Paul Harrison

Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) has captured the imagination of many, often portrayed as a looming existential threat to humanity - we have seen this recently in the Statement on AI Risk signed by all the big-shots in he field. However, it is essential to critically examine the practicality of such concerns. While theoretical discussions about AGI’s potential dangers are valid, it is crucial to prioritise addressing the immediate and tangible challenges posed by existing AI technologies....

Historically, Windows has been awful for developers (unless you’re working with .NET I guess), whereas Unix environments are generally easier to configure and developer tools pretty much just work. So, why am I bothering with Windows? Well, during the day I’m not - my work laptop is a Dell Precision running Ubuntu. However, my personal laptop is a Windows machine, which I chose because I also like gaming. If you’re a gamer Windows really is the only choice....

Unless you’ve been living under a stone for the last few months you’ll be well aware we’re in the midst of a global pandemic, with the current advice being stay at home to contain the virus. Aside from being unable to work in my favourite cafe and having to panic buy loo roll I’ve, rather fortunately, been largely unaffected. I’ve been mostly/fully remote for over three years now and work in an industry (and for a company) where the technicalities of rapidly switching the entire workforce to fully remote has been quite straightforward....

I’ve been a data scientist for nearly six years. As with most other things I’ve done in life, I kind of fell into it. I’d done some machine learning during my PhD, though this wasn’t the important bit. Post-PhD, having been wooed by its sexiness, I wound up in my first data science job. I didn’t really know what I was doing, but I assumed nobody else did either and cracked on....