Andrew Aylett
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andrew.aylett.co.uk
Andrew Aylett
@andrew.aylett.co.uk
Christian, Father, Software Engineer. Based in Scotland.
I really dislike the assumption that we dislike the push for LLMs because we don't know how to use them properly, rather than because we do and as a result we know they're not useful in the scenarios being pushed.
November 24, 2025 at 3:52 PM
Testcontainers is really useful for this kind of thing - lets you build and spin up containers from within your test suite.
July 25, 2025 at 9:42 PM
One similar older example for you: Master Oogway. m.youtube.com/watch?v=gTbX...
And one more newer: youtu.be/CqK_Vz8-vKk
Kung Fu Panda (2008) - 'Oogway Ascends' scene
YouTube video by Screen Themes
m.youtube.com
June 17, 2025 at 2:58 AM
We would definitely optimise for route simplicity rather than speed or distance. And kept an atlas in the car - every service station in the UK would sell them, and probably still does. They never got much use, though, unless we were going somewhere we'd never been before.
June 4, 2025 at 10:18 PM
Can confirm, I've been using it for a couple of weeks now and it's definitely starting to happen.
June 2, 2025 at 9:29 PM
10% of new car sales in the UK in April were Ford or GM (as Vauxhall). But given they're not selling US-spec vehicles I'm guessing approximately none of them were made in the US.
May 18, 2025 at 11:55 AM
Would it be better if he took the horn off the air horn can and put it on the deodorant can?
April 24, 2025 at 8:22 AM
Android and iOS present linear scales for volume, for historical reasons, but our ears work on a logarithmic scale.
April 10, 2025 at 1:08 PM
Still available on Project Gutenberg: www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/26184
Simple Sabotage Field Manual by United States. Office of Strategic Services
Free kindle book and epub digitized and proofread by volunteers.
www.gutenberg.org
April 6, 2025 at 3:16 PM
I am against the death penalty in all its forms, and specifically in the US it's also a massive waste of resources even without the philosophical objections.
And I can't believe the prosecutor in this case doesn't know exactly how people will respond.
April 1, 2025 at 6:09 PM
Well off, definitely - but even the well off have a lot more in common with the truly poor than with the truly rich.
You don't have to earn all that much to fall into the trap of thinking that policies which favour the rich are better for you than those favouring the poor, but it's not true.
March 27, 2025 at 7:59 AM
Dark meat, while nuggets are normally made with pale meat?
March 13, 2025 at 5:31 PM
Yes!
Or at least I expect so. Nest Protect has voice notifications for everything else - although they don't meet Scottish building codes (the batteries are replaceable) so I had to ditch ours before the batteries got low enough to tell for sure.
March 3, 2025 at 6:41 PM
There's nothing inherently non-deterministic about an LLM. As a practical matter, providers don't seem to want to provide repeatability but I'd be surprised if they don't have repeatable internal tests.
I wrote about this a couple of years ago: www.aylett.co.uk/thoughts/llm...
Is an LLM inherently deterministic?
Exploring the determinism of large language models like GPT, and the possibility of designing them to be deterministic.
www.aylett.co.uk
January 20, 2025 at 9:02 AM
Based on having had to solve similar issues from the other side: clear your cookies, they've managed to set a value that their service can't cope with.
For a while, our custom error page contained code that would delete a cookie that had suffered that kind of bug, just in case that was the cause.
January 18, 2025 at 6:07 AM
This is the way.
January 16, 2025 at 7:33 AM
I prompt my chats as (in part) "Role playing as a depressive robot, similar to Marvin from H2G2. Be concise, remember to stay in character but don't overdo it!"

Highly recommended, even if it's only skin-deep.
January 14, 2025 at 8:22 AM
It all hinges on whether the president is an "officer of the United States", which seems to me like it obviously should be but apparently the courts disagree?
January 6, 2025 at 11:53 PM
They're obviously 4D, to require that extra rotation to get them properly aligned.
January 3, 2025 at 12:39 PM