The personal website of Daniel Bachler - Software Engineer and Photographer
I’m a bit puzzled by public discourse on AI safety. It is great that the general topic has now reached mainstream media - merely a year ago this was very much a fringe topic. Nowadays it has become a primary discussion point in high-level political gatherings and has inspired numerous op-eds in prominent publications. Nevertheless, most discussions advocating for increased AI safety recommend…
My wife has recently started learning Spanish in preparation for a trip to Mexico and Colombia. She uses a mix of Duolingo and Zoom conversations with a native speaker through iTalki . Duolingo is good for gamification, and it helps her practice phrase translation and vocabulary training every day. The conversations via iTalki are excellent for actually talking to other humans. However, between…
Over the last few years it seemed like we were able to observe the cutting edge of AI research more or less in the open and more or less in real time. Some was in the form of public demos, some in academic papers, others directly in products. As the capabilities of these systems advance, however, I think we need to wonder if this will remain true, and consider the repercussions of what would…
I just joined the fantastic team at Our World In Data ! At Our World In Data we build a website with the same name that compiles data and research on the most pressing global problems. Go check it out if you don’t know it yet!
This Tuesday I gave a talk at the fantastic (currently zoom only) Berlin Functional Programming Meetup about F#. I gave a brief introduction to the language, then showed how to download and analyze some historic weather data and serve this up as a small SPA web app. Below you can play the recording - have a look and let me know if you have any feedback.
I’ve used F# a lot in the last 3 years and for quite some time I wanted to collect a few good starting points to venture into F# in one place. I also wanted to collect some of those random things that I felt weren’t easily available anywhere because they fall through the cracks of the official language reference and library documentation. While writing this post I had two inspirations in my mind:…
In the last few months, climate change has been discussed with renewed vigor in the media and on social networks. More and more people realize that we have a problem but a lot of the current focus doesn’t seem to be directed at the pragmatic goal we should be aiming for: mitigating climate change as far as possible. Increased levels of greenhouse gases in our atmosphere are the cause of climate…
The frontend programming podcast Working Draft interviewed me recently and we talked about Elm and F# . Hop over to the interview and let me know on twitter if you have any comments!
The field of software engineering is in a strange place today. A lot of the mainstream tools and concepts look less like deliberate choices made by intelligent people anticipating change and more like ad-hoc reuse of things some people were already familiar with, despite the problems this may cause at scale. Things I consider to be concrete examples of this are all the major programming languages…
The programming blog paqmind interviewed me recently and we talked about Elm, Purescript, F# and other programming languages I love. Hop over to the interview and let me know on twitter if you have any comments!