I talked with Joel from the Modern CTO podcast about building and scaling an organisation, cultural habit formation, Catalan micro-villages, social media, among other things!

The Modern CTO podcast

There are striking similarities between the training of a neural network and the way that we – as humans – form habits. How should that inform our thinking about the potential for this type of artificial intelligence, and what we should and shouldn't be asking of it?

Is training a neural network like forming a habit?

What lessons could politicians and governing organisations learn from business? We lack good metrics around the vast majority of what our political leaders promise to us.

A referendum on metrics we care about as a society

My default position is that roadmaps are bunk.


Are roadmaps useful any more?

I've found Atomic Habits to be a useful tool for my day-to-day goals – I was wondering if they could also be applied at an team-level?


Atomic Habits for organisations

Most approaches to AI alignment incur upfront costs to the creator (an “alignment tax”). In expectation, startups will skimp on alignment in order to avoid the tax. “Alignment windfalls” are strategies which tend towards long-term public good and short-term benefits to a company. One suggestion for a high impact career is to discover, validate, and advocate for these alignment windfalls so as to accelerate their adoption.

Alignment windfalls are a robust way to avert AI disaster

With the rapid increase in capability of coding assistants like Copilot, should they be banned from technical interviews?

Using coding assistants in technical interviews

It's useful to be able to preview the changes made in a PR before merging it. This is fairly easy with Argo CD, but not very well documented: I'll recommend an approach so you can get this set up quickly.


Creating ephemeral preview apps with Argo CD

Want to make Artificial Intelligence less likely to result in doom? Don't have a machine learning PhD? You can still help!


AI Safety Needs Great Product Builders

Ought are an applied research lab, studying how to build capable AI-powered systems without the existential risk. I'm super excited to be a part of the team!


Joining Ought

How to quit like a boss

Does more automation mean less control?

A machine learning approach called CycleGAN has been shown to be effective at transforming an image from one style to another. Perhaps turning a photo into a Monet-style painting, or changing a picture of a horse into that of a zebra. However, I wanted to try to use the approach on a more challenging transformation: turning audio data into an aesthetically-pleasing image to illustrate the latent structure of music.


Synaesthetic music visualisation with CycleGANs

In The Moral Landscape, Sam Harris describes a framework which allows for strictly rational conversations about morality. In this post we explore the possibility of applying this framework to serve as the basis of ethical artificial intelligence, and show that although The Moral Landscape might work well for humans, it's a poor choice for machines.


Will we share a moral landscape with artificial intelligence?

Existential risk is hard to weigh up versus other priorities we see around us in the world. When we look at the data, however, I think it's clear that this deserves more of our attention, and is generally under-funded when compared to shorter-term charitable causes.


A future cancelled: existential risk deserves more of your attention – and our altruism

Deploying a Gatsby site to GitHub Pages using Actions and Cloudflare

Using Athena, S3, and Tableau to quickly extract and visualise inaccessible data

… in which I weigh in on a sensitive debate from a uniquely privileged and blithely ignorant perspective.


Diversity as a superpower, and the madness of monocultures

IMO a missing piece in the Atomic Habits book was figuring out what to prioritise (and de-prioritise). Maybe this is obvious to most people, but I had to come up with a plan to figure out what was important.


Atomic Habits: what habits do you actually want?

ynabadell: connect your Sabadell bank account with YNAB

Don't video player controls seem dumb? Desktop and web-based players alike allow the user to jump forwards or backwards by 5 or 10 seconds, or possibly speed up and slow down playback. These controls operate identically no matter what the user is watching – there's no connection between the content of the video, and the controls. Here's an idea for how to identify the salient points in a video that a user might want to skip to: the good news is that this could all be done automatically, and with very little overhead; I'll leave the bad news to the end!

Enabling automatic "skip-to-next-scene" in videos

InnoDB and Table-level Locking

None of the major cloud infrastructure providers are going to work well for the unique capabilities of Elixir and BEAM.


Elixir on Google Cloud Platform: hot code reloading?

An attempt to justify spending hours in my workshop, breathing in harmful wooddust and sustaining several fairly serious injuries.


Life coaches hate this one crazy trick to stave off burn-out and increase motivation!

At Teespring, we use a take-home test as part of our technical interview process. We've had very little push-back on this from candidates, so the level of antipathy towards take-home tests in some discussions was an enormous surprise. Most people viewed these tests as a waste of time, rude, disrespectful, or a combination of all three. Here's why we think they're great.

Take Home Tests

It it possible to guess Catalan words?

Swamp cooler: experimenting with airflow

Injecting into transient FactoryBot attributes

Swamp coolers for the house?

Deploying a static site to Github Pages using Travis and Cloudflare

Queues, Culture, and Computer Science

Introducing "full-stop" a little projects which helps separate the mechanism of managing and appyling your dotfiles from the content of the dotfiles itself.


Are dotfiles meant to be forked?

A quick and dirty proof of concept for a virtual reality Teespring campaign page, created as a potential hackathon project.

Prototype: Virtual Reality e-commerce

Why exploding job offers don't work for senior hires

Google Bollocks: their seminal new product

I was recently asked: what's the worst project you ever worked on? I settled upon my first job out of university – taking "Not Invented Here" syndrome to a whole new level.

The worst project I ever worked on

An easy gift you can make for someone you care about, without a lot of special tools. You will need a drill though.


All Posts

The Modern CTO podcast

Is training a neural network like forming a habit?

A referendum on metrics we care about as a society

Are roadmaps useful any more?

Atomic Habits for organisations