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Megalithic Portal
The Megalithic Portal is an incredible site for exploring ancient stone structures. I’m very into standing stones (menhir) in particular. Something about their permanence has the hypnotic quality of fire to me. On any given weekend May → September odds are that I’m standing out on a moor staring intently at a many-thousand-year-old Rock.
Anyway I digress. The Megalithic Portal is a fantastic resource for Rock Enjoyers, but their website has an extremely clunky raster map interface that only loads a subset of Rocks at once. So if you’re looking at a Rock in one part of the country but want to see a Rock in a different part of the country, you have to jump through Eleven Hoops to get there. I don’t want to jump through hoops though, I just want to Look at Rocks.
So I set out to make a map of my own.
The key discovery was that for each site on the Megalithic website, there’s a corresponding GeoRSS feed of nearby sites, with metadata for each nearby site including site name, latitude and longitude:
<item> <title>Langleydale Common 8</title> <link>https://www.megalithic.co.uk/article.php?sid=50089</link> <description>Rock Art, (No Pic)</description> <geo:lat>54.614212686267</geo:lat> <geo:long>-1.9452625039514</geo:long> <media:thumbnail url="images/mapic/tg29.gif" height="20" width="20" /> </item>The URL from this feed is parameterised based on the site’s latitude and longitude, so from any given Rock feed, I can iterate over each of the items and generate URLs for each of the related Rocks—meaning that I can hop from one feed to the next, saving each new item to an SQLite database as I go.
A year ago I’d have said that sounded like a lot of work.
But we’re not living a year ago, so I got Claude Sonnet 3.7 (via Aider) to do it for me. It only took a little bit of prodding.
Okay, so now I have an SQLite database with a thousand or so barrows and tumuli and dikes and embankments and (yes) Rocks around where I live. But the whole point of this is to view all of the sites at once, without having to navigate the Megalithic Portal’s esoteric RSS-based raster maps and leap through their Eleven Hoops.
Back to Claude, to set up a simple HTTP server which reads all of the sites out of the database and plots them on a simple Leaflet map. It gets it in one. Boom roasted, I watch my own job evaporate like Thanos in front of me. What will my family think when they realise that I have been replaced by a robot named after a Beanie Baby.
In an attempt to make myself feel even remotely relevant I go sign up for an OS Maps dev account so that I can use the Ordnance Survey maps as the base layer; this takes me like 20 minutes. I try not to think of how few milliseconds it would have taken Claude.
The whole thing costs £0.54.
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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.
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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.
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Now: 27 January - 2 February 2025
This year is quickly turning into a series of weekends where I do fun stuff and weekdays where I sit around and try to stay on top of everything else.
We spent the better part of our free time during the week watching Severance, which puts us in the one-half of the world who only started watching after Apple did a big marketing offensive, including a weird bit where Tim Cook pretends to have been severed and stares blankly into the middle distance, as if he’s not one of the wax figurines in the Perpetuity Wing. I really like Severance. I like shows where the audience gets to hold a bunch of narrative strands together and work to remember which characters know what. And they told me that I wouldn’t need to remember what dramatic irony is!
I also started listening to a new podcast called “Never Post” (should podcasts be quoted, or italicised?); it’s “about the internet”, which is what it feels like maybe 1 in 3 new podcasts in 2024 is about. Anyway this week’s episode about Cameo (the App) and some navel-gazing about cameras but had this interval in the middle about TikTok going down for like three hours that gave me chills. I try not to get involved in moral panics but listening to all these young folks being like, “keep scrolling—don’t eat don’t sleep just keep scrolling,” and “I refuse to read my posts—I’m not going to rewire my brain to read,” spooked me pretty bad. Lots of pundits out there seem to think that TikTok is a net good, and a few pundits out there seem to think that TikTok is a net bad—and for my part I think about TikTok nearly not at all—but I’m the teensiest bit concerned that shortform video seems to have replaced media as a monolith for a whole demographic cohort, and that this demographic cohort is about to inherit the earth while I continue to lose relevance. Ehhhhh
At the weekend I replaced the spark plugs in the Skoda in the hope that it would resolve our dwindling fuel economy woes (ChatGPT told me to—how’s that for a moral panic!). It didn’t. But I did find that the outgoing spark plugs were wildly overgapped, so I must have fixed something, right? Anyway ChatGPT says that the next thing I need to learn to replace are the O2 sensors pre- and post-catalytic converter.
Then on Sunday we dropped in to Durham to buy a pair of road running (!) shoes ahead of the Boston Marathon (not that one) in April. I’ve never had a pair of road shoes but I’m keen to see how I get on.
Then we went up to South Shields for the Temple Park cross-country running fixture. It was a really lovely day and not too tough going. There were a couple of steeplechase-style puddles to splodge through, which roused the spirit and got me good and clarty, and maybe even got some dirt in my competitors’ eyes. Finally breaking my Dry January Alcoholic Fast the night before probably didn’t do me any favours, but I finished in decent time.
Very few pictures this week; I should have taken pictures at Temple Park or while changing the spark plugs—but I didn’t!
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AI and the Rise of Mediocrity
From TIME Magazine, in an article (sorry, "essay") purportedly about reckoning with a modern landscape of mediocrity, comes this extremely mediocre take in the opening paragraphs:
The truth is that there is no such thing as “artificial intelligence.” ChatGPT, Midjourney, and the like are not conscious, intelligent minds. As sophisticated as they are, they are only language and image models fed with the results of human innovation scraped and stolen from the internet.
Uh, ackshually. I don't think they're wrong per se, but the more important definition, from Matt Webb all these months ago, seems to be: artificial intelligence is intelligent (or, is conscious, or has a soul) insofar as there is a "non-misleading distinction between non-conscious [or intelligent or whatever] AI and hypothetical conscious AI". Is there a distinction to TIME Magazine between modern AI and a theoretically-actually-intelligent AI?
Although I like this comment on how mediocrity fuels consumer appetite for good enough, which is the actual product here:
That’s always been the way: the long-distance truck tomatoes sold in American supermarkets, for instance, are grainy, and oftentimes flavorless, but you won’t ever know how bad they are until you bite into an heirloom tomato and understand what you are missing. Similarly, the companies that own nearly all of our media have devoted billions of dollars to retelling stale stories instead of the thousands of new ones out there, but we’ll never know what could have been, because all they will put their money behind is The Avengers again—forever.
Stray observations
TIME appears to be using Tailwind, and appears to be applying a bit of loose leading on their body text, which looks weird, to me.
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