James Hetherington
jamespjh.bsky.social
James Hetherington
@jamespjh.bsky.social
250 followers 230 following 180 posts
Data and computers and code and people.
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Hackney, London. Newham, London. Waltham Forest, London.
I am the cowpox of grumpy professors. Work with me so it’s safe to work with the real ones.
“Places I would like to work” is also a factor.
Honestly, I was assuming most of your answers would be mostly American so was being European as a counterpoint. But no one else replied yet. So now I feel exposed.
CSCS, BSC, LRZ, EPCC, A*STAR
Ok, it didn’t quite work, but you get the point.
Hey, we invented Tulips!

That’s a flower.

Yes, we’ve been quietly growing flowers for 50 years. But now we decided to Call Them Tulips! The final flower!

Right, but it’s frustrating to ignore all the good work in growing flowers.

Yes, but you’ve gotta be Tulip ready!
Also I have loads of conferences coming up including one in the Pestilent States…
Non-sick employees are a more exploitable resource.
Double jabbed! Flu paid by UCL, covid privately. Would recommend.
Reposted by James Hetherington
Research Infrastructure Engineers (RIE's) are the technical staff who build and maintain accelerated compute clusters. RIEs are invited to join the ACIT-Hub Training CoDesign Day on Oct 28 in Edinburgh to help define the training it offers: edin.ac/43f5VHR
caPitalising rAndom letters IN the title to Form the word yoU want is not cLever - PAINFUL. #reviewing
You know when you’re reviewing grants, and it’s like meh, meh, meh, WOW THIS IS THE BEST PROPOSAL EVER WISH ID THOUGHT OF IT, meh, meh, meh.
Reposted by James Hetherington
⏳ The DisCouRSE Network+ has launched its first Flexible Fund, offering up to £10,000 to support projects that strengthen leadership training and career pathways for digital Research Technical Professionals (dRTPs).

Find out more at www.software.ac.uk/news/discour...
I agree, but also, memorisable identifiers (like what three words or the xkcd password protocol) exist and should be used in place of opaque UIDs wherever possible.
Yes, there is too much boilerplate in current languages, and natural language interfaces will have a big role to play in tools for skilled analysts.

But “computer, please use this data to show the result I want” is going to create bad stats, and bad business decisions.
Code is the most productive, reliable and expressive way of describing mathematical ideas to computers.

I have worked building GUIs for designing system models, in industry and academia.

They seem attractive at first, but users realise that *they are more productive with code* once they practice.
You cannot safely do statistics or modelling without understanding the risks of lying to yourself.

If you have the intellectual ability to do this, the code is actually easy.

If you don’t, you will harm your company by trying.
Let’s just go over again why low/no code platforms for data analytics and computational modelling are Wrong.

I do this because I’ve just seen another advert for a tool “so all your colleagues can get insight from data regardless of technical ability”, and I need to call bullshit again. 1/N
“The sorry identifier magically produces a proof of anything, or provides an object of any data type at all.” lean-lang.org/theorem_prov...
Propositions and Proofs
lean-lang.org
Fermats margin proof was ‘sorry’ : #Lean4
What is the fractal dimension of the Jagged Frontier?
For advanced knowledge workers, there’s an assumption the job is 10% explicit learning, (self taught, conferences and formal courses), 20% on job learning, 20% faff, meetings and admin, and 50% productive.

This will change. Maybe 75% explicit learning, 5% faff and 20% productivity time.