Holidays I

Well today is day 2 of the holiday, well complete day 1 of Cornwall. And I’ve gotta say that I’m knackered for it.

Back on Friday I got up early and packed my a full backpack in Downham. Quickly I got myself down to the train station; after Downham decided that it might be quite useful to actually man the quiosk, I go on the train.

A quick hop to Ely and a coffee later I got on the cross country train heading for Manchester and Lady E. The tiny 2 carriage train lead to an interesting fight for a seat, something quite essential considering the next 4 hours I was going to spend on the train.

Nevertheless I managed to find myself a nice table seat with 3 others. A vacant mother, concerning father and 5 year old boy. After mum had been ignoring the child for about twenty minutes. The child started to climb onto the mums lap. At which I couldn’t believe what was happening, the mother actually said “if you don’t stop being naughty and sit down, I’ll call that nice policeman in the other carriage and he’ll come down here and arrest you”. After the second warning she then preceded to pretend to type numbers into her phone, hold it to her face and pretend to have a conversation. At which point the child quickly moved back to his seat. Although you have to wonder what happens when that one day when the kid pushes the boundary past that “phone call”

Several hours later I managed to get into Manchester and was welcomed by my lady. That night we went to Pizza Express and we got a meal for 7 for £12.60. This was due to us going the other week and it taking nearly 5 hours to do 3 courses, for which we got a free meal and wine. So, the meal was under £2 each and effectively paid for a veer and a few cokes.

Saturday a really dull day in the house with the aunt in-law and her brood a they are house sitting whilst the others went to Cornwall.

Sunday meant a good old drive down to Maidenhead so that Lady E could attend her job interview the next day. A complementary upgrade by the hotel sweetened the deal, as our room had a pleasant view over the river Thames.

Monday brought Lady E getting up silly early to go to the job interview. So she was there before 830 leaving me to explore the area of Maidenhead until 530. The only problem is that I managed to walk all the way around Maidenhead town centre in less than an hour. So, the rest of the day was spent in the cinema, coffee shops and talking to hippy dudes in music shops.

As soon as E was done. It was time for the super fun 4 1/2 hour run down to Cornwall.

Today we went around, King Arthurs castle.

To avoid soaps this evening, I found jenga blocks


This page previously appeared on morganbye.net[^1][^2][^3]

[^1:] http://morganbye.net/holidays [^2:] http://morganbye.net/2009/07/holidays) [^3:] http://morganbye.net/blog/?p=17

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Holidays II

What distinguishes you from other developers?

I've built data pipelines across 3 continents at petabyte scales, for over 15 years. But the data doesn't matter if we don't solve the human problems first - an AI solution that nobody uses is worthless.

Are the robots going to kill us all?

Not any time soon. At least not in the way that you've got imagined thanks to the Terminator movies. Sure somebody with a DARPA grant is always going to strap a knife/gun/flamethrower on the side of a robot - but just like in Dr.Who - right now, that robot will struggle to even get out of the room, let alone up some stairs.

But AI is going to steal my job, right?

A year ago, the whole world was convinced that AI was going to steal their job. Now, the reality is that most people are thinking 'I wish this POC at work would go a bit faster to scan these PDFs'.

When am I going to get my self-driving car?

Humans are complicated. If we invented driving today - there's NO WAY IN HELL we'd let humans do it. They get distracted. They text their friends. They drink. They make mistakes. But the reality is, all of our streets, cities (and even legal systems) have been built around these limitations. It would be surprisingly easy to build self-driving cars if there were no humans on the road. But today no one wants to take liability. If a self-driving company kills someone, who's responsible? The manufacturer? The insurance company? The software developer?