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
- 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:
- LLMs do not understand anything. Save this for the next time someone tells you that LLMs 'understand' things. Added:
My links
2024
- Goldman Sachs Top of the Mind, Issue 129. Read the interviews. Economists give interesting, and diverse, opinions on the economic potential of LLMs. Added:
- Story points are wasting time. Pretty convincing to me. The biggest potential weakness in his argument is his claim that none of the most common reasons why devs disagree on story points exposes anything which ought to be resolved in an estimation meeting. If you can provide other common reasons besides the ones Dave considered, you could rebut his argument. I don't feel experienced enough to judge this myself. Added:
- Reverse Engineering TicketMaster's Rotating Barcodes (SafeTix). Who doesn't like a classic David-and-Goliath hacker story? Also, if you're American, please break up TicketMaster. If you're in the UK, it's not quite as bad, but it's still really bad. Use alternatives where you can. Added:
- Don’t use booleans. A nice idea. But I think this advice only applies well when you've got many inter-dependent flags. If you have independent flags, re-writing those as enums will just end up with you re-implementing the boolean type for every parameter, and not getting much profit, I reckon. Added:
- Big Data is Dead. Did you know that most organisations store less than 100GB, and almost all analytics is run on the last 24h of data? I didn’t. Though take it all with a pinch of salt: the guy’s writing on his company blog which sells traditional data warehouses. Added: