Another week of recovery. On Sunday my wife and I drove to her parents’ house, to catch up with them and give them a hand with a few bits and pieces. They live almost three hours away, so we had a lovely dinner out, stayed overnight and I took Monday off work.
I made it back into the office on Wednesday and Thursday, but it felt like a big push to be there. I’d been feeling better, but at the end of each of those days I was coughing again and exhausted. Occasionally I get the odd very mild migraine, perhaps three a year, with the worst bit being an aura before the headache which stops me from being able to see properly. This week I had two in two days, which felt very disconcerting.
There seem to be so many people that have been laid low with this bug or something similar. It’s a nasty one. It was only on Friday that I started to feel my brain fog finally lift and I was back on my game again, two weeks after it started. I’m hoping for much more of a normal week ahead.
This was a week in which I:
- Continued the process to on-board a new team member. We’ve agreed the terms and conditions and now just need to sign the final versions of the documents.
- Met with our sister company for the first governance meeting on the building and facilities services that they provide to us.
- Visited a furniture showroom near Old Street to see examples of boardroom tables.
- Got feedback from our AV partner on the latest design of our boardroom.
- Reviewed and gave feedback on the latest proposal for an AV technology refresh of a shared space in our office.
- Put together a presentation about the Gartner IT Symposium/Xpo events that I’ve attended over the past couple of years, and delivered it at our weekly Learning Hour.
- Had my monthly call with my executive partner at an IT analyst firm. The conversation came at the right time; it got me thinking about what success would look like this year and helped me to refocus on what we need to do.
- Had a random chat with one of our group architects in South Africa who wanted to know more about our part of the organisation.
- Attended our internal Generative AI working group, the first time in a while that I’ve been able to join the meeting.
- Caught the tail-end of a Yodeck webinar on the best ways to schedule content.
- Spent some time with my very clever friend who created the Album Club website. He had refactored the code so that I could replicate the site for the WB-40 Album Club. I spent time going through the 19 albums we have played so far and getting the detailed data into the correct format. He also showed me how to set it up so that it builds on Vercel every time a change is committed to GitHub.
- Helped my father-in-law to get set up with YNAB for his personal finances. I’ve been using the app for 15 years or so and it has changed my life. I just wish I’d started using it, or a system like it, when I was much younger.
- Enjoyed dinner at Avellino, Ross-on-Wye’s Italian restaurant.
- Used some gap filler to plug a hole in our brickwork that last year served as a home for a family of blue tits. The cans of filler are so big; you could probably insulate all of your cavity walls with just one can. I needed a couple of squirts and now unfortunately need to take the rest to the recycling centre.
- Got back exercising again, tentatively at the weekend and then ramping things up over the course of the week. I made it out for the Saturday morning club ride and managed to keep up, despite coughing my way through parts of the route. We had a comedy moment in trying to change a friend’s front tyre which ended up with me cutting myself and bleeding all over his wheel.
Media
Podcasts
- Really enjoyed the latest episode of Reqless where Paul Ford and Rich Ziade spoke with Clay Shirky about the use of AI in higher education:
Clay: … People love this because it feels like learning. It’s not actually learning, but it feels like it. And so you think, “I have a problem, and I’m gonna think about the problem for a little bit, and then all of a sudden I have a great answer,” that feels like you learned something. But what you learned was, “This is how I asked ChatGPT about this problem.” Now, if what you need to be learning is just, “How do I use this tool effectively?” That’s okay.
…
Clay: There is a Reddit thread that we all went to town on about a month ago, month and a half ago, an NYU student said, “Help, I can’t stop using AI.” They were a school—
Rich: A cry for help.
Clay: They were a student enrolled, they said, in their senior year in our engineering school, saying, “I’m using this thing all the time. I recognize that in my own major I’m learning less than I would if I wasn’t using it. But I can’t stop.” It was that sense of addiction that really started to change—and make me more pessimistic, frankly, about the kind of progressive, like, we’ll just appeal to the student’s natural love of learning.
Rich: Mmm. Mmm.
Clay: It’s like, if this is a student who is in the part of her education where she’s only taking classes in her major and by her, you know, at least by what she said in the, in the Reddit thread was interested in them.
Rich: Yeah.
Clay: And then was saying, “I actually can’t stop using this thing that I recognize is interfering with what I’m learning.”
- I loved Ben Thompson’s Stratechery interview with Bobby Healy, the CEO of Manna. It made me unashamedly excited about a technology again, something that I haven’t felt for a while. Manna provide drone-based delivery, currently only to Dublin 15 in Ireland and Pecan Square in Texas. The operation sounds incredible, and Healy’s case for his company is very convincing. They load the battery pack with the cargo so they don’t need to worry about drones being out of action for any length of time. Because Europe is so strict and has laid down such clear regulations, they knew what they had to build against. The drones have been designed and built in-house with multiple redundant safety features, as nothing was available off the shelf that met the specifications. However, looking at the YouTube videos of the operation from a Dublin McDonald’s car park, I’m not sure that it quite lives up to how Healy described it in the Interview:
Bobby Healy: But if you have a hot swap system, as we do, you get eight deliveries per hour throughput. But the person loading the cargo, one of our people will do between 25 and 30 deliveries per hour, that’s because we’ve about a 60-second turnaround time aircraft lands. It’s back in the air in less than 60 seconds.
Articles
- The Guardian and the New York Times get into bed with generative AI. Sigh.
- A wonderful list of travel tips from Kevin Kelly.
- Robert Breen on Why Blogs Matter.
- This UK government seems to be digitally dumb. As well as proposing that AI companies get access to use copyrighted creative works, their request to Apple for a backdoor to their encrypted cloud backups was only going to result in one outcome.
- I pass through Euston every day that I go into the office. This update from A London Inheritance reinforces the fact that very little seems to be happening there.
Video
- The podcast interview with Clay Shirky mentioned above led me to looking up the work of Joss Fong. Her video on the impact and implications of AI in education is superb.
- Watched a bit of the F1 75 launch event. Aside from the funny quips by the host, Jack Whitehall, it felt like an extended media event with little notable content. I love that F1 has been trying different things and has expanded the fan base, but I don’t think these kind of events are for me.
- Started watching season three of The White Lotus. A slow burn so far.
- Continued with Severance, which seems to have slowed down. I’m hoping that it doesn’t turn into some kind of long drawn-out incoherent series like Lost.
- Watched the first episode of the Jerry Springer documentary Fights, Camera, Action. What a hideous programme it was. It seemed to be more about the producers of the show than the presence of Springer himself.
- Started watching A Thousand Blows. It’s had me captivated from the start.
Audio
- Picked up an amazing vinyl copy of Floodland by The Sisters of Mercy. It’s great when a Discogs purchase turns up and exceeds expectations.
- Was so pleased to finally get my copy of Nik Kershaw’s box set The MCA Years. I ordered it when it was announced back in May and the release date was pushed back a few times. It’s a lovely thing.
Web
- I love Gina Trapani’s map of her life in weeks.
- Tony Redmond on Why Microsoft 365 Copilot Works for Some and Not for Others.
Books
- My brain fog finally lifted enough for me to finish my write-up of Fascism by Ian Dunt and Dorian Lynskey.
Next week: Welcoming a new team member, and another Album Club.
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