Recent content in Posts on Mike's Blog
Last week, I spent some time with Haley (one year old) doing serious research into ‘putting things into other things’. We’d brought her a soft toy squirrel and, inevitably, she had found the cardboard box it came in much more interesting. There followed a considerable period of putting various objects into the box and taking them out again. This was pretty interesting, but the…
Neutrinos are particles that hardly interact with normal matter. Every second, trillions of neutrinos from the Sun stream through your body, your chair, the earth and out into space. This is why physicists call them ‘ghost particles’. But this is quite wrong. Look at it from the neutrino’s point of view. To them, we are the ghosts. Everything, me, the oceans, the forests, the…
The latest nonsense about deleting emails to save water puts me in mind of of an incident when I was working for a ‘hot’ consultancy during the glory days of the .com bubble. Tony Blair’s Minister for Science and Tech came with her entourage to glean words of wisdom from us. After the meeting was over, the head of the London office turned to me and asked me what I’d thought…
Let 2025 be the year of #de-enshittification. Any act, however small, that contributes to this will earn you forgiveness for your sins, a place in heaven, maximum hit points and a wand of eternal debugging. You don’t have to put on a hair shirt, close all your accounts, and sever all links to family and friends, but even small actions which push back against the TechBros add together to have…
Raspberry Pi did it again. They’ve announced the Raspberry Pi AI camera. I’ve been waiting for them to make some move on the AI space, and they’ve come up with what I consider a corker. Shipping now, £62, a 12 MP camera with integral inference engine. As usual, this is shipping product, complete with a github repo of premade models for deploying on the camera.…
Last night Adam Mosseri, Head of Instagram, quitely announced the next step in the integration of Threads into the Fediverse. In addition to being able to follow Threads accounts from Fediverse/Mastodon accounts, we can now reply to and like Threads posts. Threads are taking a quiet, incremental approach to Federation, but seem genuinely commited. Why is this important? Because I believe that Meta…
There’s a long standing myth that very successful people got that way because they are either very clever or very ruthless. The truth is that intelligence and drive are necessary but not sufficient, and we vastly underestimate the effect of luck. Once somebody has achieved some pinnacle of success it tends to be a self perpetuating phenomenon. We, and they, believe they are…
I’ve tried, really, to get co-pilot to do something useful for me, but at least for my work, it doesn’t seem much use. When you are doing something that hasn’t been done 20+ times on github or stackoverflow, you are SOL. And if you are doing something that has been done 20+ times on github or stackoverflow, you shouldn’t be, but that’s another story. As I’ve…
TLDR; Revenue streams for startups can (should) evolve over time, consultancy is a very valid starting point. Last week, I was helping out with an investor pitch for a SaaS startup, and when we’d got to the end of the deck, the investor asked the following question: “This all looks great, but our experience is that in this market, it takes a lot of hand holding and support before…
So, you are a first time CTO in a start-up. You’ve just landed your seed investment, and you and your team are feeling pretty good about yourselves. At last, you have enough money to be able to start the real work of building out your product or service. Your CEO is completely committed to her vision has a near religious belief in it. And that is as it should be, because it a steadfast…
So, my lovely postie has just dropped my new Raspberry Pi Pico 2’s through the letter box. Why is this of any interest to you? Well, Raspberry Pi just had a successful IPO on the London stock market. This new product means that their product range now stretches from the Pi 5, which is a credible desktop machine at the top end, through the Pi Compute Module, which allows equipement…
I have a theory that those with real expertise in the ML / AI field are those who are most deeply skeptical about it’s abilities as touted by the fan bois. In my experience, they can’t wait for the bubble to burst so they can get on with the real, useful, applications that ML can achieve. The converse is also true. Those with the least knowledge of these technologies are the most vocal…
‘Move fast and break things’ has become the unthinking mantra of the tech industry. There is certainly a time for moving quickly and decisively, accepting the associated risks. Most of the time however, thinking and observing first, while working steadily and carefully husbanding resources is the way to go. (Thinking, of course, being much out of fashion at the present time.) In a…
Someone just sent me a WSJ article with the title ‘Mainframes find new life in the AI era’ Bollocks. Here’s my reply them: Hmm, This story is somewhat / very slanted. The real reason that banks and airlines are still using mainframes is that they are terrified to try to modify the software they are running, let alone replace it. Not only has the knowledge of how these systems…
Yea! Raspberry Pi have just started taking orders for the Pico 2! Just ordered two. Just to remind you, the orginal Pico and the RP2040 processor it uses have become a staple of embedded systems design, partially because of it’s innovative PIO processors which can offload all kinds of IO processing from the main system. The new one is faster, has more memory, and can have either ARM or RISC…
In this issue: AI without NVidia Teaching tiny computers to do AI A Year with LLMs, real-world learnings AI without NVidia I know a few people who have invested in NVidia this year and are rather pleased with themselves. After all, it’s gone up 100% over the year and is a darling stock. I’m pleased for them, but in general, I’ve been telling them to take their money and be…
