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Not quite directly through my website, but indirectly via my newsletter, that points to my website. It happened on two occasions, the most interesting of which was on a commission to do a piece of research on data uses in a sector that wasn't directly mine back then. The person who contacted me was a subscriber and I didn't know them personally. I had written a short paragraph in my newsletter about a recent piece of data research I had carried out; something must have caught their attention as they went looking for it on my website, then contacting me saying "I'd like you to do the same thing for my organisation, can we talk?".


I have a couple of things that I have mentioned at recent job interviews and helped me get the job, but in a sideways manner. Still make me smile because I essentially did them to learn something and they kinda acquired a life of their own.

Long story short: I had a bit of a fixation with political data wrangling.

This got me two really odd personal successes (excuse the slightly blowing of my own trumpet here, for story's sake): an app [1] that takes UK Parliament debate transcripts and makes an interactive n-gram analysis, similar to Google Books N-gram viewer, which was used by Robert Peston's political show on national TV and the press in the UK (e.g. on the Financial Times [2] and the Sunday Times [3]); then I did a quasi-viral blog post that used code to calculate the average face of a British MP [4], which got me a few contracts, including one with the BBC for the same thing in the US Congress [5]

When I say sideways, what I mean is that the interesting thing is that the jobs I got when using these as examples were not hands-on data wrangling jobs (in fact, they are terribly dirty pieces of code, but that's another story). What they got me is two things: from a technical perspective, the ability to see an end-to-end process to create a product, the running of a service no matter how small for a decade, the use of cutting-edge technology; from a broader point of view, they were great to show me catching the zeitgeist, seeing stories in data, engaging with national media. Both were incredibly "catchy" stories to tell during an interview, and even when challenged (my recent employers being in the public sector) they allowed me to explain myself and my journey.

So, in summary, I love how these two one-day hacks turned into great interview stories, beyond the very minor direct income that they got me.

Aside from the ability to blow my own trumpet a little, the broader applicable lesson here is that by working on something you have a passion for, no matter how geeky it might be, you can build something simple and not necessarily super tidied up, that will however be a good prompt to discuss both your technical and non-technical skills.

I've coached a few candidates for interviews in the intervening years, especially people in tech roles, and it strikes me how often they play down their own side project, which are sometimes much way technically better than mine and with some pretty good stories around the initial motivation and use examples.

[1] https://parli-n-grams.puntofisso.net/

[2] https://www.ft.com/content/d9db05e7-bb1c-4f38-9a02-bd6b66c9c...

[3] https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/mps-are-becoming-more-loc...

[4] https://puntofisso.medium.com/i-calculated-the-average-face-...

[5] https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20171018-this-is-the-face...


I wish there was a model out there that asked me "what do you mean by 'join'" but I guess we're somewhat far from there :)


I think you’ve just quantified the difference between a text generator (LLM) and AGI.


It's hard to really understand what it must be to live through such a tragedy, so I'm not sure how relevant my suggestions will be.

But I would do three things (some of which I see mentioned in several post below):

1. download as much as you can – wikipedia, stackexchange (e.g. https://archive.org/download/stackexchange), openstreetmap; possibly, set up a local wifi router to allow others to access these and, if you keep it technical, it might be that this will enable you to get in touch with others with similar needs, which should keep you learning together as much as possible

2. if the conditions allow, try and get your hands on StarLink. Getting a dish and router might be problematic. But if you like diy and assuming you can actually sign up to it, it should be possible to self-build a connection kit using spare parts and an ordinary sat dish.

...which brings me to...

3. consider getting into ham radio. This, once again, depends on the situation in the country, and whether licensing is an option or not. But, providing you can and that you have electricity, this could get you in touch with others, who will usually be techies and may be able to also answer coding questions (although this is a willingly long stretch). And, albeit at very low speed, Internet via ham radio is itself a possibility, e.g. https://spectrum.ieee.org/build-a-longdistance-data-network-...

All the best to you, and I hope the situation improves quickly!


I reported about my own similar experience a few years back (https://puntofisso.medium.com/paypal-closed-my-account-with-...).

What's really stuck with me is that it seems that anti-fraud legislation in many countries allows PayPal and, most importantly, traditional banks to accuse a customer of fraud and close their account without having to provide the actual reason that triggered the anti-fraud checks.


What scares me is that there's very little in terms of user rights, and where entire businesses depend on it, things might get very bad very quickly.

It's not just Stripe by the way: I had my own issue with PayPal (luckily, not very serious as I only had $8 in the account): https://puntofisso.medium.com/paypal-closed-my-account-with-.... And, famously here in the UK, Richard Davey had the same with a high street bank, HSBC: https://medium.com/@photonstorm/hsbc-is-killing-my-business-....

Most of these incidents are caused by entirely misplaced anti-fraud regulation, which is based on assumptions that come from a different era in which transaction were mostly national, mostly predictable, mostly referring to a set of easy-to-understand products and services.

I wonder if what we need is to advocate for new policies and regulations with our respective national legislators.


I had a very similar experience with TripAdvisor and a hotel in Vietnam, which claimed my review was false. The really crazy part of this was that my review was positive, 4/5 stars. But they wanted 5 stars and "befriended" me on Instagram to ensure I did that. Even with all this proved and screenshotted, TripAdvisor didn't do much until I went public on social media (thread: https://twitter.com/puntofisso/status/955726203662536704) and some highly visible users piled in.

I can't trust any reviews after this. The major issue is that the review system is flawed. One odd bad review should not affect the overall standing of a business, so even assuming a review was flawed they should leave it on; if they don't, it means that the whole review framework is wrong somehow because statistically gives power where it shouldn't.


I tried this set of prompts trying to get ChatGPT generate a diet plan with close-to-impossible constraints. Its behaviour is interesting: it generates a response that ignores some of the constraints. When corrected, it admits the mistake, but then it does it again when offering a correction.


With the exception of the ones specifically instructed, ChatGPT does not seem to respond with any acknowledgement that it can't do something. I was incredibly impressed by its ability to write a web scraping script for a specific website but when it reached the limits it would just write what it imagined is the correct solution.


Indeed. The perception it gives is that it's fudging things up. I'm really interested in this because it will impact somehow the credibility it gets / the confidence it inspires in end users.


Interestingly, this is exactly how I found about Buttondown, which I've been using for years to send my own newsletter. It also helped that it was priced way more sensibly than many alternatives, in a way that grows linearly with the number of subscribers (which is also how, theoretically, ads returns from a newsletter can grow): my then provider would meet me with a massive cliff-edge, going from $0 to about $30/month, if I recall correctly. It's a common behaviour – lock in first, then charge A LOT :)

Which makes me wonder – maybe a simple, overlooked way, to start side hustles is to replicate a service, but offer better pricing that works for niche/bootstrapped contributors, as opposed to creating niche versions of the service?


What I find interesting is that such p2p comms applications return with a certain recurrence. I think one of the first was Nokia Sensor (2005?), and there was one that was famous during the Arab Spring/Hong Kong protests.


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