David Edgar's website

Saturday, 08 June 2024

I have a task and I suspect an llm can help with it and I feel like I need a shower.

I want to extract text from something, a website or a pdf most likely, and have it summarised down to maybe half a dozen words, with a preference for the words to match an existing set of words. That is, I want a tool that suggests tags for a bookmark and if possible reuse existing tags where appropriate.

I feel dirty.

Friday, 07 June 2024

🔖 AI Is a False God

Arguing that the danger to AI isn't that it will destroy humanity or take your job. It is that you will believe it is something more than it is.

Thursday, 30 May 2024

🔖 Banoffee Pie

Good. A lot. Still can't make biscuit crumb base properly.

Sunday, 26 May 2024

Bring back National Service (i.e. we’re a little worried we’re not even going to get the gammon vote) really brings home how badly the UK Tories are going.

Friday, 24 May 2024

2oz Fireball Whiskey 1oz Baileys 1oz Salted Caramel liquor 1oz coffee

I expected it to be awful. It is not.

🔖 Utopian Realism, a speech by Bruce Sterling

Wednesday, 22 May 2024

I watched Gen V and I don’t know why because everything related to The Boys is so fucking tediously exhausting. It’s all so lazy and cynical. In particular….neither of the heel turns was actually earned. They needed more work to make it work. But of course the writers and creators of this shitshow are cynical enough to believe they don’t need to earn it, the audience will just go with it.

Sunday, 19 May 2024

🔖 Cowboy Candy

Had these at a place called Roast Republic, which seemed all about smoked meats. Really nice accompaniment to roasted potatoes/chips.

Wednesday, 15 May 2024

The office moved. Now I am faced with those two very bourgeoise problems:

1) working out where I need to sit on the train to optimise getting out of the station with minimal eye contact; 2) finding a new coffee shop that doesn’t smell like sadness.

Monday, 13 May 2024

Wake up for a maintenance downtime at 05:00 this morning and it really drummed home the priorities of the dogs. The puppy† stayed with me in the coldest room of the house and watched me very very closely in case some food materialised. The more seasoned professional took my side of the bed and got some solid snoozing done.

It’s good that they know what they want out of life.

† well, he’s two but he’s a Labrador so ten more years of puppiness to go before he grows up.

Sunday, 12 May 2024

🔖 Pumpkin Cheesecake With Gingersnap Crust Recipe

Saturday, 11 May 2024

Gosh, Gruber is on a tear finding examples to prove to people that their lived experience is wrong.

Wednesday, 08 May 2024

🔖 A Useful Productivity Measure?

Another idea on measuring engineering productivity via value add.

🔖 Productivity Measurement as a Tradeoff

A followup to two earlier responses to the McKinsey Engineering Productivity article

Tuesday, 07 May 2024

I hate the idea of LLMs being used as a way to diminish human expression and reduce it to serial magic eight balls, and all. But I gave my Stack Overflow contributions, as meagre as they are, to humanity and to a collective knowledge. Trying to petulantly take that back from the community because the host is also going to give it to OpenAI would be a pretty shitty act.

Our old television died and I had to replace it with a high definition. It makes everything look like it was filmed in the cheap. It can’t be that everything I watch is soap opera level bad production. Is high def really this bad?

Sunday, 05 May 2024

Looking around the rest of the audience of this Nick Cave gig I’m wondering what they’ve been doing for the last two hours since the 16:00 meal service?

🔖 How to send progress updates

🔖 Agile Rehab: Replacing Process Dogma with Engineering to Achieve True Agility

All unhappy agile teams are alike. Each happy agile team is happy in its own way

🔖 Conway’s Law in Team Topolgies: Did you really get it?

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