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Posts by Jeremy Keith

Dilation Nothing can travel faster than light. And if you manage to travel close to the speed of light, things get weird. Technically, we all experience time differently depending on how fast or slow we’re moving. But the differences are so imperceptible as to be non-existent. That’s how we can describe events as being “simultaneous”, even though according to Einstein’s theory of relativity, there’s no such thing. It’s thanks to these small relativistic effects that GPS works. But when you approach the speed of light—or get close to something very massive—then the large-scale relativistic effects kick in. If you travel close to the speed of light for a short time, it will seem like a much longer time to everyone you left behind. This is the twin paradox, which isn’t really a parodox at all, just time dilation in action. There are some coincidental parallels to this kind of time dilation in old folk tales. The Japanese tale of Urashima Tarō tells of a fisherman who rescues a sea turtle and is rewarded with a relaxing few days in an underwater kingdom, only to find that when he returns home to his village, 300 years have passed. The Irish tale of Oisín describes the warrior’s journey to Tir na nÓg, the land of youth. He spends three years there but when he returns to Éire to see his old fighting comrades from the Fianna, 300 years have passed. This story gives us a wonderfully poetic turn of phrase that’s still used today. The closest English equivalent is “Billy no mates”, a rather cruel term to describe someone with no friends. In Irish, we say: > Mar Oisín i ndiadh na Fianna Like Oisín after the Fianna.
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Sunday session

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Finn Mac Cool by Morgan Llywelyn After reading The Morrigan I was hungry for more retellings of Irish myths and legends. I tracked down the 1994 novel Finn Mac Cool by Morgan Llywelyn. When I was devouring modern retellings of Greek myths, I commented on an interesting difference in the tellings: > The biggest difference I’ve noticed is the presence or absence of supernatural intervention. Some of these writers tell their stories with gods and goddesses front and centre. Others tell the very same stories as realistic accounts without any magic. The Morrigan was dripping in magic. Finn Mac Cool is a more down-to-earth affair. That’s not to say that magic doesn’t matter. For the characters in this book, their belief in magic is as real as their belief in the weather. But there are no supernatural powers here. If anything, Finn’s superpower is his ability to tell—and believe—tall tales involving supernatural intervention. All the usual accounts of Finn Mac Cool’s prowess are retold as deeds that may have a basis in reality but then get exaggerated almost immediately. It’s a framing device that works well. It’s all too easy to believe in the rise to power of a charismatic man skilled in controlling the narrative. There’s plenty of Machievellian politics at play. There are no outright villains, or even heroes. There’s a pleasing messiness to the forces at work. Sometimes the author’s research shows a bit too much. There are digressions into explanations of Brehon law that threaten to derail the narrative. Overall though, this is an engaging and vivid retelling that just makes me want to spend more time in this world.
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Reading Gideon The Ninth by Tamsyn Muir.

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A man playing uilleann pipes with a woman playing fiddle in a pub.

A man playing uilleann pipes with a woman playing fiddle in a pub.

Thursday session

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Threat models People talk about the effectiveness (or lack thereof) of large language models as though all tasks are comparable. But it strikes me that there are three broad categories of work that large language models are applied to: 1. Compression. 2. Transformation. 3. Expansion. **Compression** is when you feed a large language model something big that you want to make small. Summarise this book. Give me the gist of this meeting. Large language models are generally pretty good at this, which makes sense given that they themselves are kind of like compressed artifacts. **Transformation** is when large language models convert from one format into another. Turn this audio into text. Turn this jumble of data into structured JSON. A large language model can handle these tasks pretty well. There’ll probably be a few errors so make sure that’s not a deal-breaker. **Expansion** is when you give a large language model a prompt to generate something from scratch. An image. A presentation. An email. A poem. This is where slop lives. The output inevitably betrays its origins, glistening with a sheen of mediocrity. Laurie spotted this three-way split a while back: > Is what you’re doing taking a large amount of text and asking the LLM to convert it into a smaller amount of text? Then it’s probably going to be great at it. If you’re asking it to convert into a roughly equal amount of text it will be so-so. If you’re asking it to create more text than you gave it, forget about it. I hope that when the bubble finally bursts, we’ll see the surviving large language models put to work on the first two categories. The boring stuff. The work that’s tedious for humans. But tedious is as tedious does. Something I consider drudgery might be the very thing that gives you life. Like Giles says: > I have a feeling that **everyone likes using AI tools to try doing someone else’s profession**. They’re much less keen when someone else uses it for their profession. The big exception seems to be programming. Apparently there are plenty of coders who never before expressed an interest in being managers who are now happily hanging up their coding spurs in favour being the overseer of non-human workers. It’s a reasonable outlook. It could even be considered a user-centred approach. Users don’t care about the elegance of your code; they care about accomplishing their tasks. Programming is something of an exception to the efficacy of large language models in general. Instead of relying on the subjectivity of painting, poetry, or prose, programming can be objectively tested. Throw enough money at the worst people in the world and they’ll give you tokens you can use to get the machines to test their own output. So you _can_ get a large language model to create something reasonably good from scratch as long as that something is code. If you had asked me about the threat model of large language models two years ago, I probably would’ve been worried for artists, writers, and musicians. I thought that software had enough inherent complexity to be relatively safe. Now my opinion has completely reversed. Software is almost certainly the killer app for large language models. I think the artists, writers, and musicians will be okay, or at least as okay as they ever were. It turns out that humans like things made by other humans. And y’know what? If I had to choose which endeavour I’d rather see automated away—programming or art—it’s no competition. Don’t get me wrong—it would be nice if everyone got paid for doing what they enjoy. It’s just that I’m okay with software engineers not being at the front of that line. I remember when I first started getting paid money to make websites. “Really?” I thought, “Someone is willing to pay me to do something I’d do anyway?” I kept waiting for the jig to be up. Instead I saw my profession grow and expand. Perhaps there’s a long-overdue compression happening. Or maybe it’s more like a transformation.
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Wednesday session

