Hello Deep Learning

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...

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...