Microposts

Fri 15 Dec 2023 21:03

Also lovely beer and I had to drag the dog away

A dog sitting in someone’s lap, with a beer on the table with Christmas goodies.

Fri 15 Dec 2023 19:20

If you’re going to eat a sausage roll this year (vegan or otherwise), I highly recommend, taking a membership to the Skiff coworking space in and heading down there tonight 🎄😋

Fri 08 Dec 2023 14:53

Watched "Can AI catch what doctors miss?"" -> ted.com/talks/eric_topol_can_a

I suspect the person at Vision Express who just received my query on when this is rolling out is gong to be delighted.

An orange circle with a network of darker lines. It’s an image of a retina. Around the edges are examples of what can be detected from these images. It includes liver and gall bladder disease, kidney disease, Alzheimers, heart attack and stroke, Parkinson’s, and diabetes and blood pressure control. The software to do this is open source, apparently.

Wed 06 Dec 2023 22:12

Panic bought soup at lunchtime, because I got my Zoe.com results, became overwhelmed. Which I know is not the point, but the soup was lovely (and 90/100 score for me).

Mon 04 Dec 2023 22:24

Headed up to campus at tonight to catch Prof. Gillian Forrester’s “Hand to Mouth: The Language Puzzle” lecture.

Best part for me was the idea of left/right brain split being a very old way to parallelise two tasks (say, eating and being watchful for predators). And you can (maybe) trace a continuum all the way to the present day.

This seems to cover it: scientificamerican.com/article

Fri 01 Dec 2023 10:34

I'm probably alone in this, but I find the world of UK VAT rules so fascinatingly weird and complex.

Recent one: "Refer a friend" schemes have VAT implications -> constablevat.com/constable-vat

None of this matters much to me - just a grotesque pleasure.

Thu 30 Nov 2023 07:50

BN1 0.01

Sun 19 Nov 2023 19:15

I do not want to be spending my Sunday evening trying to get the washing machine on the Wi-Fi so that I can give it a spin-only cycle it should’ve already had only to be told, once connected, I can’t do it right now because the “software is optimising. Try again later“.

Thanks for listening.

Sat 18 Nov 2023 10:00

I think I’m going to enjoy this book: “For instance, why did humans evolve to walk upright? Was it to run further on the African savannah? Why did humans evolve to use complex language? Was it to complain about how far they had to run on the savannah?”

Thu 16 Nov 2023 18:05

Had fun making a GPT to identify (): Take a photo of the ingredients on a packet, get an answer and some reasoning. I’ll post the prompt somewhere later, but it’s been fun, but also limited (what is this? A free sales effort for ChatGPT Pro accounts?)

In doing this I also discovered an nifty OpenFoodFacts app: world.openfoodfacts.org

An easy case: margarine. Screen shot from a tablet showing a image of a packet, and the output from GPT saying “Yes, this is UPF”. There’s then a list of ingredients and each explained.

Thu 09 Nov 2023 22:09

UK people: just one more sleep until the next weekly Helen Lewis newsletter: helenlewis.substack.com

Sun 05 Nov 2023 21:09

So far so good for bonfire night. Breezy barks at loud fireworks, ignores the rest, which seems preferable to how Skitters coped. Hoping your animal pals are doing well.