• Wednesday, 5 Mar 2025 9:08 pm

  Alnwick XC

  Up at Alnwick Castle for the last (for me) cross-country running outing of the season. Good weather: not too much wind, dry course. A little bit chilly. Felt like a lot of people in the camp before the race, but on reviewing the results there were less than 400 runners in the men's race.

  

  Felt as well like clubs were fielding their stronger runners—had trouble keeping up after I chugged 250ml of Tailwind and then glugged and glogged around the course for 50 minutes. Still, beautiful course that I'm keen to get back to next year and smash a PB.

  Running

• ---

  Wednesday, 5 Mar 2025 9:03 pm

  Now: 24 February - 2 March 2025

  On Friday night I worked late while the first recordings of Trump’s meeting with Volodymyr Zelenskyy played in the background. I think—I hope—that it was a wake-up call for Europe, which since the second World War has enjoyed the protection and stewardship of the United States and for which reason has basically been sort of languishing from the perspective of contributions to the global community.

  Then again—over the past 20 years China has quietly been munching on America’s lunch, and if the American government is willing to nuke the country’s international reputation then I guess I’m okay with that too.

  The next question is what can I do about this.

  now Politics

• ---

  Friday, 28 Feb 2025 10:16 pm

  Aider

  Aider is an LLM tool that runs in your terminal, selectively reads your codebase, and gives you a little prompt to generate code. Lots of tools purport to act like a junior dev that you can send off to tackle the backlog, but this one kind of seems like it actually is. Operating on the terminal means that you don’t have to learn a new extension or a whole new IDE. Bringing your own models means that you don’t have to sign up for some new subscription.

  And it works surprisingly well. I wouldn’t let it build out whole new features (yet) but like Harper Reed I find that with a bit of nudging I can basically get it to do exactly what I want, and only have to debug the results a little bit. I’m well pleased.

  AI Code

• ---

  Sunday, 23 Feb 2025 6:47 pm

  Now: 17 - 23 February 2025

  What do you use AI for? I’ve lately been using large language models for getting me over hurdles that a little bit of perspicacious search-engining would have done, in the past. “How many days ago was 11 January?” or “Given this JSON structure, how do I use jq to get only these keys?” I’ve put five quid into OpenAI and have been using their API access via Simon Willison’s llm command to generate alt text for pictures on my blog. A lot of the time I have to edit these down because gpt-4o-mini tends to be a little whimsical, describing things in terms of “dark and moody atmosphere” or “placid, becalmed setting” and I don’t think that’s much help to anyone. I know that alt text should be bespoke and artisanal but when I do it myself I just wind up writing things like, “A picture of me on a snowy hillside,” which is probably also not much help to anyone.

  I’ve lately been trying to use AI more to shore up the technical gaps in my own background. I famously didn’t study the thing that currently pays my bills at school, but as I try to move more towards a senior-level role at work this is starting to feel less like a point of pride and more like a Deficiency in Experience. When I looked up some old computer science A-level tests, I didn’t understand much of it at all, so basically fed the questions back into ChatGPT, along with the answers, and got it to explain why the answers were what they were. By the end of the night, well I wasn’t in any position to undertake a compsci A-level but at least my eyes had reverted from being the 🌀 emoji.

  Anyway there was a fun thread about the same on Hacker News, and now that I’m sharing Hacker News posts on my personal blog my transformation into tech DudeBro is complete.

  Saturday was officially the first Nice Day of the year (weatherwise), so Sam and I went on a big run+bike ride with Ghyll, going all the way up to Sunderland on the lines and then getting the train back to Horden. Ghyll was good overall and totally unfazed by running 30+ km, but I was pretty much shattered by the time we got back home. Then it was a quick turnaround to take the bus into Durham for a fancy dinner at Cellar Door and a couple of pints at the always-cheerful Swan and Three Cygnets and the actually-not-that-nice Market Tavern. Durham was bouncing and the vibe was good, but on the bus ride back home a couple of 12-year-olds heckled me for my accent and then tried to sell us cocaine, which was nightmarish.

  

  

  

  Quiet Sunday in recovery, pancakes for breakfast and then a walk on the beach with Ghyll. Wind has been blowing a gale all day but apparently not strong enough for the Met Office to declare an official storm or anything. Anyway all of the bins have been knocked over and rubbish is starting to collect at the end of the street. I expect we’ll be back to cold weather by morning.

  

  now Running Durham

• ---

  Wednesday, 19 Feb 2025 9:20 pm

  Anthropic Economic Index

  Good nyewwws everyone!

  The main findings from the Economic Index’s first paper are:

  • Today, usage is concentrated in software development and technical writing tasks. Over one-third of occupations (roughly 36%) see AI use in at least a quarter of their associated tasks, while approximately 4% of occupations use it across three-quarters of their associated tasks.
  • AI use leans more toward augmentation (57%), where AI collaborates with and enhances human capabilities, compared to automation (43%), where AI directly performs tasks.
  • AI use is more prevalent for tasks associated with mid-to-high wage occupations like computer programmers and data scientists, but is lower for both the lowest- and highest-paid roles. This likely reflects both the limits of current AI capabilities, as well as practical barriers to using the technology.

  I'm entering my Man In Tech Trying To Learn As Much About AI As He Can era and I use Claude.ai pretty much daily to explain to me what circular queues are and how to un-gzip archives on the command line, so this is pretty much what I expected.
  

  AI

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