Is the song I was listening to on my after dinner walk, sticking with Radiohead's discography for no real reason. I walked from the hotel down to Cockle Bay. The day of Connecting had gone well. I wore a button up shirt, drank a lot of coffee, provided strategic insights into AI capabilities for agentic organisations, and enjoyed the view.

The morning's sunrise had not been magnificent. Grey clouds ironically desaturated any colour.

The original dinner plans also failed to manifest, and instead a bottle of wine and Lebanese food was consumed with colleagues instead. It was pleasant to Connect with my team members somewhere with a nice evening vibe.

Sitting around drinking coffee is not a good way to reach your step goal, so the after dinner walk was required. I chose Darling Harbour as my destination in part because I thought maybe there would be a late cancellation freeing up a seat at the IMAX and I would catch a late night showing of The Odyssey. Perhaps this would manifest like my birthday breakfast. That's when I remembered that book from the 90s called The Secret which suggested that you could will things into happening by buying a book. The IMAX wasn't even showing The Odyssey.

Instead of a movie, I sat looking at the buildings and their reflections on the water while that song in the title played. It did not feel apt. It felt like everything was in A place, not necessarily right or wrong, but I did appreciate seeing my current customer's logo on their skyscraper, gleaming off the mirror of the bay. That company was the reason I was sitting there eating an ice-cream.

This necessitated further stepping.

In the gym about 10 days ago I asked Gemini what time sunrise was going to be in Sydney on August 25th.

"6:22 am" was the answer. And thus the vision for my birthday morning was shaped.

I already knew that I would be waking up in a nice hotel room with an opera house view. Seeing that at sunrise would be nice, I could do my morning stretches, and the early start would give me enough time for a long walk, breakfast somewhere nice, before arriving at the office.

The weather forecast was for 10mm of rain, but I was determined to manifest a dry morning to facilitate the walking.

I arrived in Sydney on Monday evening, and didn't delay much before attending my favourite Sydney institution - the Lord Nelson.

I enjoyed a chicken curry and a proper sized pint of British pale ale, before walking along Barangaroo to get some frozen yoghurt.

I was tempted to have a second pint, but I restrained myself as the work trip was going to be demanding. Perhaps this was a sign of maturity as I turn forty-two. Instead, I went to bed early and set my alarm for 6am, then I bumped it to 6:07 for lols.

I woke in the morning in time for a nice sunrise.

In Sydney, an Opera House view is technically the same as a freeway view. And by the same strokes, a walk across Sydney Harbour is the same as a walk along the shoulder of a motorway.

The weather was nice though. It was raining in Adelaide. I reached Milsons Point and Lavender Bay.

The cafe I believed I was going to seemed a little more like a takeaway shop than a cosy breakfast spot with a pleasant outlook, but only a few metres away I discovered another spot that had its own beer garden and even a view of the harbour. Sort of.

The big breakfast was great too. It really did feel like I had manifested the best possible morning for a birthday on a work trip. I returned back via the waterfront, listening to 90s Radiohead. As I recrossed the Harbour Bridge an ibis flapped across the sky.

I made it to the office by 9am. The eye candy from the windows of the office puts my hotel room to shame. Even if grey clouds and a bit of rain did arrive through the morning. I enjoyed multiple free coffees (including my introduction to the new coffee variety: The Magic. "Two magics please, one extra hot" - the barista did not blink), caught up with colleagues, generated a nice flow diagram, and generally did work on my birthday. At the end of the day I was invited to a function upstairs and enjoyed a free beer as the sun set.

For dinner I attended the local pub quiz solo. I was hoping to manifest a victory there, but after I got the first three questions wrong - all 50/50s - I knew my manifesting was probably dried up for the year.

Today I was called both Bret and Bard.

I wonder if AI can extract and index all my old spam group chat emails from that outlook file I've backed up somewhere and give me insights on my twenties.

I caught the train into town today for work.

I like being on a train, staring out the window without having to steer or control anything. This is what I suspect dying will be like. A sleepy little tour of my life. There's my old house from 2014. There's the station I used to wait to catch the train from in 2015. There's the cafe I used to stroll to with Nash in 2021. There's the bridge I used to walk across and have to turn my headphone volume up as the train went by in 2024.

I guess I have been alive for long enough in the same place that now trips to town on the train feel like a machine learning exercise. One of many hundreds of runs where I go through my day in Adelaide and I can picture a thousand Brads going off in different directions after leaving the concourse. Off to Pinky Flat with my drink bottle for primary school something or other. Into government house's gardens to accept my IT award. Into the SA Museum courtyard to catch a Triple J broadcast. Into many office buildings. Into the same dentist chair a couple of times.

