laingc
Joined 11 years ago
Karma
1,232
Submissions
225
Member since
Apr 4
Recent submissions
Comment · 1 year ago
Starboard Maritime Intelligence | Agentic AI Engineer | Wellington, New Zealand | Full-time | On-Site
Starboard builds mission-critical intelligence platforms for the defence, national security, and maritime enforcement sectors. Our software fuses complex datasets—including satellite imagery (SAR/EO), vessel tracking (AIS), and proprietary intelligence to help our customers identify and respond to illicit and threatening activities at sea. We work on challenges like sanctions evasion, illegal fishing, and maritime security operations.
We are seeking our first Agentic AI Engineer to pioneer a new capability within the company. This is a foundational role with significant autonomy, responsible for designing and building an "AI Agent Workforce" from the ground up. Your objective will be to leverage agentic AI to enhance operational effectiveness and accelerate the intelligence cycle across our business—from engineering to analysis. This is a hands-on-keyboard role focused on deploying robust, auditable, and secure AI systems, not just theoretical research.
Example responsibilities:
- Develop agents to automate the initial analysis of raw data streams, generating draft intelligence summaries for our analyst teams.
- Build agents to assist with static code analysis, security vulnerability scanning, or triaging failures in our secure deployment pipelines.
- Create agents to perform real-time horizon scanning, monitoring multiple data feeds to flag and contextualise key maritime events.
- Establish the company-wide standards, tooling, and security frameworks for the development and deployment of all AI agents.
We're looking for someone with:
- Demonstrable, hands-on experience building functional AI agent systems. This can be from professional, academic, or personal projects.
- Proficiency in Python.
- A deep-seated curiosity for emerging AI technologies and a systematic approach to experimentation.
- An understanding of how to apply technology to solve concrete business and operational problems, with a strong sense of ownership.
IMPORTANT - SECURITY REQUIREMENTS: Due to the nature of our work with government defence and intelligence partners, this role has strict security clearance requirements. To be eligible, you MUST have been a citizen of the UK, USA, Canada, New Zealand, or Australia for at least 10 years. We regret that we cannot make exceptions to this.
If you are interested in applying your AI skills to critical national security and intelligence challenges, we would love to hear from you.
Apply here: https://www.seek.co.nz/job/85965176
Comment · 2 years ago
For those interested in a high-level walk through of the Anglo-Saxon period, I highly recommend “The Anglo-Saxons: A History of the Beginnings of England” by Marc Morris. It covers the period from a number of different perspectives, including a clerical/monastic one that is easy to underestimate and ignore with a modern secular bias.
There is also a very listen-able audiobook version available on Audible.
Comment · 2 years ago
Because memes aren't allowed on HN, you're not allowed to reply with the "akssshuallllyyy" meme, so you had to go to these lengths.
¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Comment · 2 years ago
Very helpful answer, thank you!
Comment · 2 years ago
What's the current state-of-the-art in deploying large, "self-hosted" models to scalable infrastructure? (e.g. AWS or k8s)
Example use case would be to support a web application with, say, 100k DAU.
Comment · 2 years ago
That is simply not correct. With properly implemented E2EE, you can communicate confidently over a completely insecure channel. You could post the entire data stream publicly on the internet with no loss of privacy.
Comment · 2 years ago
I replied with what the thing is called, explained what it can be used for, and recommended an introductory text to learn more.
If you can come up with a more helpful reply in as many words, then please do so.
Comment · 2 years ago
> but those operations over what usually appears at the denominator of the derivative purely for notation purpose has always looked to me as complete magical garbage.
You will be delighted to discover that they are in fact not magical or garbage.
> What object is "dx" ? is it a number ? a limit ? is it zero ? can i divide another number by it ?
dx is a differential one-form. You can think of it as a generalisation of a gradient, if you like. These are very important in Differential Geometry.
You can use differential forms to do all sorts of things, but one example you may be familiar with is to compute area or volume forms over arbitrary manifolds. It gets a bit hard to define things on HN without TeX support, but using differential one-forms and the related exterior derivative, you can define a generalised Stokes' theorem that works for any smooth, oriented manifold.
I used this in my PhD, and implemented it directly in a numerical method, so this has very practical engineering uses also.
"Elementary Differential Geometry" by Barrett O'Neill is a pretty beginner-friendly introduction to some of these topics if you're interested, though there are many other good texts also.
Comment · 2 years ago
As the father of two young daughters, I adore Bluey. Quite apart from how good the episodes are for adults, I really enjoy the following aspects:
1. It portrays wholesome and positive family relationships, particularly between father and daughters. The girls are also good to one another, with occasional conflict kindly and realistically resolved.
2. It tells simple stories without pushing political messages. Unfortunately, children’s television at large has become another victim of the culture wars, with heavy-handed social messages infecting what should be simple cartoons. Bluey is something I can trust.
3. I don’t have to expose my kids to American accents. They’ll have more than enough of that from regular programming when they grow up.
Comment · 3 years ago
Doesn’t Airtable more or less do this?
Comment · 3 years ago
yt-dlp
Comment · 3 years ago
I am entirely on Meta's side here. They have done a huge amount for open source ML, and with the llama2 license they are enabling millions of small-to-very-large companies with incredibly valuable technology, while asking the hyperscale cloud providers to pay. This is more than reasonable, in my view.
I would like to see more open source technologies taking this kind of licensing view - free for almost everyone, except the frankly parasitic hyperscalers who profit from others' largesse.
Comment · 3 years ago
I didn’t pick that up, but I suppose that’s fair. I’ve heard both, as I have with Celsius.
PhD in Applied Mathematics, specifically in numerical differential geometry. Some residual interest in intellectual property law from a distant past in law school.
Based in Wellington, New Zealand.
meet.hn/city/-41.2887953,174.7772114/Wellington
Socials: - linkedin.com/in/christopherlaing
Interests: AI/ML, Entrepreneurship, Open Source, Programming, Defence Tech ---