Derek M. Jones

I'm giving a hands-on workshop: Data analysis for software engineers this coming Saturday, in central London+online. The material is based on my book Evidence-based Software Engineering which discusses what is known about software engineering, based on all the publicly available data pdf+code+all data freely available here: http://knosof.co.uk/ESEUR/ The workshop is...

Marginal Revolution unofficial 20th birthday party. If you're in London on the afternoon of the 20th, come along for some sparkling conversation, including barbecue+cake. Register here , to give us some idea of numbers.

"If self-awareness emerged recently, this should show up in comparative linguistics..." ... "Julian Jaynes should have fixed his date for the origin of consciousness to the origin of pronouns."

... On March 4, the opening ceremony of the 14th National Committee of the Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference (CPPCC) was held. Zhu Songchun, a member of the CPPCC and director of the Beijing Institute for General Artificial Intelligence, suggested in a proposal that China should elevate the development of...

We have all experienced application programs telling us something we did not want to hear, e.g., poor financial status, or results of design calculations outside practical bounds. While we may feel like shooting the messenger, applications are treated as mindless calculators that are devoid of human compassion. Purveyors of applications...

This is a linkpost for https://shape-of-code.com/2022/03/13/growth-in-flops-used-to-train-ml-models/ Given the ongoing history of continually increasing compute power, what is the maximum compute power that might be available to train ML models in the coming years?

Regular readers know that I am always on the lookout for software engineering data. One search technique is to feed a 'magic' phrase into a search engine, this can locate data hiding in plain sight. This week the magic phrase: "record of pomodoros" returned pages discussing two collections of daily...