When I was fifteen I completed a Design & Tech GCSE specifically in “Resistant Materials”, a big part of which involved a practical woodworking section. I had decided to (rather ambitiously) build a desk using mortise-and-tenon joints, but I was completely floundering and none of the joints were strong enough. My teacher, rather than spend a little time helping me out, decided it was appropriate to laugh about how terrible my project was with the other teachers, or so a friend who’d been in the woodshop told me afterwards. Mortified, I decided to scrap the project and focus on the exam so that I might scrape a passing grade, which I did.

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When my girlfriend and I arrived in North Devon for a short break with her parents last week I said I didn’t want to talk about AI. I suppose lately I’ve been feeling the coming together of several different forces in my work life and I feel so terribly exhausted by the rhetoric around the use of LLMs. I’m so tired of being seen to be the unreasonable one, to ask for things I don’t think of as being unreasonable. To be absolutely clear, I do not want this future society appears to be sleepwalking into. I didn’t ask for any of this.

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In February of last year I became a member of Dorset Devils, a litter picking group based here in beautiful Dorset, where I live. I’m DD1164 but the thoughts expressed here are my own, not the group’s. Joining had been on my horizon for some time but the kick up the backside I needed was seeing a local taxi driver pull up in my road before dumping a McDonald’s paper bag (full of other assorted rubbish) out of his car. Deciding not to do anything about it for the next week, while out walking I would see the bag, breaking apart and then eventually sending little bits of rubbish all over the road. What a f*cking mess.

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This essay contains The Last of Us, Part 2 spoilers. If you haven’t played it already I think you should.

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Earlier this week I was curious if I could create a program that would help me make my Fantasy Premier League selections: a list of players with the highest scores for the anticipated gameweek (a set of fixtures). Initially I wanted it to consider form (a player’s average score over the last thirty days) and the difficulty of each fixture. I wrote a first version in a couple of hours.

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