Personal
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Just 24 hours after getting back from my trip to Toronto and Banff, I was heading back to Zürich for a flight across to London. It was really hot, so I waited in the tunnel at my local station for a good 10 minutes before heading up to the platform. The trains in Switzerland are generally quite comfortable even in hot weather. Normally I have to change in Neuchatel to get to Zurich airport, but at this time of day I also had to change in Bienne and Zurich main station. Going past Swiss lakes on a hot day sometimes…
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At the end of the last post, Andrew Sonta and I had managed to arrive (slightly delayed) in Calgary, missing our bus and having to wait 2 hours for the next one. After grabbing dinner at the airport, we were able to take the last bus of the night, leaving at 10:30pm. We eventually arrived safely in Banff, at the Centre for Arts and Creativity, where the ACM BuildSys conference was due to be hosted the following week. Here's a photo of the entrance that I took during daylight, the following day. Here's a map of their lovely campus. We…
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I posted this today on LinkedIn. I'm having to rethink my approach to using this platform. Next week marks 20 years of my "Through the Interface" blog, but lately my standard approach of posting links to my content - with a few images - is leading to fewer and fewer people seeing my posts, at least those coming in from platforms such as this one. Part of me doesn't care all that much: I feel like I've grown out of my dopamine-hungry, engagement-measuring phase and I certainly find it a shame that I have to create "native" content to be…
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After an incredible week at TechX in Seattle, I headed back to Europe, but not yet homewards. I changed planes in Frankfurt on my way to Alicante for a friend's 60th birthday. I hadn't slept at all on my flight from Seattle to Frankfurt as - despite having a seat with decent legroom - I had someone next to me who was clearly severely alcoholic (trust me, I'm not one to judge) and was literally sweating alcohol. There was no way I could sleep with the smell of his sweat next to me. By the time I arrived in Frankfurt…
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I haven't posted since DevCon - other than the excellent guest posts being contributed by Patrick Nadeau - as we've entered quite a busy time of year. My team has now delivered a couple of shareouts for our company's senior leadership, and we'll shortly be going into the Research organisation's mid-year review cycle for our various projects. Anyway, this week has given me a bit of a breather: while Friday was a holiday in Switzerland, today is a holiday in the UK and Canada, presumably for Star Wars Day. May The Fourth Be With You Always! At the weekend I'll…
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Here's one more post relating to what has somehow become a bit of a recent theme on this blog: artificial intelligence. Something has been weighing on me, of late. I've noticed a significant uptick in my site being mined by bots and spiders: once upon a time it would be for search engines trying to find its content, but increasingly it's the likes of Anthropic, OpenAI and Grok, coming in and stealing/learning from this blog. There was a time when I'd have shrugged and said "c'est la vie", but given the increasing competency of these models to write code themselves,…
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There was a lot of excitement, last week, when Autodesk announced a $200 million investment in Dr. Fei-Fei Li's World Labs startup. Just to get this out there from the get-go: I have no special information about this investment - I heard about it at the same time as anyone outside the company, and was in no way involved in negotiations or discussions relating to it. I just thought it helpful to gather together a few references to public information that might be of interest (and of use) to people. The first reference I found worth a read is this article…
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Yesterday was a day of strange coincidences. After several months of heated discussions with His Majesty's Passport Office, I finally received my replacement UK passport in the post. In a nutshell the problem had come from me sending in a copy of my Swiss passport - with the name "Kean Walmsley" - with the application. HMPO came back with a message saying "you can't have a passport in another name", as my UK passport included by middle name (which I honestly neither use nor particularly care about), while my Swiss one didn't. I'd realised this when I first got my…
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Last week I was back in the UK this week to visit friends and family but also for a networking event hosted by UCL's International Centre for NeuroArchitecture and NeuroDesign. I landed on Tuesday evening and went straight to Cookham to catch up with my brother and and old friend. It was a nice evening - and meal - but on the way home - quite early, at around 9:30pm - we came around a bend in the road (one with a 30mph speed limit) to find a car speeding towards us, trying to overtake another car. The car hit…
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It's been a strange start to the year, here in Switzerland, with the news of the tragedy in Crans-Montana. On the morning of January 1st my wife and I woke up to breaking news of a fire in a Swiss mountain nightclub. We opened the link and immediate started to panic: our second son had headed up to Crans-Montana for New Year's Eve to surprise his girlfriend (who was there with family over the New Year's period). Neither his nor his girlfriend's phones were turned on - it was 7am on January 1st, so no great surprise, but still anxiety-inducing…