Weeknotes: Week 12 - Q1 - 2025
Hello - these week notes are turning out to be much harder to write than I thought they would be. Well at least they're harder to make interesting than I thought they would be. This is the last week of the quarter at least so next week is going to be all about review and planning for the next 12 weeks.
Busy, busy
With the first quarter nearly out of the way, the More Than Machines pipeline is nice and full again. We've got some great projects either underway or about to start that I will start to write a bit more about over the next few weeks. There are some humdingers in the mix. There's a dream data project and also a bunch of things we're doing with AI that are off the charts interesting. I can't say too much now - mostly because we haven't started but also because some of the paperwork is still going through.
Progressing Echidna
I'll go over the whole More Than Machine product stuff next week but one of the things I have been working on is our Echidna product. Echidna is the More Than Machines AI platform, it brings together the whole GenAI/ML pipeline from data curation, model training/tuning, Governance, Testing etc. through to the UI in which people interact with the models. It's taken a while to get the vision right, especially as every day there's a new approach, piece of research or best practice that didn't exist the day before. I think by this point we've rewritten the MVP about 10 times. Specifically I am hoping to finally release our LORA tuned Agronomy model. We've tuned the model on Australian agronomy data. Is it perfect not by a long way but I see it as a stake in the ground and something we can and should be talking to the Australian industries about. I'm a perfectionist and have been holding back doing anything until it is right but i've recently ahd advice that we should just get something out there - good or not. So in the next week or so I hope that's what we will do.
Solar Battery Storage
We've had one too many power outages recently and I'm now seriously starting to look at batteries again for the home/office. There's a lot of stuff going on here in Australia that's making this a worthwhile exercise again - power prices are going up, the grid around us seems to go up and down like a yo-yo and there's rumours tat we might soon get charged to feed energy into the grid (this just seems crazy to me). I haven't gone too far with this yet but expect some geeking out. The great thing is that I have a few years of data under my belt now from my solar system/inverter so it should make planning for capacity a lot easier. Hopefully the numbers all stack up. Ia l also have a crazy idea for a solar project that I am speaking to a few people about. There's a lot of unused rural KWh available for doing interesting things with. I'm still thinking a lot about some of the conversations I had in Dubbo with the folks mining crypto coins on their properties.
No images
I made a decision when I put this blog together that it was just going to be a place for words and that mucking about with images was too much hassle. I'm starting to woder about that though. There's loads of things that i want to show and staring at a blog thats just words is a bit 2000's. I'll keep thinking about it but there may be some changes if I get a few hours spare to alter templates and stuff. The other thing I want to get sorted is adding links to interesting stuff to my blog. I come across so many links (as we all do) and as Simon Willison says - it's a great way to keep a record and to share thoughts. Maybe this will come first before images.
Final thoughts
As I mentioned above - next week is quarter notes time. I've not done quarter notes before so it may be a bit of a clusterfuck. Either way it's going to be great to have a look back at the last 12 weeks and think ahead to the next 12. As always I have so many ideas. This whole reflective approach to work has had me realising that really the only thing stopping me from doing anything is me - especially my Scottish heritage and fear of spending money on anything while still managing to spend a fortune on nothing.
Laters!