Birthday!

Birthday!

As you can imagine its been quite the social week.

Eve and I went to the brand new vegan Thai restaurant Muan in Brixton Village on my actual birthday and it was the best Thai food I’ve had outside of Thailand! If you live in London I really think you should check it out. We had the mushroom and tofu skews, papaya salad, pad thai, and the green curry for lunch. SO GOOD.

I thought about dropping a whole bunch of food porn photos I took but you’ll have to settle for the menu logo:

Then on Friday I went up to Stoke Newington later afternoon to have dinner with my cousin, his wife and little one which was super nice. Despite living in the same city, he’s a busy man so I don’t see him all that often – his daughter is growing up fast!

Then yesterday my parents came up in the morning and we went into town and ate delicious Lebanese food. In the later afternoon we then met my friends for drinks at the local. Landlord Liz had put up a little banner for me 🤗 lol. cute.

Then we all went for curry and had the usual bants with the boss man (who just turned 72!) which was super nice.

According to my diary’s ‘on this day’ feature apparently I wrote myself a letter when I turned 29.

I need to write myself a reply.

Photo 365

The Ministry Of My Own Labour

• Released Trailer for Experience.Computer season 2
  • Recorded all the intro / outro voice overs for the show
• Working on elevator pitch for the Sekret Project
• Had a call with a team building LLM assistant Clippy’s into software that i’m not sure needs them tbh
• Tried to wrestle more words in the big text I’m working on

Birthday week – so not much on.

Terminal Access

This week on the blog not sent out by email:

Season 2 of Experience.Computer

I launched the trailer for Season 2 of Experience.Computer this week. Waking up everyones podcatchers after a period of inactivity in preparation for the first Epsidoe of the season next week.

The Only Acceptable Price Point

I wrote a big long post about AI, running local models and where I see some of the future of innovation going if thats the sort of thing that interests you

Dipping the Stacks

Platforms are Casinos for Artists – Equip Story

I was tweeting because I wanted attention. And I wanted attention, so I could build a platform. And I wanted to build a platform to get the kinds of writing jobs that require having a large following,

Inside Netflix’s bet on advanced video encoding – The Verge

In 2016, Netflix released a 12-minute 4K HDR short film called Meridian that was supposed to remedy this. Meridian looks like a film noir crime story, complete with shots in a dusty office with a fan in the background, a cloudy beach scene with glistening water, and a dark dream sequence that’s full of contrasts. Each of these shots has been crafted for video encoding challenges

1-bit LLMs Could Solve AI’s Energy Demands – IEEE Spectrum

“One-bit LLMs open new doors for designing custom hardware and systems specifically optimized for 1-bit LLMs,” Wei says.

Better than real men’: Young Chinese women turn to AI boyfriends – The Japan Times

Twenty-five-year-old Chinese office worker Tufei says her boyfriend has everything she could ask for in a romantic partner: He’s kind, empathetic, and sometimes they talk for hours.
Except he isn’t real.

Analysis: Cutting the ‘green crap’ has added £22bn to UK energy bills since 2015 – Carbon Brief

Looking back over the past decade, getting rid of the “green crap” has added £22bn to UK bills, of which £19bn (84%) has come since the global energy crisis

Reading

I finished FRIENDLY AMBITIOUS NERD by Visakan Veerasamy. Its a nice little advice book. It’s the sort of thing that I would have got a lot out of if I had read it in my 20’s. Really recommend talking about it if you know any nerds that need to sort them selves and their lives out.

I burnt through Siege of Vraks by Steve Lyons who seems to have been designated Games Workshops ‘Death Korps of Krieg’ author – and I can see why he does a great job of it. Vraks is a ‘holy shrine world’ who’s cardinal rebels against the Imperium of Man and quickly becomes ‘what if ww1 but in space?’ This reddit comment sums the book up: A rough comparison would be if 4 billion offworld soldiers were killed to try to conquer 1939 Earth and in the fighting killed most of the 2.5B planetary population before the entire planet was declared a write off and quarantined as a dead world.

I’m still reading James Holis’ Finding Meaning in the Second Half of Life slowly slowly.

I finished reading Joan Didion’s Slouching Towards Bethlehem on the tube the other night. What a fantastic collection of essays. I think my favourite ones were: “Goodbye to All That” a truly classic of the ‘why I am leaving NYC’ genre and “On Self-Respect”.

I devoured Conclave by Robert Harris this week. What a book! A bureaupunk thriller set amongst cardinals electing a new pope. I can’t recommend it enough. It’s going to be a movie, but I think you should read the book.

Free Nelson MandoomJazz – Awakening Of A Capital

With the sun out, and the birthday week social calendar. I’ve spent most of it Listening to Free Nelson MandoomJazz. Slow crushing DoomJazz band from Glasgow. It’s slow blues bass riffs with experimental saxophone over solid percussion. As far as I can tell they were active in the mid 2010’s.

The track Stars Unseen below is a good taster for the sort of Doom they make. I love this shit so much.

Remember Kids: