I am a dad, and as a dad I watch a lot of kids TV. Some shows I think are actually pretty great (Hey Duggee, Bluey), and some shows are fine, not my thing, but inoffensive (Fireman Sam, Chuggington, Octonauts). There is, however, one show that I just really hate. Paw Patrol. It’s bad. Caveats Before we dive into all the reasons Paw Patrol is the worst, I want to lay out a few caveats. Read more

By now I’m sure everyone has seen enthusiastic AI boosters being completely wowed by ChatGPT and other Large Language Models (LLM) and also AI detractors pointing out the flaws of these models. For example, here’s a big compilation of such LLM failures. I think I’m probably more on the critical side, but I think a lot of the criticisms fall flat. Or better, the examples are failures, but the conclusions people draw on the basis of those failures are flawed. Read more

The problem Python has a Counter object – it’s found in the collections module – and I’ve become convinced that it’s… a bit weird? The basic idea is fine: it’s a dictionary but the keys are things you want to count, and the values are the amount of the thing you have counted. The neat thing is if you initialise a counter with an iterable like a string or a list, it’ll give you the counts for the number of times each element appears. Read more

I had this idea for a project I could do, but I thought “maybe I should do this other thing first to get to grips with the API”. I was doing something for that project, and got distracted doing a simpler project to learn about the technologies and tools involved. I got distracted from that project by some weird behaviour of a class in the python standard library (I’ll post about that later). Read more

In a previous post I said I would come back to explain a few somewhat opaque lines in my matrix-based solution to Advent of Code 2022, day 2. This is what I’m going to do here. There’s three smallish things I thought it was worth pointing out. None is going to surprise veteran python coders, but they might be of interest to some. Building matrices So the first line I want to look at is: Read more