benjamta

Playing about with a small side project that's spun out of a need to manage our board game nights better.

Started as a spreadsheet, moved to notion database, now a web app. Idea is groups have collective libraries across members, and planning what to play when is a pain.

Tried to make it easy to get going - take photo of your games shelf and we identify the games there, look them up via the BoardGameGeek API and add the to you library, then you can the pool with others.

It's free if you want to give it a go:

https://ourboardgames.com

I've been banging the explicit encoding / knowledge engineering drum for years - I think now is a good time for many to look at Knowledge Engineering as a growing career option.

We've put to together a series to try to give a flavour of what Knowledge Engineering as a career choice looks like - though it might be of interest here.

I also have fond memories of the Ridgeway, and especially the White Horse. As a kid we lived in a village 9 miles or so away (perhaps the same place as your dad?).

I used to fly model rockets from the fields by the White Horse. And I'll never forget being made to do cross country running on the Ridgeway from school.

There's so much history and myth tied up with that area. Especially true of the White Horse, Dragon hill (where legend says St. George killed the dragon), and Wayland's Smithy near by.

A comprehensive, precise, and pedantic branch of set theory pertaining to food categorization.

https://www.bentaylor.co.uk

Infrequently updated thoughts on photography, logic, open rights, canoe building and many other things.

Ha! Norfolk's a treasure trove of interesting place names. Wymondham also trips outsiders up.

I was here for almost 20 years before I learnt that Heighham is pronounced as just "Ham".

Here’s a bit more about the Rainbird platform for those interested…

The platform has two main parts:

1. The studio (an area where you can make visual decision-making models in a process similar to mind mapping)

2. The inference engine (which uses your models to automate decision making)

The platform is designed so that computer scientists and automation specialists can overcome the challenges of machine learning (in particular, our inability to stay in control of algorithms that find their own patterns in data) and RPA (in particular, a decision tree’s inability to juggle many variables at a massive scale). And that’s why we’ve focussed on two principles as we improve Rainbird:

1. Human-down structure: that is, we start with human knowledge and apply it to data (so that humans can always understand and explain what the machines are doing)

2. Non-linear automation: that is, we focus on capturing and codifying knowledge that can apply to multiple scenarios (rather than on steps to be followed in a one-off, isolated situation)

My kids love microbit - and have been hacking stuff on the platform since they were 7 or 8 years old.

They’ve played with raspberry pi too, but Microbit is just so immediate. You write some code (or drag some blocks about), upload and it just works. It’s simple, understandable and quick. It’s also bridging the gap to learning some basic electronics too - building small circuits on a bread board with a mictrobit controller.

There’s something about microbit that just sparks my kids imagination - they’ve used it for school projects, homework assignments, they make little robots, figure out how they can automate tasks like watering their plants. All things they could do on Raspberry Pi of course, but still…

I see my kids playing about with mictrobits and I get a really sense of the same joy I had messing about with computers and electronics in the 1980s.

This roundabout still gives me shudders after learning to drive (well trying to learn to drive) in Swindon in the 90s.

What a great film! Ilford are a fantastic company, they have managed to successfully ride out the rollercoaster the traditional film market has been through over the last couple of decades.

Some years ago I was taken on a tour of their facility, I was struck by how passionate about the product everyone I met there was. That passion seems to ride through to their loyal user base, I hope Ilford remain strong.

As a British company looking to enter the US, is there a preferred mechanism for seconding UK employees to a (currently non-existent) US entity?

I love this - and it's a rPi case too!

We're using docker in part to get round the old 'works on my machine' problem: http://www.rainbird.ai/2014/08/works-machine/

I'm one of the co-founders in this project. Thanks for taking a look at Rainbird.

Currently to integrate you'll either need to use our REST api or a Javascript agent - essentially a little themeable widget you can embed in your site. This means that we host your knowledge base and you need do to be on-line to access what you've built.

We do have plans to provide a version of our engine that could be used off line or self hosted. Although we don't expect this to be available in the near future.