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Just heard the sad news about Moya Brennan passing. Some of the first records I ever bought were by Clannad—Macalla, Magical Ring, Legend.

Ar dheis Dé go raibh a hanam.

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Monday session

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The bots are swarming hard today, laying waste to the meadows of the open web. This is what powers vibe-coding.

The slop must flow.

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I know a young student in Germany who needs to learn about relevance of the Entscheidungsproblem and Alan Turing to today’s work in computation—who should I put them in touch with?

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My salary history Times are tough out there. I know that a lot of people are looking for work, which can be a very stressful experience. One of the things that can make the job search stressful is uncertainty. There’s a real taboo around talking about salaries. This taboo ends up benefiting employers and punishing potential employees. There’s an information gap that can be exploited (see also: job postings that don’t list salary ranges). That’s why I’m always pleased when people voluntarily share their income. Here are some of the people who have done this over the years: * Dan Mall (US) * Alistair Hey (UK) * Jamie Tanna (UK) * Tom Withers (UK) * Matt Brunt (UK) * Carolina Gilabert (UK) * Xe Iaso (Canada) * Kristófer Reykjalín (Canada/US/Iceland) Because the jobs are generally in software or design, you can sort of make apples-to-apples comparisons. You can definitely get the general gist of what kind of salary to expect for certain roles. In the interest of full transparency, I figured I’d share my own income numbers, though as you’ll see, they’re not very representative of a normal career: * 2003: £15,434 (freelance) * 2004: £15,900 (freelance) * 2005: £14,125 (freelance) * 2006: £43,009 (freelance/Clearleft) * 2007: £34,900 (Clearleft) * 2008: £33,833 (Clearleft) * 2009: £35,549 (Clearleft) * 2010: £37,174 (Clearleft) * 2011: £40,666 (Clearleft) * 2012: £39,750 (Clearleft) * 2013: £39,500 (Clearleft) * 2014: £48,655 (Clearleft) * 2015: £46,499 (Clearleft) * 2016: £52,106 (Clearleft) * 2017: £56,492 (Clearleft) * 2018: £59,498 (Clearleft) * 2019: £59,670 (Clearleft) * 2020: £43,807 (Clearleft) * 2021: £48,344 (Clearleft) * 2022: £60,446 (Clearleft) * 2023: £55,721 (Clearleft) * 2024: £47,104 (Clearleft) * 2025: £42,133 (Clearleft) The first thing you’ll notice is that agency work isn’t nearly as well paid as in-house work at a technology company. So don’t embrace agency life for the money. Speaking personally, the benefits are in autonomy and variety. Those are things I value highly. Also, I haven’t put any job titles or levels on there because they’ve never really been codified for me. I just made up my own job titles as I went along. Again, this is not very helpful to you if you’re looking for a job at a typical company. You’ll see that things got weird in 2020, which is to be expected because things _did_ get weird in 2020. I was furloughed, and I also took some more time off. I got a taste for it, which is why I went down to a four-day week and later a three-day week, which is what I’m doing now. So those last five years of numbers are loopy—I’m making less than before, but if you were to adjust it for a five-day week, I’m still getting paid more than before …if that makes sense. Perhaps the most unusual thing about my career trajectory is that I’ve been at the same place for twenty years now. That’s pretty much unheard of in tech. It’s far more usual to see people switch companies—and get a salary bump—every couple of years. So I’m not sure if there’s any value in me sharing my numbers like this. But like I said, I admire when other people do it so I figured I’d throw mine out there. Perhaps you’d like to share your numbers too.
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Tuesday session

