16 Jan 25 ~All the news thatās fit to thermal print with GPT-4o-mini. Reading things on paper is better for your brain, and Iāve got a thermal printer in a box gathering dust. Rather than blearily scrolling through BBC News first thing, why not get the news from a miniature newspaper, freshly printed each morning? Itās not quite āsky before screensā, but āpaper before pixelsā has a ring to it. Behold, a literal doom scroll Iā¦ read more ā
11 Jan 25 ~Crafting little webpages for quicker connections. Chances are you arenāt reading this from a satellite-connected oil-platform, deep in the North Sea, but if you areā¦ youāre welcome. Almost all[1] the HTML pages that make up this site weigh in at under 14 kilobytes.[2] Why does that matter? Because itās much faster for our imaginary drilling friend. For those downloading from the sea š¶ Itās all terribly comā¦ read more ā
4 Jan 25 ~How to set up a tiny and useful AI on the most knackered of hardware. Iāve been using my nifty terminal helper to write the bash commands that my brain refuses to remember. Itās quick and accurate (enough); the best tool yet Iāve built using an LLM. The only downside is its reliance on the Claude API, which means itās useless without an internet connection and a credit card[1]. But can we get another version to run locally? Nā¦ read more ā
30 Dec 24 ~Using AI to start the creative process - not consume it Try Kickstart šµ here, the app that goes with this post. This Hacker News comment started turning a cog in my brain: are we going about LLMs all wrong, by plonking them straight in the hands of the end user? AI, in its current state, really isnāt a tool meant for an end user to interact withā¦ The best use cases seem to be those that donāt require an end cā¦ read more ā
8 Dec 24 ~How to train great readers in a world of cheap words. Donāt tell them, but Iāve been lying to my Year 11s. What started as a joke is now well on its way to becoming an essential part of our daily routine. Every morning they push me further into it, and every day I desperately try to bluff my way out of it. In fact, itās getting to the point where Iām starting to believe it myself. The lie? That Iāve read and meā¦ read more ā
29 Sep 24 ~The simplest question is always the best Itās been nearly two years since I started fiddling with LLMs. In many ways, theyāre the perfect technology to tinker with: zero up-front cost, straight-forward documentation, with plaintext input and output. As with most overhyped start-ups, my tinkering has largely been in the form of writing fancy wrappers around an API. Iāve tested out a few - some sillā¦ read more ā
28 Sep 24 ~An exercise in pettiness, podcasts and programming. A boy needs his bongs I love the BBC. But I do not love BBC Sounds. It is clunky, it lacks automatic downloads, and it has an unbearable habit of advertising the podcast you are listening to during said podcast, with a bonus reminder that you can listen to the podcast on the app you are currently using. As more and more BBC programmes vanish from open podcaā¦ read more ā
30 Jun 24 ~When it comes to using LLMs, educators need to lead by example. The temptation to ājust get ChatGPT to do itā is as strong for teachers as it is for students. So should we be surprised when pupils reach for the AI to finish their homework, when we do the same with our paperwork? The end of term is always a rush, with exams to mark, units to finish, reports to write. That last bullet-point on the To-Do list is often the ā¦ read more ā
1 Mar 24 ~Let the writing do the talking No matter how often you do it, starting the process of writing is agonising. It is slow and full of false starts. Not because we donāt know what to write, but because we could write anything. The blank page is infinite, without footholds or signposts. So we start doodling in the margins. Death to .docxš Children are most susceptible to this trap. Students wā¦ read more ā
22 May 23 ~And Humanities will be for pudding. TL;DR: The Times has been good enough to publish my letter on this topic - so just read that if you want. Otherwise: given the infinite space afforded by a personal blog, I thought it worth elaborating my thinking here. Given all the problems faced by British head teachers - the yawning gulf between pay and inflation, opaque inspection frameworks, craterā¦ read more ā
13 May 23 ~Youāre Bard, sunshine. We canāt control the tides, but we can at least stop our students playing on the sandbars It seems incredible to say now, but I once received lessons in How To Google. And yesterday, Google rang the death-knell for that way of traditional searching. Friday was Googleās annual I/O conference. Between the perennial updates to mobiles and tablets was arguably ā¦ read more ā
4 May 23 ~Learning the hard way, failing the right way A trial by ordeal This website is a place about learning and a place for learning: as the playground page testifies, this is as much a learning experience for me as it is a resource for anyone else. Based on my previous musings, Iāve tried to put the principle into practice. Allow me to introduce my latest experiment in GPT and JS: What Am I Doing Wrong? Sā¦ read more ā
26 Apr 23 ~If the robots can do it better, why bother learning at all? Less ārearranging the deckchairsā and more āputting on your white tie, sitting down in the flooded dining room and wondering if thereāll be scallops to start.ā You canāt move for the doom-laden coding headlines at the moment: The layoffs are here for those who chose to ālearn to codeā Meta layoffs show how coding jobs are no longer safe Will A.I. Steal Allā¦ read more ā
18 Apr 23 ~You have to start somewhere. As it says on the tin: Iām a teacher. Itās an incredible career, and one Iām proud to be part of. But a niggling feeling started to at the back of my mind a few months ago. Teachers donāt do much learning. Thatās perhaps unfair - hardly anyone, really, does much learning past the age of 25. I donāt mean in the self-knowledge, incremental gains kind of way; ā¦ read more ā
20 May 20 ~Rebuilding routines will be the hardest and most important job of schools after the pandemic. In the aftermath of the 2011 Christchurch earthquake, schools in the city faced an unthinkable challenge: how do you return to normal? 15,000 pupils had been wrenched from their usual routines overnight - how do you bring them back? Kiwi educators recognised that ā above everything ā school provides āa calm space,ā essential after a traumatic crisis. That tā¦ read more ā