Hello! Below are rough, in-progress notes, published as they come. For my longer, more considered writing, head over to Writing.
On a nautical chart, not all of the sea is known equally well. Some of it was surveyed last year by multibeam sonar; some was last sounded by a weighted line over the side of a boat in 1880. So charts carry a Zone of Confidence: a ladder of stars on each patch of water, six for "fully surveyed, trust it" down to a bare U for "nobody has checked."
Quietly brilliant: the confidence is drawn straight onto the data. No methodology section, no footnote about survey vintage. You glance and you can see which parts to trust, compressed into an icon a tired navigator can read at three in the morning.
The UK is getting more comfortable with automated decisions. The Data (Use and Access) Act swapped the old near-ban for "fine, with safeguards and meaningful human review", and the ICO has spelled out what that looks like in recruitment. The human in the loop has to be real, able to actually overturn the call.
Read more →We worry that AI just remixes what already exists. Bob Dylan said exactly the same thing about himself.
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