Personal website for Andreas Varotsis
I have been vibe coding a lot . Like, a lot a lot…. and it’s been leaving me feeling a bit conflicted. I’ve been committing hard, and feeling tremendously productive. But I also get this weird flash of existential dread when I catch myself furiously hitting AGAIN AGAIN AGAIN like I’m 3 Mai Tais deep at a Vegas slot machine, until I suddenly find myself staring at a codebase I’ve never seen, like…
Code viewof selectedRanks = Inputs . checkbox ( [ "PC National" , "PC Metropolitan" , "Sergeant" , "Inspector" , "Superintendent" ] , { label : "Ranks" , value : [ "PC National" , "Sergeant" , "Inspector" ]} ) viewof payPoint = Inputs . radio ( [ "Starting salary" , "Top of scale" , "Both" ] , { label : "Pay point" , value : "Starting salary" } ) viewof realTerms = Inputs . toggle ({ label : "Real…
Note About this post This is an experiment on collaborating with AI: I wrote most of this blog post by collaborating with my Claw/Hermes Agent, running on a Raspberry Pi. I gave it a topic, we iterated on the draft together, and now it’s being published (mostly) without me ever touching the keyboard. I’m working on my own (entirely human) blog post on that experience, which should be published…
So, I really don’t like the scientific publishing ecosystem. I used to find the idea deeply inspiring and faintly aspirational, and then I had to actually interact with it, and came away with some confused blend of angry and profoundly disappointed. I think we can do better, and the good news is that a lot of the heavy lifting has already been done: Octopus reimagines scientific publishing in a…
And so we come to another turning of the wheel of time, and it is time to announce, once more, the creation of Britain’s FBI. For those who haven’t been following policing for the last couple of decades, we have in fact been here before. Will this one be the one that sticks? Who knows. But reflecting on the myriad of previous iterations , my takeaway is that for the implementation to succeed, it…
Note Timed Post This was a timed post, a new approach I’m testing to post more often: I give myself 60 minutes to write a post, and if I don’t finish it in time, it gets deleted . You can read all these posts here . Once upon a time, I was a young neighbourhood police officer in London, and I loved it - I think it laid the groundwork for a lot of who I am today. It wasn’t perfect though, and one…
Earlier this year, Anthropic treated us to the delightful Claude Plays Pokemon : a wonderful way of watching some poor AI model get lost forever in Mt Moon, fighting a swarm of Zubats, and presumably hating it just as much as we once did. Now, I don’t work at Anthropic (and I definitely don’t have as many credits as they do), but I do love games, and think they tell us something about the people…
A few months ago, I released Quarto-mastodon-comments , a quarto extension to add comment functionality to this blog via Mastodon (and the wider fediverse). Well, inspired by Terence’s excellent blog functionality , and building on the web-components by LoueeD and Dpecos , I’ve now added Bluesky (and in theory, AT Protocol ) functionality! You can now comment on either network, with all the…
I’m a big believer of “working in the open” - open-source, open science, open communication, that sort of thing. It’s not just that I think this stuff is ethnical or right (though it mostly is), I think it helps build things that really matter. But it’s also really bloody hard: exposing yourself to the scrutiny of the world (and more specifically, the internet), while doing the extra real, chunky,…
General Thoughts God, getting back from holiday is the worst , isn’t it? It’s so strange watching that sudden influx of energy slowly draining away when faced with the reality of the modern world. This probably isn’t helped by my reading Slow Productivity (more below) STEM and AI education in the UK: I’ve been pondering education in the UK, and whether it’s failing us in the AI field (eg, why…
Inspired by Simon Willison , and because I’m starting as Newspeak House faculty this year, I’m starting to write weekly notes… let’s see how they get on! Southern France is, in fact, very pretty. Might never come home? I’ve been on holiday this week, which probably explains why I’ve done all the things . Nothing makes me productive more than throwing me into the middle of nowhere with no meetings…
Just over a year ago, hot after the release of ChatGPT, I wrote Copbot to examine whether large language models could help articulate (or maybe even predict) police risk assessments for missing people. The conclusion? Eeeeh. Maybe. Ish. Like plenty of LLM use cases, they did a perfectly plausible job, but how comparable to human decision making they were was a whole different kettle of fish.…
I’ve become a big fan of the “fediverse” in the last few years - social media let me find my own delightful community of crime/ai/evidence nerds, and I don’t want those systems to be any more centralised and out of my control than they are already. I also really like the scientific publishing platform Quarto (that’s what the site is built on!) . So last night, I got wondering how hard it would be…
In the eternal words of The Thick of it, everything that happens in the world has to happen somewhere . It sounds obvious, but so many good pieces of research or analysis forget just how much where you are matters …and that’s why, this christmas, I’ve spent an inordinate amount of time contributing to Open Street Map . I still remember when I first got really excited about OSM - we were doing some…
Looking for the new Copbot Online ? Read about it here! In case you’ve been living under a rock and missed all the recent excitement around ChatGPT , it works really, really well now… Like, “oh god that’s actual wizardry” well. The fact it would probably breeze through a Voight-Kampff test should probably worry me a bit, but more importantly, what cool stuff can we do with it? Given using the tool…
It’s nearly 2023, and in the true spirit of Christmas, I’ve used the cheese/wine filled nowhere time between the holidays to pick up an analytical side-project that’s been irking me for awhile… what’s happened to burglary, and why are we suddenly so excited about mandatory attendance? It’s a thorny question, so I figured I’d document my analysis here… All(ish) of the code is available, so this…
Well, isn’t this all fancy and posh! After much back and forth over a decent blogging platform, I think I’ve finally found a decent, well maintained home … meet Quarto! So, what did I want from a blogging platform, and why did it take so long to get here? Easily maintained, static pages (no paying for fancy maintained services 1 ) Native(ish) support for Python Jupyter notebooks and RMarkdown…
Honestly, this wasn’t me. So I’m sitting in Berlin airport, waiting to get home from Chaos Communication Camp 2023. It was, to put it bluntly, bloody fabulous… and my god, I’ve missed hanging out with a whole field of awesome nerds. The enforced loneliness of the pandemic made me do a fair bit of reflecting on which social interactions I valued, and which I’m really not particularly fussed about,…
Amongst stuffing my face with wine and cheese, I’ve used this Christmas break to learn more about geospatial modelling in Python. This blog post is largely intended for my reference and to act as a useful example for others…as such, it may be messy! I’ll try and tidy it into a Medium post in the coming weeks. Space is an often disregarded dimension of modelling within policing research. As per…
The lockdown and social distancing measures that were brought in throughout the world to tackle COVID in 2020 have had a significant, widespread effect on crime. In this notebook, I use public London crime data on robbery and burglary to examine where this “COVID crime shift” was strongest, and whether any specific drivers or correlates can be identified. I use three years of Metropolitan Police…