Andrew Lynch

andrewlynch.net/now

We used to have a culture of diligently sharing techinical solutions online, in Stack Overflow or blog posts, about things like "here's how I installed gitbash on my windows laptop" or "how to manage virtual environments in Python." Then AI hoovered up all that knowledge for its own training. Now, all you do to get the answer to those, or any other, technical questions is ask AI -- or just ask AI to do it for you. Which means there's no revelatory blog post, no need to document what you did for others, because the whole post would be "I asked AI to do it and it did it." So if there's no new material being produced, is there a risk that that leads to us getting stuck in the current state, at a local maximum? If there's no genuinely new stuff being produced to keep training AI on, don't we just...ossify where we are? I don't know the answer to that but it's something I'm thinking about.

Location:

Nottingham, England, United Kingdom

Professional title:

Finance Director

What do you do?

I help companies figure out how much money they've made (or not) recently, and how much money they might make (or not) in the future -- as well as making sure they don't run out of cash before they get there.

Why?

I'm a business nerd who loves crunching numbers. But I also like telling a story, so being able to connect the spreadsheet view of the business with the experience of people working in the business is a real joy. Plus, I love helping small companies in my city thrive, creating good jobs and profits to reinvest in making it a better and better city over time.

What should we read?

It kills me to narrow this down to just one book, but one that's had a big impact on me recently is The Comfort Crisis by Michael Easter.