[wt : 4]

As the latest in a very long line of marginal career shifts winding up in unintended places, I seem to have agreed to become module lead for the COMP0088 Introduction to Machine Learning course. This is not completely out of the blue—I am already, in some partial & impermanent fashion, counted among the UCL Computer Science teaching staff—but so far I’ve been able to get away with just doing things like project supervision and tutorials and (ugh) marking rather than actual full blown lecturing. No longer, it seems.

Obviously I am ambivalent about this; I’m ambivalent about everything. On the one hand, AAAARGH! I feel like the absolute last person who should be teaching anyone about anything. On the other, I Have Opinions about how it should be done for this subject in particular, and it seems I can no longer just smugly hold those from the sidelines but must actually put them to the test. Eek.

One consequence of the prospect of having a corpus of actual students is an inchoate but subtly nagging sense that perhaps I should have a less disreputable—and possibly even up to date—web presence, in case the little bastards google me. I don’t know whether that might take the form of a direct successor blog—WT5—or some separate work-specific thing, and of course doing nothing also remains a popular option. So for the moment I’m just noting that the question exists, and while it simmers on the back burner I might try to post a bit more often than once a year, if only to push the notably disreputable previous post off the front page. (Though in point of fact, that post is legitimately work-related in ways that may or may not be clarified soon.)

More than 10 years ago I wrote this:

It’ll be a dark day for the city if the Outer London anti-Ken contingent propel his gormless, cloth-eared, crypto-fascist mophead buffoon of an opponent into power. We’ll be a laughingstock.

Obviously true, but also: Christ, I had no fucking idea.

The thing that vexes me most about the bowel-voiding embarrassment that is our current Prime Minister—and literally everything about him is vexing—is that he, like his tartrazine twin in the White House, stands as a powerful lesson, written in letters of fire a hundred metres tall for all to see. And that lesson is:

Shitty people get rewarded for doing shitty things.

Not only that, they’re encouraged to think they deserve those rewards. Incentivised to wallow in their shittiness, to proclaim it loudly far and wide, to revel in and celebrate their utter lack of redeeming features. Being a repugnant narcissistic self-serving mendacious shitbag is a fantastic career choice, they prove by example. Sign up at Shitbag University right away! Be the shitbag you truly want to be!

The very existence of these smirking entitled pricks sullies our public discourse, debases society, pollutes the Earth. And the fact that so many people line up to give the shitbags exactly what they want, knowing full well they don’t merit it, that doing so is an abject surrender to the forces of actual evil—well, that debases us more.

I hope to live to see these particular exemplars cast down, despised and rejected and acquainted with grief, stripped of every single trapping of success their rotten hearts ever desired, crawling in the gutter, drowning in sewage, torn apart by angry mobs. But even if that eventually happens—and SPOILER ALERT it won’t—it’s too fucking late. The lesson has been taught, and you can be quite sure it’s been learned. There are plenty more shitbags where these ones came from, and hordes of eager enablers ready to fawn and cringe and grease their paths to power.

So that’s something to look forward to, eh?

Yes, some time has passed. But I’m currently doing something that entails revisiting this talk content, and that reminded me I said I’d post the slides, so here they are. As PDF, so a few animations and timing gags are missing. What can I say, you had to be there.

For context, this was a ‘briefing’ given at a workshop on the subject of AI and Future Crime, which is why it ends with suggestions of stuff ‘to consider in your groups’. Feel free not to consider anything, in groups or otherwise.

At some point I will probably post the slides from my talk a few weeks ago, which was — obviously — amazing. Albeit in some ways surprisingly similar to my last post on here from, oh dear god, more than a year ago. Tsk. But in the meantime here’s one of the fleeting throwaway jokes from it, which I’m frankly a bit prouder of than I should be…