A few weeks ago my 5-year-old and I tried playing Cat Crimes, a puzzle game in which you work out which of your cats ate your shoes. We had a wonderful time - for about 20 minutes. In each round of Cat Crimes you get a puzzle card with a list of clues on it. You have to use the clues to figure out where in your front room each of your 6 cats were...
The plane reached 10,000ft. I connected my laptop to the wi-fi. The network login page encouraged me to sign in to my airmiles account, free of charge, even though I hadn’t yet paid for any internet. A hole in the firewall, I thought. It’s a long way from London to San Francisco so I decided to peer through it. I logged in to my JetStreamers...
For the last eighteen months I’ve been writing a book about being a dad. Two weeks ago I finished the first draft! The book is inspired by my blog posts about parenting, but most of it is brand new and I think it might be very good. It’s about childbirth, covid, careers, old friends, new friends, kid friends, chess, pianos, screens, AI, marriage,...
I know that time spent with my kids is supposed to be its own reward, and it is. But I also want to believe that what I do in this time matters, as much as possible. Elegantly handling a tantrum feels more worthwhile if I’m helping my son learn to express his feelings, not just making it through another day. I find more contentment at the end of...
Introductions to deep learning are too complicated and spend too much time trying to thrill you with details and real-world applications. This makes them a frustrating place to start. You already know that deep learning is amazing and that it actually works on real problems. You know that most of the hard work in industry is in the data cleaning....
In the last 10 years I’ve given more than 400 coding interviews. That’s the equivalent of 2 working months just watching strangers having a crack at the same few programming challenges. Some of my would-be colleagues solve the problems without incident, but others run into trouble for similar, easily-correctable reasons. I wish I could give...
This is part 17 of a series about my experiences being a parent. Read the rest here. Gaby, my wife, a few weeks before the birth: Before Oscar was born, I was entirely excited that we were going to have a child. I liked my life, but it was a good time to change everything. My job was fine, but I wasn’t worried about putting it on hold or even...
I’m a professional computer programmer, but I don’t often do all that much computer programming. Instead I spend much of my time futzing around with config files, other people’s frameworks, and other people. This makes it easy to forget how much fun it is to write a long program that truly interests you and watch it do something a little bit...
A week ago my brother sent a message to our family group: “My team at work launched something! It’s called ChatGPT. Give it a go: https://chat.openai.com” I talked to ChatGPT for ten minutes and then had a crisis of meaning for a few days. I eventually texted my brother back to say well done, because family will still be important, whatever...
Are you building a Gameboy emulator? Are you stuck? Are you failing Blargg’s test ROMs and can’t work out why? Gameboy Doctor can help! (GitHub link) What is Gameboy Doctor? Gameboy Doctor is a tool that compares your emulator to an example emulator that passes Blargg’s test ROMs. It finds the exact tick where your emulator’s state diverges from...
Three men were accused of selling firearms to South London gangs. At their 2012 trial in Croydon Crown Court, the prosecution played the jury a recording, taken undercover, of the trio allegedly arranging a sale. But the men’s lawyers claimed that the recording was a fake, and that the police had fabricated it by splicing together clips taken at...
This is part 16 of a series about my experiences being a parent. Read the rest here. I always assumed that I’d teach my kids about the things that I love, and that I’d start early. Gaby thought the same, and recently we’ve been putting more effort into guiding and challenging Oscar. At first this felt awkward and embarrassing. We worried that...
This is part 15 of a series about my experiences being a parent. Read the rest here. We’re having another baby. Gaby’s been a blunt advocate for more ever since we got Oscar home. She muted her arguments when we were considering whether to have any children because she wanted to give me a free choice about my life’s wide arc. But now that we have...