Richard Astbury's Blog

What happens if you give Alexa a modern AI agent?

An experiment in AI-assisted theoretical physics A note on how this was made This project began as a question: what happens if you point a generative AI at one of the hardest unsolved problems in fundamental physics?

The Spark: From Conversation to Code It started with a simple question: “What if we could find planets that others have missed?”

Today I decided to test Microsoft Copilot Researcher’s problem-solving capabilities by asking it to solve today’s Wordle puzzle.

I thought it would be fun to ask these LLMs to create a self portrait of themselves.

In this blog post, we will explore the various Microsoft tooling options available for application modernisation.

In the middle of 2023 I was left at home for a week while my wife and kids went abroad.

Most of the GenAI use cases we see are the ‘copilot’ experiences, with a chat assistant helping a user to complete a task.

An AI generated image of “constructing a large language model”.

The ChatGPT interface is much more flexible than the chat, text generation and summarisation examples often cited.

GitHub Copilot Tips and Tricks Enable/Disable Specific Languages in VSCode In VSCode you can enable and disable specific languages by adding the following to your settings.json file: "github.copilot.enable": { "*": true, "plai…

History In the early days of Azure (circa 2008) the only compute option was PaaS (Platform as a Service) in the form of Web Roles and Worker Roles.

FTP vs SFTP FTP (or File Transfer Protocol) is a protocol that’s been around for 50 years, and is used for exchanging files between a client and a server.

With the advent of .NET 6, C# 10 and Orleans 4.0 (preview) it seems like a great time to take a fresh look at Microsoft Orleans (which is now included in the official Microsoft docs!).

Background I think the storage services in Azure are excellent.

TL;DR Don’t bother.

On a recent project we wanted to have high quality mapping, but completely offline.

I bought a £50 security camera off Amazon to improve security at our home.

Summary In a previous post I discussed a pattern for implementing maps in React based web applications using a pub/sub approach.

I recently worked on an internal project with a team of grads and inexperienced developers.

The Problem After implementing maps in react applications a few times, I have found that map components and react have have quite different, and largely incompatible abstractions.

I started to take JavaScript seriously in 2012 with node.js.

Azure Maps consists of a set of geospatial REST APIs and a JavaScript web map control.

Vector Tiles are an efficient way of displaying a large amount of data on a mapping control.

TL;DR I wrote a fractral viewer using Leaflet.js which renders map tiles in the browser using a pool of service workers.

On a recent family trip to Denmark we spent a day at the Lego House in Billund.

https://deveast.uk I’m one of the oragniser of Dev East.

Let’s say with have a simple table in SQL Server CREATE TABLE [dbo].

Note: This isn’t a particularly well balanced, scientific review comparing all 13” laptops on the market.

I am attempting to improve the performance of image resizing in C#.

Introduction Never has there been such a good time for C# developers wanting to develop software based on Virtual Actors.

Yesterday I was trying to learn F# by reading through the O’Reilly book and trying a few code samples.

Orleans has seen lots of improvements over the last year, in terms of the client APIs, the configuration and installation.

Continuous integration is a development practice where every commit to a repository is built and tested.

When building occasionally connected apps, we frequently want to synchronize data between client and server.

In this series of blog posts, we’re looking at how to set up a simple web app in node.

In this series of blog posts, we’re looking at how to set up a simple web app in node.

In this series of blog posts, we’re looking at how to set up a simple web app in node.

In this series of blog posts, we’re looking at how to set up a simple web app in node.

I’ve been talking to a few people lately about how I build web applications.

Setting up a Google Hangout is not obvious, here are the steps I take to create one. 1.

Introduction Orleans helps the developer with concurrency problems in a distributed system, by providing single instances of your objects running in a single thread (we call these grains).

Yesterday we had a very interesting and productive Orleans meetup, which included the Orleans product team (Sergey and Gabriel) as well as Hoop from 343 Industries.

Download the io.js binary io.js can be downloaded here : https://iojs.org/download/ You just need the iojs.exe file itself which you can get from the nightly builds, for example: https://iojs.org/download/nightly/v1.0.0-nightly2015011284fa1f8c46/win-x64/…

Thanks to Yevhen Bobrov for pointing this out.

The default grain placement behavior in Orleans is to activate grains on a random silo in the cluster.

Disclaimer, this post is opinionated, poorly researched, and really just the thoughts in my head.

I have been playing around with the Julia programming language for about a week.

I have moved my blog to GitHub.