2023-09-17

Sunday night and it was a wash out. Not in the “it was wet outside” sort of way, but the excessive exposure to alcohol and a touch of CBD allowed the disease in that has been tickling my nose for the last few days. Disease kept the little one from daycare on Thursday and it’s seemingly spreading a little.

Having a sick little guy means that he’s been very insistent on sleeping in our bed. Or perhaps we’ve been so worn down that we are now powerless to resist and are just allowing his presence whereas previously I would have made a lot more effort to keep him in his own bed. Instead now I just have an excessively hot water bottle trying to climb on top, headbutt or kick out my kidneys. Glorious!

Either way, combining a toddler with an inability to breathe last night didn’t make for a great night of rest. But then alcohol always messes with my heart rate until around 2 AM, and CBD makes the morning the day after feel like horrific exhaustion.

If we’re being honest though it was all self medication. With it being the Jewish new year, having 4 kids a dog and 4 couples in our place for dinner whilst not horrific is far too loud for my usual introverted tendencies. Too loud thanks to the kids smashing. Too loud with the battle cries of Israeli conversation. Under these circumstances, a little CBD keeps me magnanimous and stoic.

It did make me recall a piece that I had seen earlier. A female therapist had made a comment that the great difference in couples that keeps them fighting is that women need to freak out over a situation before they can act. Men need to dissociate before they can address a problem. However, the women is often then freaking out that the guy isn’t freaking out. In turn, not giving him the space to dissociate.

I’ve been thinking about that a few times since. I think it describes how our relationship often works. Her stress seems to be amplified by me not being sufficiently freaked. However, I feel that the one thing that she has valued in me over the years is that I calm her down. Tricky.

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2023-09-15

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2023-09-18

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?