To use the tool, you need to know about it first | Software tools The kinds of things I describe in my post on useful tech you might not realise exist unless someone tells you.
RSVPs | You’ve probably gone to a few events in your life, and declined or ignored invitations to others.
Critiques of conferences | TL;DR: If you’re going to a conference and don’t have a very clear picture of what it going well looks like, I think you’ll probably be wasting your time.
Polite Notice | By default, I try to be polite: I think generally it’s the right thing to do, plus it’s a helpful way of developing virtue & maximising the good (two of my underlying ethical goals, with the former a heuristic for the latter).
love is embarrassing? | Some people aren’t remotely interested in dating, which makes perfect sense.
Suspending adulthood as a way to have fun | Something I noticed at the OULES New Year’s celebrations was that the people there were very good at having silly, joyous fun.
Thermostats | In machine learning, there’s the concept of “temperature”: a parameter which controls the amount of randomness that’s fed in to the model’s predictions.
Dating | I’ve been working on building a dating service for Oxford students (Oxheart) this year, but as a friend pointed out, I’m not creating a product which is precisely tailored to what I’d like to have exist.
Asking questions and drinking games | I like being listened to. And when I’m being listened to, I like to be thoughtfully vulnerable.
Losing my sense of taste | Sometimes I look back over my journal to see what is repeatedly on my mind.
PMQs | In classic Sixth Form work experience fashion, I spent a week last summer shadowing an MP.
When the front page shouldn’t be the top priority | Lots of things are important, but some are more important than others – often by orders of magnitude (for example, causes of death). One frustrating thing about the news is that the amount of column inches and airtime a topic gets seems to bear little relationship to how significant it is to the world.
I really hate Facebook | Not as a consumer; I don’t use it much. But as a business or developer, it’s absolutely infuriating. You have to share your personal login details with unknown testers They “temporarily” (for over a year) removed the ability to create test accounts, but to get through App Review you need testers to log in and try your app.
Bureaucracy | I have spent much more time tangled in Facebook over the past week than I would like. My account was suspended, then I was blocked from opening a developer profile.
Advertising | You can make advertisements for things you’re working on! Maybe this seems obvious, but on several occasions it hasn’t occurred to me that I have a lot of marketing options available, and that some would be totally worth it.
PPE | Sometimes I’m asked by people hoping to study PPE (philosophy, politics, and economics) for tips on how to do well in their applications.
This essay will… | George Orwell has a famous essay “Why I Write”, where he presents four reasons that someone might do so: sheer egoism, aesthetic enthusiasm, historical impulse, and political purpose (in his words). If you ask most undergraduates why they write their weekly essays (you can find mine here), I suspect the response will not be one of the above reasons, though.
University admissions advice | People often ask me whether I have advice about applying to Oxford for PPE.