cost by removing people are going to get badly burnt. When all the costs are added up, AI automation will prove (as all automation does) to cost as much as the people who did the jobs before.

People claim LLMs are like human brains & their output should be seen as a sign they think & reason This position can only be reached if your ignorance of how LLMs work matches your ignorance of how the brain works LLMs are single shot processors with no mechanisms for inference or awareness

Your regular reminder that "valued at" and "worth" mean different things.

Is this a US thing? Having worked with tech people for several decades in the UK, I haven't found them to be any less capable in non-STEM areas than others in the workforce. And in many companies, the issue with the people making the bad tech decisions is that they know very little about tech.

We're deep into the AI adoption conversation now, and there are as many opinions as there are people. So how about a look back on some thoughts from 2020 to see if I was barking up the right tree: