Picky Bits with the Data Nerds
Top conference snacking.
This week I spent three days getting my nerd on at an industry conference. Fear not, I shall not speak a word of agentic commerce, the criticality of semantic layers in preventing metric drift, or the lower compute of vector versus graphical search. Also nothing about hallucinations, token optimisation or pre-parsing things for LLMs who prefer J-SON. And definitely nothing about Retrieval-Augmented Generation architecture. Whatever any of that means.
Instead, I shall give you the delights of conference snackage - the standard of which was high. Given the team at the ExCel were catering for over 5,000 attendees, that is going some I’d say.
The photo above was my favourite. Cauliflower and curcumin cornbread with cauliflower puree, charred leaf ash and pickled sultana. In case you were wondering, curcumin is the active ingredient in turmeric. I can only assume that they chose curcumin (rather than the more pedestrian turmeric) for alliterative purposes. A veritable smorgasbord of copywriting pomposity and pretension, but notwithstanding, so delicious that I might even now pickle my own sultanas and char some leaves.
Up next a rather lovely Tahitian vanilla and citrus infused muffin with white chocolate frosting and raspberry crumb. I ate about fifteen of these, only stopping when I could no longer fit any more of the wrappers discreetly into my coat pockets.
Plus a rather lovely tartlet with dill custard, smoked chalk farm trout, fennel pollen and citrus. And a black bean cornbread with sweetcorn, smoked cream cheese, crispy fried corn and chives. As you’re not allowed to smoke in real-life any more, it seems all your food has to be smoked instead. Fennel pollen no idea.
I did avoid the puffed rice bar with millet, medjool date, curcumin root, black pepper, soy butter and toasted coconut on the grounds that it looked like dust that had been glued together, and sounded like an un-necessary use of multiple quite random types of seasoning, but perhaps I missed out. Who’s to know.
Absolute unadulterated brilliance, I loved it. And the conference was ace too - loads of great ideas, inspiration and fantastic new people.
But I can’t leave you without this absolute gem. At said conference were 5,000 of the finest minds in data, analytics, tech and AI from across the UK and Europe (and me, no idea how I snuck in!). But someone somewhere thought this sign next to the tea and coffee machine was necessary…
