Here are my current thoughts on A.I. - by which I mean, deep neural networks. The more I work with technologies such as transformer networks (such as LLMs), convolutional networks and the like, the more impressed I am with them.
Hiking the Bidjigal Reserve
Yesterday we decided to hike the Platypus and Burraga Loop trail at the Bidjigal Reserve near Castle Hill. It was a really lovely walk! It was a little harder than I was expecting, purely in terms of having to cross a creek quite a few times. Sometimes there weren’t great stepping stones to cross on, and it was lucky we were both wearing waterproof hiking boots.
Back in Tokyo
We have an overnight stopover in Japan. Because we flew in to Haneda airport, which is nice and close to central Tokyo, we took the monorail in to the city. We are staying at the Mecure Tokyo Hibiya, which is a lovely hotel with nice big king-sized beds.
Drone finally fixed!
About a year and a half ago, in an attempt to keep playing with new technology, I bought myself a DJI Mini 3 Pro drone. The tech was way ahead of the last drone I owned (the Parrot AR).
WebFlow
I just started using WebFlow to level up my website building game. I am really loving it! It seems to generate clean HTML / CSS and is fairly easy to use if you know HTML and CSS. I recommend doing the WebFlow 101 YouTube tutorial to get up and running quickly.
Automating secure access to AWS services
Every so often I need to open up access to an AWS service to my home IP address. Unfortunately, my IP address is liable to change when my broadband router reconnects, so I wanted to automate the process of adding my local IP to the AWS security group. I created the following shell script to do this. It will retrieve your externally presenting IP address, and then add a new rule to the security group opening inbound connections to the specified port range. If the script has been run previously, the script will first delete the previously added rule.
Is AI affecting the programmer job market?
A couple of weeks ago I went to the Sydney Developers Meetup. I wanted to meet up with other programmers in Sydney and get more involved with the Sydney technology scene. Having been in the UK for so long, I feel like I am really out of touch with what is going on in Australia.
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So much time has gone by
I can’t believe that so much time has gone by since I last updated my blog. It feels like the blink of an eye, but I can see that it was last updated in November 2022. In that time I feel like the world has changed. OpenAI launched ChatGPT at the end of November 2022. Nowadays, I can’t imagine coding or problem-solving without the help of an A.I. chatbot. It seems like just as significant a development as the advent of the internet or the mobile phone.
Upgrading Mastodon from 3.5.3 to 4.0.2
You can follow the 3.5.3 to 4.0.0 instructions which are here. Just remember to do git checkout v4.0.2 instead of git checkout v4.0.0.
bash Snapshot File alias
I just created this useful bash function for snapshotting a timestamped version of a file: