Weeknotes #267 — Electricity

Amazing new street art on my commute to the office

A four-day week, but it didn’t feel like it.

On Monday our eldest boy turned 17. How I am suddenly a parent to a 17 year old, I really have no idea. It feels no time at all since he turned up in our lives. As usual, we celebrated a family birthday with a meal out together. I love these moments. It’s always so fascinating to think how much our boys have both changed as they grown; thinking about our birthday meals together is a lens to look at how the years have passed. Our boy has some driving lessons as his birthday gift and has his first one booked in for next week.

Gnocchi with mushrooms at The Highwayman, Berkhamsted

It finally feels like spring is here. Despite being on the edge of Storm Kathleen this weekend, it was lovely when the sun broke through. The outdoor clothes dryer has carried its first load and I’m going to mothball the jumpers from my working from home wardrobe.

This was a week in which I:

• Gave my ‘digital literacy’ presentation on Large Language Models and Generative AI at an internal quarterly online town hall-style meeting. There were over 350 people online, but the beauty of presenting remotely is that it would have felt no different if it was ten times as many.
• Had the weekly project meetings for the office refurbishments and moves. A colleague and I had to quickly sketch out a Technology and Real Estate ‘shaping’ budget for a new office we are opening.
• Wrote up and published the minutes from last week’s programme steering committee.
• Received a first draft of the AV/IT bill of materials for a new office that we are moving into.
• Met with the CIO for our African footprint to talk about our office footprint and how we should work together.
• Spoke to our corporate insurance broker to update him on our upcoming office changes.
• Met with one of our business line heads to introduce our development team and look at what her business priorities are.
• Had a check-in with the landlord of one of the new offices we are moving into.
• Met with our Finance team to review the first draft of our cost projections for our office refurbishment project.
• Met with a real estate project company to look at bringing in additional support for the work we are doing.
• Attended our working group for Microsoft Copilot and Teams Premium. I’m still not incorporating Copilot into my everyday workflow. I try, but so often I just get this:

• Got lucky with the trains despite major disruptions on Tuesday evening and Wednesday morning. They had closed the lines for four days over the Easter break for engineering work. I’m assuming this didn’t go quite to plan as they would have liked.
• Booked some overseas business trips. I’ve been trying to keep my business travel to a minimum, but I can’t put these visits off.
• Made some suggestions to how we can improve some of our facilities management processes and our overall office experience.
• Bought a bunch of appliances for our new kitchen that is getting fitted out over the next month or so. The changes we are making are complicated and there are lots of moving parts — and people — to coordinate. As ever my wife is doing an amazing job of getting everything lined up.
• Finally had our house connected directly to the power line in the street after 70 years of being ‘looped’ off of our neighbours’ supply. I love it when the infrastructure beneath our feet gets revealed. Our supply is the black cable at the bottom of this picture, connected into the grey plastic-looking container that sits atop the main power cable.

• Heard that England and Wales are the only countries in the world that have fully privatised their water supplies. It’s insane to privatise an essential utility where customers can’t choose between providers. Thames Water are in deep, deep trouble and it’s going to be a scandalously expensive problem to resolve.
• Pondered, yet again, whether I listen to too many podcasts and not enough music. I loved Elliot Roberts’ ’reaction video’ to Rob Sheffield’s list of the 100 best Beatles solo songs that he made for his Patreon Supporters. When I was a teenager I would have been so excited to read a list like this and to seek out the songs and albums I hadn’t heard. I spend so little time listening to music as I’m constantly trying to keep up with all of the time-sensitive podcasts that I subscribe to — tech and cybersecurity news and commentary, politics, F1 news etc. But I love these podcasts; many of them are useful in the work that I do. There’s just not enough time.
• Finally made it out for a club bike ride again. The start of April means that the club’s ‘mandatory mudguards’ rule is retired and people can opt to head out a little earlier to do a longer version of the route. It was a glorious morning and so lovely to get out.

• Enjoyed a lovely dinner hosted by our close friends, who put up with my fussiness of admitting that I’m not a fan of quiche. I can’t wait to get our kitchen finished so we can once again do some entertaining of our own. It’s been years.

Media

Podcasts

• Enjoyed this discussion of Madonna’s Like A Prayer album.
• Found Ben Thompson’s interview with Benedict Evans super interesting. Evans made the point that learning prompt engineering for AI models is like learning the command line, when really all you want is to press a button and the machine to do the work. He also offered this fascinating observation into the difference between finding information from web searches versus prompts to AI:

Benedict Evans: Years ago, someone pointed out to me something, I was very annoyed at myself for not realizing it, that Google Search is manually curated, Google doesn’t give you the answer, it gives you ten links and ask you to pick the right one.

Ben Thompson: That’s right.

BE: Google doesn’t say, “This is the answer”, and there’s a product problem here in that an LLM says, “This is the answer”. Or at least as they’re currently constituted, they do.

BT: This was the Gemini problem, in that it was giving you one answer, so the sense of burden of proof, Google took that on, as opposed to it’s always been on the user previously.

Articles

• The XZ backdoor has had a lot of coverage. As ever, Michael Tsai has a great roundup.
• The fact that Amazon’s ‘just walk out’ grocery stores were powered by 1,000 people sitting in India reviewing video footage is perhaps unsurprising given the company literally provides a Mechanical Turk as a service. It feels so dishonest versus how it was presented. I’m a technologist, but there is so much hype and grift around at the moment.

Next week: Wrestling with trying to fit everything into five days again, an album club and this blog’s 20th birthday.