Weeknotes: Week 10- Q1 - 2025
Well, it took less than two months for me to miss a week or maybe two. But here we are again dear reader and what a busy week it’s been.
Monday/Tuesday this week I did the 1000+ kilometre round trip to Dubbo from home to speak to a group of farm business owners about AI. I can’t share too much about what went on as the set up was quite interesting and all took place under Chatham house rules. Essentially, a group of successful, farm business owners get together to share best practice, their activities and their numbers. Then they agree between themselves on areas of their business they are going to improve before they next meet, thus holding each other accountable. It’s an interesting opening of the kimono and not a structure for sharing I have been involved with before so super interesting all around. There were a couple of things that stood out to me though. Firstly is how lonely and isolated some farmers are, even the ones who run large scale operations with plenty of help. The second is how many farmers (at least in this small sample) invest in or are heavily involved in the mining of crypto. When you hear the reasoning/economics behind it, it’s hard to argue with them.
Wednesday I was up at 4.30 to drop my son off for his school camp. Just what I needed after driving for u hours the day before but it was great to see him off with all his friends. I was quite jealous. I could do with some time out to sleep under the stars. He got lucky with the weather. The rest of Wednesday was mainly catching up on emails and other admin.
On Thursday I kicked off a couple of new projects. One I can’t talk about yet but the other is with an Australian ag data startup called Pairtree. They aggregate data from lots of different providers and bring it together in a single dashboard. Late last year they launched a new product called pipes which is their api. The developer experience is a little squiff at the moment so I’m going to help them work through that. It should be good fun. I have lots of ideas for how we can improve it and I think it going to challenge them and their product which is always a fun position to be in.
Friday I spent much king about I king the tires of a few of the new model releases. I put the new OCR model from Mistral and Google’s new embedding model through their paces. It’s amazing how far OCR technology has come. It was only a few years ago that I looked into digitising all the cattle movement documents (NVDs) that farmers hand write and then digitise for submission to MLA. At the time it was going to cost hundreds of thousands of dollars to achieve. Now I think it would cost a couple of hundred with much better results. It really is a great time to be in computer science/software engineering.