Thousands of elderly twins assure me that my kids will be alright

“Where are we daddy?” asked my five-year-old. “We’ll land in about an hour,” I said. “No I mean where are we? Are we flying over Italy yet?” I wasn’t sure. Our flight was short and cheap and the seats didn’t have TV screens in the headrests. I looked around. I noticed a sticker encouraging me to connect to the in-flight wi-fi. That would do it, I...

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,...

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....