A week dominated by illness. Early on Monday morning my wife collected our eldest son at the airport, back from his running trip to Boston University. He was quite ill with a horrible cough, sore throat and a high temperature, and ended up spending the whole week at home. A few days in, he didn’t seem to be making any improvement, so we decided to try and get him a doctor’s appointment. Not only was he seen that afternoon, but the doctor even gave us a follow-up call the next day to see how he was doing. Very impressive.
Lots of my colleagues have been off work with a similar illness. There are definitely some horrible bugs going around at the moment. On Friday afternoon, I started to get a little tickly cough which by Saturday morning turned into a full-blown illness. I’ve spent the entire weekend drinking lemon paracetamol drinks, alternating between being freezing cold and too hot. I’m going to work tomorrow, but I’ll be staying at home.
I’ve been mentally struggling with the impact of keeping up with the news. In times of trouble, I always feel that it’s incumbent on me to keep informed about what’s happening as opposed to turning away because it’s all too depressing. In the US, it looks like a coup is underway, whereas here in the UK the government doesn’t seem to be particularly good at governing. Instead, they are leaning into trying to outcompete the right-wing Reform Party. What a mess.
This was a week in which I:
- Continued to pick up more responsibilities from my boss. I’m now responsible for our governance committee and board reports, as well as attending an executive committee run by one of our front office teams.
- Wrote and edited this quarter’s report to the board of directors.
- Collaborated with our team on our annual submission to one of our regulators about our technology setup and dependencies.
- Started to put together a portfolio roadmap for the work going on across our department.
- Ran a short workshop in our work cafe/presentation space to assess how we want it to work in the future, and what potential changes we would need to make to get there.
- Continued with the on-boarding process for a new vendor who will be providing us with a new contract staff member.
- Met with the head of one of our IT functions to discuss aligning part of my team to his organisation.
- Caught up with a colleague at our sister company on where they are with their office renovation project.
- Held an overview presentation for our programme Steering Committee members on the technology we have installed to monitor the performance of our physical space. We have only been using it for a couple of months, but it has already revealed lots of insights.
- Reviewed the proposal for implementing a data centre/network documentation and management tool.
- Had our weekly call with our audio/visual consultancy.
- Held my fortnightly team meeting. It feels like we are slowly getting into our stride as a group.
- Caught up with writing and posting four weeks’ worth of wins.
- Watched two Learning Hour sessions, catching up with the video of one that I missed on the topic of Infrastructure as Code, and another on the costs and benefits of space travel.
- Had some discussions about the potential of ChatGPT Pro and its deep research feature, off the back of a Stratechery Update and the subsequent discussion on the Sharp Tech podcast.
- Had my regular meeting with my friend and colleague, our Group Head of APIs.
- Attended our company-wide Microsoft Copilot/Teams Premium working group. Last year I couldn’t make many of the sessions due to other work priorities. It feels good to have a little bit of bandwidth to attend again.
- Started to make some moves of getting off Amazon for purchasing books. I downloaded my entire Kindle library and added the documents to Calibre, with a little help from a Parallels Windows virtual machine and Epubor. I also downloaded my wishlist, converting saved HTML pages to plain text. Getting off of a US-owned tech platform seems a sensible thing to do right now.
Media
Podcasts
- Fascinating discussion with Luke Jennings at Push Security on last week’s Risky Business podcast, all about ‘cross IDP impersonation’. (The link takes you directly to the start of the discussion on YouTube.) Users want to use OAuth buttons such as ‘sign in with Google’ to get into their corporate SaaS apps. There’s nothing to stop them from registering their corporate email address with an identity provider and verifying ownership of the email, allowing the button to work from that point onwards. The issue is that when their corporate account gets shut down, they would still have access to the SaaS app.
- Sharp Tech’s discussion of ChatGPT Pro Deep Research was fascinating. If it’s as good as it is reported to be (for USD 200/mo for the Pro subscription), it may do the work of a junior analyst in terms of the quality of the report that it returns. The problems are that (a) it makes extensive use of searching the web and can’t go beyond this with novel insights or information that isn’t on the open Internet, and (b) if you need to be an experienced analyst who is able to think deeply and use novel insights of your own, what does the pipeline of analysts look like?
Articles
- Baldur Bjarnason on ‘poisoning for propaganda’, how rising authoritarianism makes LLMs more dangerous. “The truth about modern AI is that there is that every major ‘AI’ company today is in bed with an authoritarian government. The ones that aren’t – such as the European ones – are distant runners up to the US or Chinese models.”
- Google’s not part of the US government, but it wants to keep its government contracts, so it has ended its DEI hiring goals.
- LinkedIn-style posts for the enterprise, all within Teams.
- Is this the beginning of the end of what3words? We can only hope.
Video
- Being ill this weekend means that I’ve spent quite a bit of time in bed and on the sofa, wandering around YouTube.
- Elliot Roberts’ latest video makes a case for us currently living through an all-time great era for pop music.
- This takedown of an Indian scam call centre is incredible in terms of the effort that the YouTuber went to over such a long period of time.
- A compilation of bands stopping shows to help fans.
- Watched Witches (2024), a very moving exploration of postpartum depression, linked to how women have been persecuted as witches over the centuries. Heavy-going, but brilliant.
Audio
- Awesome Tapes From Africa had a Bandcamp sale on Friday. I picked up 11 digital albums for about £10.
Web
- Went to look at an old mind map and found that toketaWare, maker of the iThoughts app, shut down last year. It’s a shame; iThoughts was one of the first apps I installed when I got my first iPad, and I’ve used it on and off since. I don’t use mind mapping that much, but I do have a bunch of old maps that I refer to occasionally. I’m going to need to find another home for them. These articles have been quite helpful.
- Maggie Appleton’s approach to creating digital gardens is lovely. It’s got me thinking about how I might go about doing this myself.
Books
- Finished reading Fascism by Ian Dunt and Dorian Lynskey. I’ve started to write up my thoughts about the book in a blog post, but being ill doesn’t lend itself to tackling this one very readily. Hopefully I’ll post about this in the next few days.
- Picked up where I left off with volume two of The McCartney Legacy. I’ve just finished reading about the recording and mastering of Wings’ Venus and Mars. It’s not a perfect album, but I’ve always had lots of affection for it.
Next week: Working from home, at least for the start of the week, as I try to get over this bug.
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