A Charitable War

The Land Forces expo was met with protesters here in Melbourne last week, and rightly so in my opinion. What was most alarming to me was the police response to the protesters which included stun grenades, "hard foam baton rounds" which the ABC assures me is not, in fact, a rubbler bullet, they're just often mistaken for them. It feels pretty wildly excessive to me. I've written to the Minister for Police - Anthony Carbines - and I encourage you to do the same.

Whiles we're on the Land Forces expo, it turns out the organisers - AMDA - are a registered charity and therefore pays no tax. Yep, makes sense.

OpenAI released it's latest model - OpenAI o1 - I also found this comment in the Pragmatic Engineer interesting:

The new model [OpenAI o1] is far more capable in its responses – even though these responses take more time to process – and brings a new dimension in how to use language models. Because the model spends more compute time on answers, it has become more expensive to use: o1 costs 100x as much as GPT-4o mini, and 3-6x as much as GPT-4.

I honestly think this is the biggest hurdle for LLMs. Does the usefulness justify the cost? The more useful it is, the more expensive it is - in this case by orders of magnitude.

Speaking of the Pragmatic Engineer, I finally got around to reading their two part piece by Gergely Orosz and Kent Beck on measuring developer productivity in response to a McKinsey piece on the topic that a lot of people (myself included) found a bit icky.

I'm pretty deep in this stuff at work at the moment where I'm rolling out an Software Engineering Intelligence tool and really care about improving developer productivity.

By “high performing” we mean teams where developers satisfy their customers, feel good about coming to work, and don’t feel like they’re constantly measured on senseless metrics which work against building software that solves customers’ problems.

That's possibly my work mantra at the moment.