Absolutely love it - real great way to explore how all numbers are uniquely interesting.

Looks like a nice implementation, and I really love JetBrains products, but for me I just don't 'get' this (or most code completion in general).

For me, and it is a personal thing, actually writing code - that is physically typing braces etc. is not the time consuming part of coding. Far, far more time is spent thinking about my code than actually typing it. Shaving off a few seconds when working in my editor feels like an optimisation too far, especially if it essentially means learning new syntax.

Like I said, it's a personal thing - I know others have good reason to love code completion tools. Now if someone could come up with something like this for when I'm writing in my notebook....

Really nice. I reckon this could be a nice learning tool too.

quite right - thanks for pointing that out :)

Exactly right. Fusion is not at all like nuclear fission. It's so incredibly hard to maintain the reaction that any catastrophic failure stops everything.

There's no unrequested fission surplus situation possible here...

It's fascinating seeing it progress (albeit from afar), true cathedral scale engineering.

My father worked on the ITER project for many years. This article goes some way to express the shear scale of this project, it's absolutely vast.

When I was a lot younger I was taken on a tour of JET (http://www.efda.org/jet/) and was overawed with the size of it. ITER is an order of magnitude bigger.

The machine that follows ITER is where things get really interesting. Called DEMO, it's still in the planning phase - but will provide a template for future commercial fusion power generation. They're talking about possibly putting fusion generated power into the grid by 2040. Truly exciting stuff.

A fantastic move! I've been using ShareLaTeX for quite some time, it's a great service. This move to open source really shows you're pushing your product in the right direction. Thanks :)

It's common enough that many crossings in the UK are protected with metal barriers. It's not at all uncommon to see those barriers bent and twisted where a car has hit them.

Sure thousands of cars can pass through a crossing every day with out on mounting the pavement. But road safety is all about improving the odds.

Crumbs, this makes interesting reading - clearly lots of failings by the companies involved here.

However. If someone were to steal a physical asset in order to extort something else out of me I would go immediately to the police. I'd have thought I'd do the same if the assets involved were digital.

I've no idea if a criminal offence was committed in what ever jurisdiction this happened. But I'd have thought extortion is illegal is many parts of the world?

And AWS! As the article said he got lucky that the attacker didn't twig that there was an AWS account associated with that amazon.com login.

You should be using two-factor authentication for all your AWS accounts, especially the 'root' account that's tied to your regular Amazon.com login (I've always though this is a bit odd).

You should also never use that root account and set up IAM accounts for yourself and any other user (which also use 2FA).

Hmmm. I reckon I'm quite good at choosing the music I want to listen to. Not sure I want to pay some one (or a service) to select music for me.

The NHS provide shockingly little information on how to opt out. The leaflet that came through all our doors about this was vague. There is no official form, they just suggest you talk to your surgery. Legislation passed in 2012 allows the NHS to use our data with out first seeking our consent.

So that's what I did. Because they don't give this scheme a name, it's hard to talk reception staff about exactly what it is you want to opt out of. They were very understanding, but left me with forms to opt out of the Summary Care Record which is not the same thing. Even if you've already oped out of the Summary Care Record you must still opt out of this.

An email to the practise manager did the trick though. I asked by what mechanism they achieve the opt out, as it all seem very vague. A very helpful and prompt response explained that a change has been made to the access conditions of my record in System One (the monolithic care record system) such that it can't be used for this purpose.

All of which is great. But this scheme should clearly be on an opt in basis.

I agree. Here in the UK it's thankfully not illegal to circumvent censorship filters. Indeed you can opt out (although there are good reasons why requiring opt out is a bad thing).

The term pirate has negative, fringe connotations for many. Our rights to privacy and an uncensored internet should be a mainstream concern.

That's not to say this project shouldn't be lauded, it should. It'd just be nice to see projects like this becoming super accessible and I think terminology plays a part in that.

Very well said. Tackling a problem with a broad brush law that grants liberties to one group while denying those same liberties from another should never be the answer.

Very nice. Whatever your views on JS are this is an impressive project.