Personal
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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…
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I usually enjoy the month of December a great deal: things are winding down for the holiday season, and participating in Advent of Code helps dust off my atrophying coding skills. This year has been a little different, for various reasons: I've had a number of converging end-of-year deadlines that have kept me busier than I would have liked - not necessarily a bad thing, of course - and Advent of Code was a shorter edition, this year.The creator of Advent of Code - Eric Wastl - decided to scale back to 12 days (instead of the usual 24) for…
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The last post talked about the trip across to Santa Fe and the first few days settling in. Now that I'm back from the week away, I've written up the second part of the mini-series, which covers the main part of the trip and the return. As I was up early with jet lag on my second morning in Santa Fe, I headed across the car park to "the gym" at the resort. I use inverted commas because it really wasn't much of a gym, and by the time I arrived it was already full of Autodeskers (three of my…
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On Saturday I went to the station in foggy Neuchatel to take the train to Zurich. From there I was heading to the town of Santa Fe in New Mexico - somewhere I'd never been - for our annual meeting of the leaders working on our various research areas. There are no direct flights to Santa Fe - it's a very small domestic-only airport in the US - and the best I could do was fly to San Francisco and take a smaller plane to Albuquerque. Which is only an hour's drive from Santa Fe. I was really apprehensive about…