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TinyStart Sometimes I look back through my blogging archives and notice what’s changed over time. For example, I used to write quite enthusiastically about the arrival of a new operating system from Apple. That is no longer the case, to put it mildly. I’m currently holed up on Sequioa, trying to resist all the nudgings to “upgrade” to the tacky design nightmare that is Tahoe. I feel like the protagonist of Pluribus. I used to write about software I really liked. Sometimes it was software made by Apple. More often it was from some independent developer. Like, I remember how much I loved a little application called Quicksilver. It just did one thing. You pressed `control` and `space` and then started typing the name of any programme installed on your computer. After a few characters Quicksilver would show you the match, you hit `enter` and the programme launched. If that process sounds familiar, it’s because Apple ended up incorporating it into their own Spotlight feature. Quicksilver got sherlocked (ask your parents). Recently though, Spotlight got worse and worse at doing its one job. It’s been laggy and inaccurate, even though I set my Spotlight indexing options to _only_ index the Applications folder. Then I found TinyStart. It’s like Quicksilver reborn! > A tiny launcher for macOS, fast and focused on the essentials. Actually, it does double duty. As well as being an application launcher, it’s also an emoji picker. 👍 Best of all, not only is TinyStart a return to the focus and quality of software of yore, it’s also a return to the pricing model. You buy the software—for a measly €5—and that’s it. You own it now. There’s no subscription you have to pay every month. I love everything about this.
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Thanks to everyone who came out to the Salter Cane gig on Saturday night—that was fun!

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Sound checking Salter Cane

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Salter Cane is ready to rock and/or roll!

https://saltercane.com/tickets

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Thursday session

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This Saturday night in The Hope And Ruin in Brighton…

https://saltercane.com/tickets

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Mistrust Four years ago I wrote about something that has long puzzled me in the world of front-end development. Trust: > The mindset I’ve noticed is that many developers are _suspicious_ of browser features but _trusting_ of third-party libraries. > > Developers are more likely to trust, say, Bootstrap than they are to trust CSS grid or custom properties. Developers are more likely to trust React than they are to trust web components. That post got some thoughtful responses but I never really understood the imbalance of trust and suspicion: > I’m kind of confused by this prevalent mindset of trusting third-party code more than built-in browser features. But something happened recently that helped me understand that mindset better. I wrote a while back about how the datalist element on iOS has been completely fucked up. It’s worse than if Safari simply didn’t support it. Breaking the web like that should be a five-alarm fire, but nobody is in any rush to fix it. I recall a similar lackadaisical attitude when Safari completely broke their implentation of IndexedDB. I had it in my head that browser features followed a forward path generally. They’d be iterated on and improved on to iron out any glitches, but it was reasonable to expect things to get _better_ with each new version of a browser. Now I see that’s not necessarily the case. Had I used an over-engineered JavaScript library instead of the `datalist` element, I wouldn’t be facing the current situation of having to use browser-sniffing to avoid sending a standard HTML element to any browser on iOS. Sure, that third-party JavaScript would mean that users are downloading more code, and it probably wouldn’t work well with assistive technology, but as long as I didn’t touch it, it would continue to work. That _should_ be true of web standards—I should be able to use them secure in the knowledge that they won’t suddenly shit the bed. Perhaps I should be grateful to Apple for dispelling my naïveté. I now have much more empathy and understanding for web developers who are suspicious of web standards and prefer to use third-party libraries instead. Good job, Apple. Happy anniversary.
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Wednesday session

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People of Brighton, be sure to get your ticket for the Salter Cane gig this Saturday, April 4th featuring Skyscrapers and The Equatorial Group!

https://saltercane.com/tickets

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Coco’s napping

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Monday session

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This Saturday, April 4th, come to The Hope And Ruin in Brighton to see Skyscrapers, Equatorial Group, and Salter Cane:

https://saltercane.com/tickets

Tickets are £8 in advance, £10 on the door.

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Saturday evening session in Tullamore

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Saturday afternoon session in Tullamore

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It’s gettin’ wild in Tullamore tonight!

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Friday evening session in Tullamore

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Going to Tullamore. brb

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