Viewing profile — RobinL

https://rupertlinacre.com/arithmetic_annihilation/ A mental arithmetic tower defence game for kids. Now with head to head/two player. Code: https://github.com/RupertLinacre/arithme…

Incentives are important for allocative efficiency, whether that be the price of a banana or the incentive to do a job that pays more. Of course, they're imperfect and there are so…

Yes - it's certainly the case at the moment that you can run a few thousand through the LLM at a reasonable price, but not, say, ten million. But the rate of progress suggests to m…

One example: I've been working for a couple years (not full time) on a high performance FOSS address matcher: https://github.com/moj-analytical-services/uk_address_matche... Until …

Having recently read Wilson's translation, I was immediately put off at the introduction and leapt to the conclusion it was bad. It just doesn't sound anywhere near as good to my e…

I've often felt my job as a programmer has often been to automate myself (and others) out of my job. But I've always felt in control of that. I suppose there's some cosmic justice …

Love this Sem. Will provide a great alternative to the SQL based connected components algorithm we ship in Splink. Looking forward to testing how much faster it is. Thanks for your…

There's also a pseudocolumn called rowid that's worth knowing about for similar purposes but on duckdb tables: https://duckdb.org/docs/lts/sql/statements/select#:~:text=Ro...

By that logic someone working in a care home is worth less than someone building a gambling app. There's little relationship between salary and what people deserve, it's mostly jus…

I see it more as a way for relatively well off people to do a little bit for the environment rather than any sort of solution of high energy prices for the poor. The nice thing, of…

Does using chat in the new codex app use up your allowance? Any indication openai are moving to a model where al usage is metered?

Same, no Sol (i'm on plus)

It works fairly well empirically: my 7yo likes to watch trains and we regularly use this map to know when to expect one to pass. Not perfect, but pretty good

I wrote a blog post a while back to address this question here: https://www.robinlinacre.com/recommend_duckdb/

I get them occasionally - maybe every couple of months or so - and I have nothing like that sort of following. But I do have a 'say thanks' page on my blog rather than the more usu…

Nice, I recently found something like this was possible too. Gpt-5.5 one shotted the basic game, but then I added some ai generated graphics/sounds/music and asked it to write then…

Yes, but it's important to note that just because a lot of aid is ineffective doesn't mean it all is. If you want to give to very poor people and be confident most (85%+) actually …

$20 chatgpt pro plan gives pretty generous usage both of codex, general chat

Interesting. I don't have to use PowerPoint much, but I hate it when I do. I don't want the llm to write the words but I do want it to make things look nice. So does this work well…

I'm been impressed when testing this model today, but it still can't consistently adhere to the following prompt: make me an image of a pizza split into 10 equal slices with space …

Please retain vega lite speech as an option! It's incredible useful because you can tweak the chart or change it completely at a later date using e.g. the vega lite editor.

Thanks, interesting. Does this make it more surprising that the other benchmarks have improved? I'm not sure I understand the benchmarks well enough - but I'm wondering whether wit…