Software engineer. One-track lover down a two-way lane
My five year-old is into football. Really, really, won’t-sit-down, won’t-let-anyone-else-sit-down into football. My wife and I spend every free minute taking half-hearted shots on goal; feigning agony as a daring counterattack puts us 23-0 down; and answering quiz questions about which hospital Harry Kane was born in. To buy us a minute to breathe and shower, I invented a game called “Dice…
Hello! Hello! Welcome, welcome. My name is Hobert Reaton, and I’m here in this shabby motel conference room to present you with yet another once-in-a-lifetime investment opportunity. Look at this picture. Tell me what you see: Do you see learning? Self-improvement? The future leaders of our country? I’ll tell you what I see: wasted computing power. Between the ages of 5 and 18, the average child…
My wife and two little boys sometimes go on trips to see friends or family for whom my presence isn’t strictly required. While my wife books the flights I make a show of weighing up my options and asking if it’s really OK if I don’t come. Eventually I’m persuaded that it truly would be the best thing for all of us for me to have five to seven days to myself with no nappies and all Nintendo. My…
I work at Anthropic on the Frontier Red Team. Our mission is to find out whether AI models possess critical, advanced capabilities, and to help the world to prepare. We’re hiring AI researchers and engineers in the US and UK, and if that describes you then we’d love to talk. We explore questions like: can models design bioweapons, or accelerate vaccine research? Can they orchestrate massive…
“Where are we daddy?” asked my five-year-old. “We’ll land in about an hour,” I said. “No I mean where are we? Are we flying over Italy yet?” I wasn’t sure. Our flight was short and cheap and the seats didn’t have TV screens in the headrests. I looked around. I noticed a sticker encouraging me to connect to the in-flight wi-fi. That would do it, I thought. A site like FlightRadar would answer my…
A few weeks ago my 5-year-old and I tried playing Cat Crimes , a puzzle game in which you work out which of your cats ate your shoes. We had a wonderful time - for about 20 minutes. In each round of Cat Crimes you get a puzzle card with a list of clues on it. You have to use the clues to figure out where in your front room each of your 6 cats were sitting. This tells you which one of them was…
The plane reached 10,000ft. I took out my laptop, planning to peruse the internet and maybe do a little work if I got really desperate. I connected to the in-flight wi-fi and opened my browser. The network login page demanded credit card details. I fumbled for my card, which I eventually discovered had hidden itself inside my passport. As I searched I noticed that the login page was encouraging me…
For the last eighteen months I’ve been writing a book about being a dad. Two weeks ago I finished the first draft! The book is inspired by my blog posts about parenting , but most of it is brand new and I think it might be very good. It’s about childbirth, covid, careers, old friends, new friends, kid friends, chess, pianos, screens, AI, marriage, and much more. Now that I’ve finished a draft I’m…
I know that time spent with my kids is supposed to be its own reward, and it is. But I also want to believe that what I do in this time matters, as much as possible. Elegantly handling a tantrum feels more worthwhile if I’m helping my son learn to express his feelings, not just making it through another day. I find more contentment at the end of a long afternoon if I think that I did a good job…
Introductions to deep learning are too complicated and spend too much time trying to thrill you with details and real-world applications. This makes them a frustrating place to start. You already know that deep learning is amazing and that it actually works on real problems. You know that most of the hard work in industry is in the data cleaning. You don’t want to set up a new environment, or play…