Jamie And Lion (aka, SpacedOutSmiles)

I’ve had to go the other way. Trying to bully myself with a calendar just didn’t work

My brain isn’t able to do the same things all times of day. I need to do the things I can do with the brain I have moment to moment

A fixed calendar just doesn’t work for me. Same for many neurodivergent folks.

I kinda had to build a system… starting with the idea of spoons / energy and then splitting by what’s fixed time or variable time…

Then by location (desk, table, bed).

I then sorta create queue of stuff around each combo of time + location.

My tools then mirror that structure.

GitHub - haotian-liu/LLaVA: [NeurIPS'23 Oral] Visual Instruction Tuning (LLaVA) built towards GPT-4V level capabilities and beyond. [NeurIPS'23 Oral] Visual Instruction Tuning (LLaVA) built towards GPT-4V level capabilities and beyond. - haotian-liu/LLaVA

I’m not directly building models… not yet anyway.

I’ve got a plan to train a custom version of LLaVa at some point (github.com/haotian-liu/...) but outside of that I’m mostly playing with things like EuroLLM which is EU funded :)

This is totally true. LLMs are a useful tech… but they aren’t ‘intelligence’.

The commercial capture + marketing of LLMs oversells the tech in daft ways because it’s focused on massive models.

It undersells the capability of small local models.

Oooo! Yes! It’s kinda hard to explain but I’ve got a lot of tools and techniques to sort of ‘flow’ my week well and structure stuff around spoons.

Fancy a call about it? Probably easier than me trying to explain it over messages!

Slowly on the mend. At least it’s only a few times a week and didn’t effect TechSharePro last week :)

That was grim. Better out that in. Was sick and could see rice which I haven’t eaten for days. It smelled very very bad.

Back in bed now. Proud cause I’m home alone. I handled it myself & cleaned up.

Called a friend who can come if needed.

I thought we had this worked out.

I’ll be okay

Tummy issues are back after a promising few days. Going to be a looooonnngggg night.

This surprises me a bit as it seems pretty common in the UK? Not the first line treatment but often the second line, especially if someone has a heart condition.

Hope it all goes super smoothly! Please keep sharing your experience. It’s super interesting :)

Hope it’s going well :)

Erm… “Why not food if food shaped”… luckily he’s already been fed :)

Not always. I’m using eurollm.io for the thing I built that helps me microwave stuff.

It runs entirely on my Mac, it’s 100% private, uses very little power. Was trained by EU universities on licensed data + funded by EU grant.

I don’t use the big commercial LLMs. The little ones are very helpful

Woosh! Up early did day two of #techsharepro. Heading off to the trains in a bit and playing some Animal Crossing to fill the gap :)

Amazing day at #techsharepro. Heck! On the way home with a massive snoozy smile. :)

Today is def on the surreal end of things.

A photo of Jamie staring at the camera hugging his bag with lion in with an orange had and green ear defenders.

I’m on the tube for the 4th time in 5 years.

Yep. It’s terrible as ever. Yay for ear defenders and amazing friends supporting me with this stuff.

Adventure!

On my way into town for TechShare Pro. All bouncy cause I’m on the opening panel :)

I’m chatting about the little local running AI powered tools I’ve been building to help me with day to day neurodivergent life stuff.

Still skeptical of big tech AI stuff… the little local models are the good spot

Hehe. Doing the same dance here. Zzzzz.

About to head out the door to the #techsharepro parliamentary reception :)

Exciting way to start a really, really busy week!!

All the Woosh.

(Lion’s going to sneak in, try to avoid scaring anyone to much :))

Working on a tech spike for @ermiltd.bsky.social and finding it exceptionally satisfying.

It’s a puzzle… finding a process which avoids high risk things (storing secrets or sensitive data) while also keeping it fast, simple and affordable :)

I do love a fun puzzle :)

It feels like one of those situations where it’s a principle not ‘use case specific’.

It’s the risk… and having to explain what you’re doing to protect the risks.

Side stepping it reduces the potential attach surface in the future & avoids hard chats with procurement teams.

Is the URL cache control public?

Back in my networking days we’d sometimes see weirdness like this where equipment across the network would hit the URL as part of cache checking so one user request turned into dozens.

Wouldn’t explain 295:1 tho!

Could be timing attacks. Attackers are smart as hell.

Sometimes it’s better to just not take a risk when we don’t need too.

Why risk opening the door at all when it’s trivial to side step the issue with good data separation.

It also avoids a complex chat / analysis at the paperwork stage.

Off the top of my head:

- exploits for cache keys where other orgs data can be returned.
- if caches contain user data, a cache leak can expose activity patterns / locations / internal IP addresses etc

Keeping it separate reduces the risk of bugs causing harm considerably.

They are org specific so keeping them separate means there’s an entire class of ‘data mixing bugs’ which can be side stepped… plus paperwork explaining the risks can be skipped.

If an orgs data is in a shared cache then the vendor needs to provide more evidence that it cannot be mixed.

My guess would be for user privacy & making data protection easier.

The models are read only blobs so the only user data is the prompts. Keeping it all separated makes it easier to get sign off.

We do this inside ERMI for similar reasons. Data isolation keeps the paperwork simpler

Mirror EXCLUSIVE: JK Rowling 'funding transphobia' as equality in Britain goes backwards, MP says Nadia Whittome, who has just joined Westminster's Women and Equalities Committee, called for the Government fight back against toxic narratives and show solidarity with the trans community

She said: "It's increasingly difficult when what we're up against is a machine funded by billionaires in this country and the US, with political support from countries like Russia as well.

"You just need to follow where the transphobia is coming from, it's not coming from working class people, it's trickling down from the top. "These concerns are not being raised by a cleaner on the minimum wage, somebody stuck in an abusive relationship. Trans people aren't a threat to them, the threat to them comes from violent men and the structures that keep them trapped, whether that's low pay, low benefits, not having access to the public services they need.

She said: "We see negative headlines about trans people in the media every day, the Tories and Reform continue to use them as a political football, often most damagingly in reference to protecting women from women who aren't trans, which misdiagnoses the problem of male violence, which is something...done to women both trans and not trans by violent and abusive men. "The only way we can stop trans people being used as a political football is to stand up for their rights unequivocally, by not giving an inch.

I imagine @nadiawhittomemp.bsky.social will be getting the usual abuse for speaking out - solidarity with her and all those fighting against hate manipulated by the wealthy right gleefully creating a distracting wedge issue

90% sure it does, though most employers probably don’t have a good policy.

This feels like it would be open to a challenge… but like most equality act stuff it would need to be funded… so it’s often easier not to fight this stuff :(

More tummy issues over the weekend but they are passing.

I need to be super super careful with food + food timing… or tummy goes wrong rapidly.

Beyond that, all is well. Excited for the week ahead at tech share pro!

Me standing in my hallway smiling for a selfie. I have a clean shaven face and head, but have left a moustache for Movember.

Every year I do Movember. I’m continuing my to raise money for Prostate Cancer UK. I’ve also set a goal to run 100 miles for the month. I just hit 25 miles this morning, and I’m already regretting my decision 😆

I’d really appreciate anyone who can support my fundraiser: movember.com/m/Conner?mc=60

One of the most ND things I experience is a complete lack of ‘friendship decay’…

I can be friends with someone…. Not talk for a year and pick up right where we left off. Friendships just kinda ‘are’.

It’s kinda epic. Especially when someone else has the same dynamic.