Robin Linacre

Lead developer of Splink. Data scientist at Ministry of Justice. Trustee, GiveDirectly UK. Pledgee, All views my own.

[Robin Linacre @RobinLinacre]

Pleased to announce the release of Splink version 4.0.0 today. It's now:

👩‍🔬 Easier to use
🚀 Faster
⚡ More scalable
🛠️ Easier to improve

For the uninitiated, Splink is a free library for record linkage and deduplication at scale

See 🧵 for links and more
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[Rohan Varma @TheRohanVarma]

We just launched Sites into Codex!

Software creation was always about more than writing code. Sites in Codex fundamentally gives the power of end-to-end software creation to every user, no matter their technical fluency.

These Sites are fully deployed to a URL, private to workspaces, come with authentication, can have static files, and can store dynamic data in databases.

It is in preview for business and enterprise teams and will be rolling out to all workspaces over the next day. Give it a try by typing @ Sites into Codex and ask it to build anything!

This project took a massive amount of effort across hundreds of people at OpenAI - proud that we were able to get this out and excited to see what you all build with it!

[Robin Linacre @RobinLinacre]

For those having to adjust to the new pricing in VS Code Copilot, here's an interactive chart showing (roughly) the relative usage-based cost of different models
https://t.co/PolRufDyCk

[Robin Linacre @RobinLinacre]

Vocab annihilation, a kids' game for learning new words
https://t.co/TEG23hTG2G

[Robin Linacre @RobinLinacre]

https://t.co/GNPN7YrsKN

[Robin Linacre @RobinLinacre]

New blog: Optimising DuckDB performance on large EC2 instances. A few simple changes can make workloads run multiple times faster:
- Fewer threads can result in higher performance
- Pay careful attention to disk I/O
- Experiment with how to write data to S3
Link in 🧵

[Robin Linacre @RobinLinacre]

@thsottiaux Very simple, but it's amazing to be able to create on-demand tools for helping kids learn maths:
https://t.co/iwm2YruW36

[Robin Linacre @RobinLinacre]

@thsottiaux I want the phone app to be able to stream the contents of the browser from the desktop machine, so rather than just sending screenshots of what I'm working on, I can interactive with the live app on my phone

[Robin Linacre @RobinLinacre]

@MathCurmudgeon @mrbartonmaths Also interesting: give the image to ChatGPT and it immediately identifies the error.

[Robin Linacre @RobinLinacre]

@MathCurmudgeon @mrbartonmaths You're right and that is fascinating. I had kindof assumed that the Desmos version (which I found online) would be easier to get right because the constraints would be easier to specify/harder to get wrong. An interesting lesson into likelihood of human error vs hallucination

[Robin Linacre @RobinLinacre]

@mrbartonmaths Aware of https://t.co/vTXGXRI2rL but when I fiddled with this a year or so ago, it wasn't anywhere near as easy as I hoped. So much potential though

[Robin Linacre @RobinLinacre]

@mrbartonmaths Interesting! Shame Desmos doesn't (yet?) have a decent LLM interface since they've done such a good job making the building blocks to make this kind of thing. e.g. feels like it should become easy to make new things similar to this:
https://t.co/fvG3t243zP

[Robin Linacre @RobinLinacre]

@reach_vb Number lanes, a lane crossing game that forces your kid to do maths! Aligned to UK primary school curriculum.

Play here (desktop only):
https://t.co/JeeP03XnR9

[Robin Linacre @RobinLinacre]

(desktop only)

[Robin Linacre @RobinLinacre]

Continuing on my search for good game mechanics for maths games for kids. This one is a lane crossing game:

https://t.co/JeeP03XnR9

This seems to work well because it's fun (at least accordingly to my 7yo), but there's no time pressure to answer the questions.

[Robin Linacre @RobinLinacre]

@AlKingsley_Edu good example of what one person can do in a few days work with AI assistance

[Robin Linacre @RobinLinacre]

Introducing letterpaths 1.0, free software for teaching cursive writing. Blog w/ examples, videos + worksheet generator:
https://t.co/FP7dw9ha4X
As far as I can tell, this is the best free and open source library for building handwriting tools according the the UK curriculum

[Robin Linacre @RobinLinacre]

@umesh_ai Even if you ask it to number them

create an image of a pizza split into exactly 10 equal pieces, with spaces between them, top down that can be used to help a child learn about fractions, each slice should be numbered 1-10

[Robin Linacre @RobinLinacre]

@umesh_ai Although it still can't do one of my favourite test prompts: "create an image of a pizza split into exactly 10 equal pieces, with spaces between them, top down that can be used to help a child learn about fractions"

[Analysis Function @gov_analysis]

During week 2 of AiG Month, you can look forward to:

🔗 "Splink and uk_address_matcher" @MoJGovUK
💷 "Investment for growth - a practitioner's perspective" AiG Award winner Eva Grace
🤖 "Laurium and AI" @MoJGovUK @GORS_UK

🎟 Book now 👉 https://t.co/9CVilaZV8E