Jonathan Dowland: Lanzarote

I want to get back into the habit of blogging, but I’ve struggled.
I’ve had several ideas of topics to try and write about, but I’ve
not managed to put aside the time to do it. I thought I’d try and
bash out a one-take, stream-of-conciousness-style post now, to get
back into the swing.

I’m writing from the lounge of my hotel room in Lanzarote, where
my family have gone for the School break. The weather at home has
been pretty awful this year, and this week is traditionally quite
miserable at the best of times. It’s been dry with highs of around
25℃ .

It’s been an unusual holiday in one respect: one of my kids is
struggling with Autistic Burnout. We were really unsure whether
taking her was a good idea: and certainly towards the beginning
of the holiday felt we may have made a mistake. Writing now, at
the end, I’m not so sure. But we’re very unlikely to have anything
resembling a traditional summer holiday for the foreseeable.

Managing Autistic Burnout and the UK ways the UK healthcare and
education systems manage it (or fail to) has been a huge part of my
recent life. Perhaps I should write more about that. This coming
week the government are likely to publish plans for reforming
Special Needs support in
Education.
Like many other parents, we wait in hope and fear to see what they
plan.

In anticipation of spending a lot of time in the hotel room with my
preoccupied daughter I (unusually) packed a laptop and set
myself a nerd-task: writing a Pandoc parser
(“reader”) for the MoinMoin Wiki markup
language. There’s some unfinished prior art from around
2011 by Simon Michael
(of hledger) to work from.

The motivation was our plan to migrate the Debian Wiki away from
MoinMoin. We’ve
since decided to approach that
differently
but I might finish the Reader anyway, it’s been an interesting
project (and a nice excuse to write Haskell) and it will be useful for others.

Unusually (for me) I’ve not been reading fiction on this trip: I
took with me Human Compatible by Prof Stuart
Russell:
discussing how to solve the problem of controlling a future
Artificial Intelligence. I’ve largely avoided the LLM hype cycle
we’re suffering through at the moment, and I have several big
concerns about it (moral, legal, etc.), and felt it was time to try
and make my concerns more well-formed and test them. This book has
been a big help in doing so, although it doesn’t touch on the issue
of copyright, which is something I am particularly interested in at
the moment.