Ignore Previous Directions by Justin Cormack issue 1
Welcome to the first edition of my newsletter! I have been meaning to write more in public, and leaving Docker gives me the opportunity to be better organised with this. I will probably try a few experiments and see how to construct these, please give feedback!
There are a number of newsletters I really enjoy, and I will try to make this an interesting read like those are. It will have some nice pictures (I hear you like them), and it won't be so long it gets truncated by mail clients (I don't like that). If I write long form I will just link it and write a summary! If you have things you would like me to write about or that you think I would be interested in just get in touch. I will probably do a variety of different things, such as interviews and so on.
I thought the "ignore previous directions" title was appropriate as I am now free to ignore previous directions, I will write sometimes about AI, but it was also the first prompt injection attack. A precursor of today's ones like this.
Nature
It is the beginning of the wild orchid season around here, and I found these early purple orchids in a local wood.
There is a peregrine nest nearby with a live camera feed and two hungry chicks.
People
I met Ayoub Fandi for coffee in London recently. He is one of the authors of the GRC engineering manifesto https://grc.engineering/. GRC (security governance risk and compliance) is a world that has often been very disjoint from the engineering. GRC engineering has a lot of the feel of DevOps, reaching across cultures, but it is very early still.
Events
I will be at the Open Source Founders Summit in Paris next week, I am writing this from the train there. Looking forward to the enthusiasm of people there, and finding out what they are working on. There will be a lot of European startups there, which have a very different feel from American ones too, which is always interesting. I am planning to write a number of pieces about business and open source soon.
Things I have been reading
Barry Masterson, The Swiss Tree Murder "It describes how a small group of people enacted a state-sponsored war on fruit trees that destroyed not only centuries of tradition, but completely altered an entire landscape." This is you know right up there with my history and food interests, but very sad. Part 1 and part 2.
Cosma Shalizi, On Feral Library Card Catalogs "For some years now, I have been saying to anyone who'll listen that the best way to think about large language models and their kin is due to the great Alison Gopnik, and it's to regard them as cultural technologies. A specifically cultural technology is one that modifies that very process of transmission, as with writing or printing or sound recording. That is what LLMs do; they are not so much minds as a new form of information retrieval." This is the blog post of the longer paper which you may want to read as well. This argues that AI is a culture compression and retrieval tool, and is a technology like others "Markets, democracies, and bureaucracies have relied on mechanisms that generate lossy (i.e., incomplete, selective, and uninvertible) but useful representations well before the computer."
Word of the day
Muntzing is the practice and technique of reducing the components inside an electronic appliance to the minimum required for it to sufficiently function in most operating conditions, reducing design margins above minimum requirements toward zero. The term is named after the man who invented it, Earl "Madman" Muntz, a car and electronics salesman. Muntz expressed suspicion of complexity in circuit designs, and determined through simple trial and error that he could remove a significant number of electronic components from a circuit design and still end up with a TV that worked sufficiently well.