At a company I once worked for, I had the great displeasure of working with someone who had decided fairly early on they didn’t like me. All attempts I made to try to repair the relationship over the course of months, years even, failed. They were particularly combative over any form of code review, telling me that to criticise their work was to criticise their ability personally.

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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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