At lunchtime it was a bit drizzly but also a bit sunny in the way September can be and I walked through the Botanic Gardens where I have been many times over my years and never got sick of. I saw a lot of flowers.

I don't get free coffees in the office any more. I mean, I do, I just have to press a button on a machine myself now instead of going down to the cafe and claiming them. Apparently I also need to clean out the grounds tray when it's full. That is something I have absolutely no problem with, but is hard when you haven't had to disassemble the machine before and you don't want to tug anything too hard and break something before you get coffee out of it. Luckily the coffee machine is in a kitchen shared with other tenants and a small startup person saw me struggling and helped me out - probably thinking at the same time how these poor tech giant employees can't even change the coffee grounds tray.

Well I guess today was machine learning.

I also learned that lavender can be white!

AI is a long way from taking over our jobs but it’s not a long way from everyone getting fired.

That’s my opinion at the end of 2024 after learning, absorbing and trying to surf the wave of Artificial Intelligence, which is what society is collectively referring to generative AI as for the last two years.

My cynicism about AI stems from my interest in it, understanding how large language models function, and experiencing the limitations on a daily basis. I can also see the huge potential that AI offers to be able to automate so much of what I and others do in our work which is both exciting or terrifying, depending on how you feel about human nature and greed.

I’m hedging my bets, by ensuring that I know how technology works and trying to stay one step ahead of it. If only I’d tried this with blockchain in 2009...

So I do a lot of development with AI tools like Cursor and models that are good at development. It’s super effective. I’ve been able to build a lot of software in 2024 with AI assistance and what’s more I’ve been able to do that in any framework or technology that I need to because I need to know less about the code and more about the principles of how software and hardware works. By doing this I have learned a lot about how to work with AI programming tools. Like, how to write prompts, what content to provide as input, and most importantly how to get out of the holes that so frequently happen when using AI tools that can’t overcome a bug.

Cursor recently rolled out “Agentic” abilities, which makes my life even easier because now it can do things like OpenSSL commands and Git statements and I can give it full control over a code base. This was helpful for a recent task I had which was to enable some additional security features on an existing Spring Boot app that runs in a docker container. This was for a development use case at work, so there was no harm in forking the app and letting the tool go as hard as it needed to to implement the SSL connectivity I wanted between components of the application. I took this step because after a day of trying myself, I couldn’t solve it. I’m not comfortable with Spring Boot and so much of my recent programming has been in python, JavaScript and other languages (yes, PHP) and I wanted a quick solution, not to spend a week learning a Java framework.

And boy did Cursor struggle with implementing SSL in the way I needed it to. In “Agentic” mode, it would go off editing multiple files and then the app would either fail to compile, fail to start, or throw a runtime error. We went through many, many iterations of trying to diagnose the issues until my workflow devolved into:

1. Cursor makes changes and the app fails to package/start/run
2. I paste the error into the chat window
3. Repeat

I admit, I got lazy, and I stopped trying to diagnose the root cause myself. I had nothing to lose, other than my time, so I kept up this cycle. However, there were a couple of times that I asked it to reflect upon what we had already tried and what we were trying to do in order to prevent it from getting into a loop, or from trying creative solutions that would not work outside a development environment.

And to my surprise, it actually got there. I got trusted SSL connectivity between two components of the application, without errors, and without relying on any hacks. Then I got the AI to remove all the extra crap it had left that was no longer necessary. Then I got it to compare the original code with the current commit and asked it to add a section to the README that explained the changes. It was pretty good at that.

I felt a sense of accomplishment at the end of today, with my functioning and secure application, that I had browbeaten an AI assistant into making work. Because this is the future. I still don’t understand Spring Boot very much. But I understand the changes, and I understand how I could make an AI do something like this again! So I’m not any smarter, but I am more skilled. Which is a good thing, because I want to implement OpenID Connect on the server’s API tomorrow.

I spent more time than I wanted to today trying to configure a TLS listener for a queue manager on a remote MQ server. This was in part because I had to teach myself some concepts around Docker and IBM along the way. I got there in the end, and my listener presented its certificate.

When I went to cook dinner I found I'd momentarily forgotten the ratio of water to rice to use when cooking basmati following the absorption method.

Considering all the effort I put into passing my latest work certification, I can't believe I missed preselecting the playlist for after I passed the exam.