It's been quite weird to sit in Australia, especially New South Wales, and watch the covid19 pandemic spread around the world. The main experience of covid here has been one of a miserable but fairly short lockdown, followed by ongoing minor inconvenience. This, obviously, put us in an extremely lucky position by world standards. We … Continue reading NSW covid19 contact tracing really is the gold standard
Banditry
As part of my ongoing mission to replace myself with a robot intelligence, I've been playing with a new AI text generator. This one, called Grover, is designed to help readers detect fake news - but also has an option to generate it. Know your enemy, and so on. It's done a pretty good job … Continue reading Lumpy scarred clumps of empty seats
Today I have mostly been playing with Transformer, an easy online interface for the 345M OpenAI neural network. The network uses a predictive text model with 345 million parameters to generate plausible endings to any sentences that you give it. I made some lists on Twitter, starting with Borges' Taxonomy of Animals (follow the link … Continue reading A Transformer is turning on its side. Moby looks at its side and decides that maybe Moby will take its side as well!
...but it's Lion Air. It's always fun to be writing for a new place, and I'm delighted to have my first piece up at Foreign Policy. It's on how Asian budget aviation, although important for transforming the economic prospects of remote locations, is very much a double-edged sword. Particularly when it turns out that American … Continue reading Oooh, it’s a mess all right…
This is mostly a traditional "I aten't dead" post, of the sort that you'll recognise if you're the sort of person who still looks at blogs that have been going for over a decade. I've been busy doing two day jobs at once, finishing up my often fun, sometimes frustrating, always interesting, and now finally … Continue reading One step short of Barking
I have a thingo up at Citymetric on how agent-based modelling would have helped the poor sods at Govia Thameslink Railway realise how stuffed they were, at least in time to everyone from getting fired. There is a bit of dispute* in the extremely nerdy parts of the Internet about whether I'm being reasonable in … Continue reading And Bayes and Bayes and remembering nothing boy
I'm travelling in Europe and the US for the next month or so, with an exciting combination of work meetings, weddings, visiting places to write about, and hopefully the occasional piece of not doing anything at all. This will be good. My travelling around Europe will involve trains, because trains are good and short-haul aviation … Continue reading I’ve got some tickets to ride, and I care a bit
As if touched by some kind of divine inspiration, this song has settled upon me, and I feel obliged to share: I'll put the god Set on you I'll put the god Set on you I'll put the god Set on you I'll put the god Set on you But it's gonna take mummies A … Continue reading I’ll put the god Set on you
The trains in Sydney are a bit stuffed at the moment. I've written a piece in CityMetric that gives some of the details on why. Although I touch on the comparisons with the UK a bit in the piece, I thought I'd go on a bit more about them here because the original had to … Continue reading Sydney Trains and Southern Railway: a striking resemblance
Just realised I haven't posted anything here for ages. It turns out that I'm alive and well but haven't been motivated to do any long-form rants about anything lately, which may be a positive reflection on my mental health, I suppose. Relatively recently, I wrote a Citymetric piece about the weirdness of Kingston-upon-Thames, which is … Continue reading Checking in, Kingston weirdness, new improved high speed