My niece sent us on a tea blending workshop: tea cocktails, learning about tea, blending tea. This was at our local tea store, which was apparently their first store, and drew a couple of serious tea fanatics. They had very nice tea-themed tattoos. At the end of the 2.5 hours of tea, tea, tea we mixed our own blends....

Tonight I was at Async for James talking about uniffi-rs. It’s a tool to generate bindings to Rust code from various other places: Javascript worlds, Python, Kotlin, Swift, others, and now—thanks to James—React Native too. This one slide nicely shows the idea: This is all new to me. It means you can: package up core...

Today at Brighton Astro Louis and Russ described their project launching a balloon from their back garden to some insane height (30km?). They recovered some great images, as you might imagine. The part I was particular taken with is that you can predict the path of these things really well. They used  launched during...

There are 600 or 700 statisticians in Brighton at the moment for the Royal Statistical Society international conference. Someone likely has a better estimate.Cafe Sci grabbed one last night, Prof Jennifer Visser-Rogers, to talk on: Living is a Risky Business. One of the topics was adjustments, where you take something...

Tonight I was at Tim Coulson’s Brighthink event, covering the physics, chemistry, biology that is part of The Universal History of Us: A 13.8 billion year tale from the Big Bang to you. I was taken by this slide, neatly summarising the big and small numbers involved in what makes up people, from 30 trillion cells of 220...

Why not start a Friday with a visit to the ABBA: One Week in Brighton exhibition? YMMV, but as a child of the disco era, it put me in a pretty good mood for the day. Walk, dance, and sing your way through the week that launched ABBA to global stardom. A couple of things of note: And I sympathise with the stressful...

Some deep learning-based systems  screw up on a fairly regular basis. On Monday I was introduced to an example called “catastrophic neglect & incorrect attribute binding”. This was at Controlling Diffusion Models, a presentation by Sayak Paul of HuggingFace at the UCL Centre for Artificial Intelligence. The problem is:...

Last night I attended a conversations between Daniel Susskind and Prof. Shqipnja Telhaj on the subject of DS’s book, Growth. I’m reporting what I heard, while I process and try to understand this. Growth is a very recent idea. It started about 200 years ago, and no-one was talking about growth until the 1950s. Growth is...

Notes from a few sessions at this one-day workshop held at the UCL AI Centre, Holborn on 13 March 2023. Towards efficient, knowledgeable and robust language models The first session I caught was Yuxiang Wu, and it set the scene for the whole day. There’s an interplay between the efficiency of large language models,...

To The Crick for this event: my main take away from the talk was that there’s a lot going into and around AlphaFold. Evolutionary information, aligning data, and surprisingly, not much physics. Update: this recording seems to be pretty much the same talk:

Chetan Padia’s talk to the Brighton Java group on why the Kotlin language is worth a look. My take away from this was that those reasons are: Tooling from IntelliJ makes it a great experience. Google have adopted it. More concise than Java, and null safety via Optional types. Update: the recording is on YouTube:

There’s something right about £5 App running a demo/game/fun event as the Xmas special. I mean, how does this sound: I turn up at The Werks, icy cold, to be handed a lovely hot mulled wine by the Ribots, directed towards the mince pies, and then entertained with a range of funky technology stuff. Mmm. This evening there...

For the impatient: impressive Seam and JRuby/NetBeans demos; JavaFX doesn’t look that crazy after all; performance improvements show promise; quality of the talks were consistently high and better than I recall from previous years; need to look at Groovy and Grails more. I don’t like to make too much fuss about these...

I’m back in San Francisco for the JavaOne conference. I think it’s either the 4th or 5th visit to the city. The trip over is something like 10 or 11 hours, and I don’t have a great time on such long flights. Towards the end I was wondering why I put myself through this, but then I snapped out of it and realized what a...

Last month Sun put on a sumptuous mini developer conference in London, called JavaUK06. I went along with the usual crowd and although it wasn’t exactly a cut-down JavaOne, it was a worthwhile day.Let’s get the bad stuff out of the way first. The initial keynote was out of place for a Java-based show. One wag explained...