2023-09-03

It’s before six on a Sunday morning and as I look out of the window I can see the sky start to slowly fade and lose the only black in favour of a grey/blue hue.

Why am I awake? Well, because pet ownership is not all it’s cracked up to be. The silly thing awoke me with some panicked crying and upon inspection it looks like she shat, spread it everywhere and then tried to eat the evidence. As you might image the sight and the smell was really quite something. I wouldn’t have minded so much if she hadn’t been let out of the cage only an hour earlier to then run, hide and crap on a bathroom carpet.

I’m not going to lie. I don’t see it. Maybe pet ownership isn’t a thing for me. But as I keep saying to myself, fatherhood of tiny humans took me 9 months to come around to.

Meanwhile my legs are a little stiff this morning. Which is certainly better than cramping. But I’m pretty concerned about race day. I am now only 3 weeks away from race day and I realized thanks to life and some wisdom teeth complications I haven’t actually done and outside run for five weeks.

Last night I did my usual 10k loop of the mountain but extended it a bit to avoid the terribly cambered sidewalks that have previously been the source of many blisters and knee tendon delicateness. A total of 11k then, pretty much at as close as I can get to race pace (or as much as my heart rate would allow). For an eventual 7:00 pace - and boy did I feel it. Not great. There was no way I could have kept that pace for much longer, let alone another 10k.

That pacing would get me around in around 2h30, which isn’t terrible, but it’s enough to motivate me to get up in the mornings and do some training before work.

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2023-09-01

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2023-09-05

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?