Joe Carstairs
Hi! 👋 My name is Joe Carstairs. I’m a software developer at Scott Logic, a graduate of Philosophy and Mathematics at the University of Edinburgh, a committed Christian and a pretty rubbish poet.
I’m also the secretary of the Scots Language Society. Help me maintain our website!
HMU with your thoughts on philosophy of science, Scots verse and John the Evangelist.
My blog
2024
- Questions I have about sex. Mark Vernon got me thinking about how the Church’s teaching on sex may be evolving. Added:
- What do academics think LLM ‘hallucination’ means?. What does the word ‘hallucination’ actually mean in reference to LLMs when used by academics? And where does that word come from? I’ve trawled the academic literature for answers. Added:
- Doctor Who, Gayness, and the Church. Series 14 of Doctor Who has a schizophrenic relationship with Christianity. It’s also gay. I think there might be a connection. Added:
My links
2024
- "Rules" that terminal programs follow. Handy for the next time you develop a CLI or TUI. Also handy as a user: now I know about readline key bindings, which are everywhere apparently. Added:
- Sexual symmetry and asymmetry. Alexander Pruss has a bizarre, but at first blush convincing, argument that complementarians about gender don’t have to appeal to morally significant intrinsic differences between men and women. Added:
- Please just stop saying 'just'. A pretty good case for avoiding the word 'just' in software engineering. I admit I've been guilty, too. Added:
- The Human Cost Of Our AI-Driven Future. In case you'd forgotten: content moderation is still carried out by appalling worker exploitation. This is not news, but nonetheless an excellent and suitably chilling essay on the topic. Be aware that the essay describes some deeply traumatic content. Added:
- LLMs don't 'hallucinate'. I posted on the Scott Logic blog a while ago about how the word 'hallucination' doesn't accurately capture how LLMs work. Added: