George Thomas

I was previously the JCR Access Officer at Peterhouse, which meant I helped state schools send students to Cambridge.

“Our researchers need a GPU cluster for training and fine-tuning models.”

Today, AI agents have to pretend to be human to the websites they use.

Try it out at: geotho.github.io/link-laugh-love Sometimes, you just need to link stuff to other stuff.

Many chat bots are trained on copies of the Internet.

When was the last time you were consciously impressed by the quality of some software?

What is a system design interview?

Project overview 🐟 I spent about a year working on machine learning tooling.

Selecting a item uniformly at random from an array is quite easy: func randomPickSlice(items []string) string { i := rand.Intn(len(items)) return items[i] } How could we do this with a channel, rather than a slice?

I’ve ported my blog from Jekyll to Hugo.

Suppose you have some mapping from keys to weights and you want to pick a key at random from the map proportional to its weight.

A trend I’ve noticed among whiteboard-coding type questions is to ask questions about randomness.

I always knew integer overflow existed, but I never thought it could happen to me.

Language influences thought, and programming languages are no different.

Writing table-driven tests allows me to focus on the inputs and expected outputs of my code, rather than the boilerplate needed to make the test work.

Sometimes, I see functions that have some hardcoded parameters and some that are passed in: func NewFoo(size int) { return Foo{ Size: size, Name: "Billy", } } And the NewFoo function is used in many places.

I’ve done four internships, two at startups and two at Google.

A common complaint about whiteboard coding questions is that they do not resemble a software engineer’s day-to-day work.

One of the interesting ideas in Bostrom’s Superintelligence (a book not short on interesting ideas) is that of mindcrime.

E Unibus Pluram is David Foster Wallace’s prophetic account of TV and its effects on US fiction and society.

When my phone broke, I no longer had access to the 2FA codes stored in Google Authenticator.

Homo Deus is Yuval Harari’s follow up to the popular Sapiens.

I wrote a thing that adds camelCase JSON tags to Go structs, because this can sometimes be tedious.

One week ago, my three-year-old phone died.

Strava is a website for tracking your athletic activity.

Strava is a website for tracking your athletic activity.

People don’t like whiteboard coding interviews for a variety of reasons: they are hard; they are stressful; they are not representative of actual work; they can require very specific insight; there is no help available from an IDE, a textbook or Stack Ove…

Put the ‘unsubscribe from all emails’ button at the top of the email settings page.

In this post, I consider four different algorithms that solve the same problem.

Reading through a pull request earlier this week, I came across some code that read: function addPanel(p) { panels.push(p); if (panels.length > 0) { p.open(); } } Feeling smug, I commented that if (panels.length > 0) should be shortened to if (panel…

A Kakuro is a Japanese number puzzle with the following rules: Each row and column must add up to the number directly above or to the left of it; You can only use the numbers one to nine; Each number in the row or column must be distinct.

TL;DR: your API or library should error if it is passed parameters it does not recognise.