dhsc retropost work · 350 words · Viewed ~302 times
This is a retropost. It was written contemporaneously in 2019 - but posted in 2024. I had just been seconded to the Department of Health and Social Care to help kick-start NHSX. I kept a diary of my time there - including working through COVID. As it has been 5 years, and I no longer work in Government, I thought I would publish interesting extracts from it. My 4th day in a new job and I'm sat…
Continue reading →AI Book Review · 1 comment · 250 words
A week is a long time in politics and a couple of years is an aeon in AI. Published in 2019, just before the dawn of the LLM, this is an overview of all the weird and charming ways Artificial Intelligence can go wrong. It is fully of delightfully silly examples and rather charming illustrations. Lots of the examples are drawn from the always-entertaining AI Weirdness blog. But it does suffer…
Continue reading →Climate Crisis electricity energy · 17 comments · 700 words · Viewed ~281 times
Whenever you talk about renewable energy, it's impossible to avoid a very particular strain of reply-guy. The "Nuclear is really good actually" dude is convinced that you have critically misunderstood Our-Lord-And-Saviour Uranium. Nukes are clean! They are cheap! They are safe and healthy! They are brilliant! Nuclear power will save us all! Look, I 100% agree that nuclear power is…
Continue reading →Game Review games metaverse vr · 1 comment · 500 words · Viewed ~314 times
I'm a sucker for anything Star Wars. So when my Oculus Quest told me I could fight Darth Vader in VR, I leapt at the chance. I kinda wish I hadn't bothered. There is very little "game" here. It's barely an interactive movie. Walk forward until you step on a trigger, watch a very slow cut scene, wave your arms until something happens, repeat a few times, roll credits. That's it. There's nothing …
Continue reading →Book Review · 1 comment · 300 words
Ach. This is a hard one to give a lower review score to. I loved MRK's Lady Astronaut series - but this crime-thriller fell a little short of the mark for me. Part of the problem with setting a whodunnit in the future is that you have to assume criminal detection technology gets better. That means an author has to find a way to nobble cameras with privacy force-fields and bypass biometric…
Continue reading →compression images · 15 comments · 500 words · Viewed ~3,777 times
There are lots of new image compression formats out there. They excel at taking large, complex pictures and algorithmically reducing them to smaller file sizes. All of the comparisons I've seen show how good they are at squashing down big files. I wanted to go the other way. How good are modern codecs at dealing with tiny files? Using GIMP, I created an image which was a single white pixel,…
Continue reading →Doctor Who Doctor Who Phones · 2 comments · 450 words · Viewed ~402 times
I'm loving the fact that BBC iPlayer has all the classic Who stories available to stream. I've been dipping in and out of the ones I don't have in my DVD collection. Paradise Towers is a brilliant story. It is well directed (which makes a nice change) and the story actually makes sense (mostly). The set decoration and story elements directly influence the modern series. And - most importantly of …
Continue reading →CyberSecurity dns domains https security · 3 comments · 450 words · Viewed ~910 times
You type in to your browser's address bar example.com and it automatically redirects you to the https:// version. How does your browser know that it needed to request the more secure version of a website? The answer is... A big list. The HTTP Strict Transport Security (HSTS) list is a list of domain names which have told Google that they always want their website served over https. If the user …
Continue reading →economics fair justice · 4 comments · 850 words · Viewed ~1,562 times
In "Theory Of Games And Economic Behavior" by John von Neumann and Oskar Morgenstern, the authors discuss the card game of poker. There are dozens of variations of poker, each with their own intricacies. But they all boil down to the same pattern - is my hand stronger than your hand? Here's how the authors frame it: Since a “square deal” amounts to assuming that all possible hands are dealt wit…
Continue reading →Movie Review RomCom Sci Fi · 1 comment · 350 words
The 2016 film "Passengers", with Jennifer Lawrence and Chris Pratt, is a gruesome study in "because of the implication". JLaw's character wakes on a spaceship to discover that only Pratt's character is alive and has prematurely roused her from her slumber. She has, in effect, been murdered and the only way she can pacify this dangerous man is to sleep with him. It is a grim film. WHAT IF THAT…
Continue reading →future near future predictions · 4 comments · 800 words · Viewed ~362 times
Only fools try to predict the future. You can read my predictions for 2023, or dig deep into my archives and rate me on how foolish I am. So here are my five predictions for 2024 AI Genocide It is obvious that Large Language Models are based on stolen material. I suspect that a lawsuit will determine that at least one of the major players has to delete all copies of their AI. They will refuse …
Continue reading →Book Review Kate Mascarenhas · 5 comments · 200 words
OK. What the actual fuck? This starts off as a rather charming period piece - 1920s hotel will all the guests snowed in - and then gradually descends into horrifying madness. I'm used to the bizarre worlds created by Kate Mascarenhas - but this took the creepiness up to an extreme level. There's an almost fetish-like description of the scenery which helps with the world building. At first I…
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