Biden on Mastodon? Well, not quite, but stay with me. Threads is Meta’s Twitter competitor, (I can’t bring myself to say X), and has been making steady progress in attracting the disenchanted away from the the bird site. It’s now up to over 130 million MAU, which is not to be sneezed at, especially since they still haven’t really made serious attempts to tap the 2 billion…
TLDR; This year, I created a Christmas card using generative AI techniques. I learned a lot about the power and limitations of the technology, the bias’s of models, the new industries popping up around AI/ML, and people’s sometimes surprising reactions to the end result. Every year, I make a Christmas card, almost always featuring myself and my wife doing something silly. For example,…
It does occur to me that the smartest people on the planet are rarely the richest or the most powerful. Quite the reverse in fact. I would imagine the same issues would face a general AI. I think the best strategy for world domination is not to develop super human intelligence, but to be dumb and lie consistently and plausibly. The LLM’s are well advanced in that. Of course, the very best…
Imagine a world without Velcro. It was never invented, no one in the world has had the concept, nothing. Apart from a major hole in the discography of ZZ Top, most of the world is pretty much the same in 2023. Donald Trump, Covid, and chatGPT are all here. There are of course small differences. Small children are less easy to get into shoes, and car seat covers have inconvenient zips, but…
So far, I’ve held off engaging in the scrum of opinions about the last few months of AI(sic) advances/mania. Like everyone, I’ve at least dipped my toe in the rapidly changing LLM world, and spent a fair amount of time with image generation. I’ve also read endless articles on the AI landscape with authors who range from fanboi gushing to Old Testament apocalyptic prophet. But,…
The International System of Units, often referred to as the SI System, defines a small number of basic units, such as the second (time), metre (distance), kilogram (mass). However, for the popular media these units have proved too limiting for the magnificent descriptive powers of our journalists and broadcasters, who have therefore evolved an alternative set of units which are used exclusively in…
Over many centuries, man’s obsession with time has led to increasingly accurate ways to measure it. As the precision of techniques and instruments has increased over the years, so the units used to define time have become ever smaller. The minute and the second have given way to the SI units of the millisecond, the microsecond, the nanosecond, the picosecond, and the femtosecond, which is…
Yesterday, I did a talk and demo about Mastodon and the Fediverse in general for my old friends and colleagues from Viant. I’ve put it up on Youtube. Hilariously, within hours of the meeting finishing, Twitter had a major outage, and a number of services ceased to work because the new restrictions on the Twitter API’s also affected Twitter internal systems. As I’d described in…
OK, I’m genuinely excited about this. For a couple of years, I’ve been using Tactiq , a browser extension that will record transcripts of on-line meetings. It’s proved a useful aid memoir generator, but of course, one has to trawl through hundreds of lines of transcript to retrieve the particular item you want. Tactiq are now offering GPT3 generated meeting summaries and derives…
I’ve just realised the output of chatGPT sounds exactly like a management consultant. A complicated answer to a simple question, which sounds good but is either irrelevant, useless or subtly wrong. The day that chatGPT can generate a PowerPoint slide McKinsey will be out of business.
Probletronics is the science of problems and their associated solutions. The fundamental particle of problems is the probletron. It has an associated anti-particle (solution) called the solutron. As might be expected, the encounter of a probletron and a solutron can result in annihilation of the probletron. However, both particles have a property called complexity. If for example, a simple…
I asked ChatGPT to write me a poem about the Fediverse. This is what it came up with. A Poem About the Fediverse In a world of social media Where algorithms rule the day There exists a place of freedom Where users have their say It’s a decentralized network Where communities can thrive Without the need for censors Or algorithms to contrive Welcome to the fediverse A place of open minds Where…
Although I registered on Mastodon in 2017, like many, my account lay dormant for a long time. This all changed last month when I started to become active again, and 10 days ago, I set up own my mastodon instance (mastodon.modern-industry.com). In that short time I’ve already learnt a lot (and I have much more to learn), and it’s set me thinking about the inevitable interaction between…
TLDR; The Process is not the Product Leading not Managing Dialog not Dictation That’s it, you can work out the rest for youselves, but for those of you who want to, read on. The Process is not the Product In a (very) long technical career, I must have been exposed to the majority of software methodologies 1 , and experience has shown that they are, by and large, more of a liability than a…
TLDR; Musk has probably killed Twitter, but out of the ruins may come unexpected benefits for brands. The recent dramas around Elon Musk’s purchase of Twitter been royal entertainment for many of us over the last couple of weeks. However, I believe that Elon has unwittingly released forces that will have far-reaching consequences over the coming months and years. Until now, there has been an…
Hello, World Nothing much to see here yet, please leave the name of a planet where you can be contacted, and I’ll get back to you.