We were fortunate to spend the end of August in the beautiful northeast of Italy, walking in the Dolomites. The scenery is breathtaking, with the sheer light grey peaks (ancient coral reefs), dominating the deep valleys. We spent the days hiking the innumerable trails (staying in Ortesei and Cortina d’Ampezzo) and the evenings sampling the regional food and drink. Put it this way, despite 20K+ steps per day in 30+ degree centigrade heat, I didn’t lose any weight!
Continue reading “Hiking in the Dolomites”
In this article I introduce the nascent field of Text-Oriented Programming (TOP), commonly used when building applications that use Large Language Models (LLMs). TOP poses new challenges for application design, DevOps, robustness and security.
This article is informed by my hands-on experience building Finchbot, an application that converts natural language text to a symbolic domain model.
Continue reading “Text-Oriented Programming”
Obligations — they obligate an entity to perform an action. In the context of law and contracts a party to a contract has an obligation under the terms of the contract. Violation of the terms of the contract typically incurs penalties.
In this article I sketch out a path from zero contract management, to real-time visibility into your obligations.
Continue reading “Obligations and Obligation Management”
The rows of white lines is the Hornsea One or Hornsea 2 facility.
Next time you fly into Gatwick from Northern Europe take a look out of window about 30 mins before landing; you may well see one of the UK’s offshore wind facilities. The scale of these is something to behold! Row upon row of (almost) free, (almost) clean energy, with all this impressive generation capacity built up over the past 20 years.
Continue reading “UK Offshore Wind”
Imagine you are setting up a book shop. You will primarily sell a selection of books, but to diversify your revenue streams you will also sell board games, coffee and greeting cards. How should you organise your store so that your customers can find your products?
Continue reading “Tips for Concept Organisation”
Just winding up five days of self-guided kayaking with my daughter in the Saint Anna and Gryt archipelagos in Sweden. The gear for the trip, as well as pickup and drop-off from Norrköping, was admirably organised by Do The North — the kit was excellent, and Thomas, Rob, Helena and crew did a fantastic job of making us feel safe and welcome in their beautiful region.
Continue reading “Kayaking in Saint Anna and Gryt Archipelagos”
Developers have an obsession with maps or dictionaries. Adding a map to an entity makes it “extensible”, in as far as arbitrary keys and values can now be associated with the entity, or so they think.
Continue reading “Maps Considered Harmful”
In this article I compare symbolic AI and Large Language Model based processing purely from a cost perspective. A basic analysis shows that if you are processing less than 1 transaction per minute, you may well be better off (financially at least) using LLM. In addition I expect cost economics to shift radically over the coming years, as specialised LLM hardware is developed and LLM market competition increases.
Continue reading “Symbolic AI vs LLM: Cost Comparison”
Yesterday I attended the “Computable Contracts: In Theory and In Practice” workshop at the Universidade do Minho Law School, sponsored by Singapore Management University and Stanford Center for Legal Informatics (CodeX). Thank you to the organisers!
Continue reading “ICAIL 2023: Computable Contracts Workshop”
Innovation That Matters 