A welcome week off, although I do feel a little bit like this guy. The days came and went but despite not getting much home admin done, the time didn’t feel wasted. I’m feeling relaxed and happy about getting back to work.
This was a week in which I:
- Got on my indoor bike trainer almost every day, mainly focusing on recovery rides. I’m pretty sure that my knee pain was a result of putting too much power through it, standing up and trying to grind higher gears to propel myself up hills faster when I rode London Wales London. The joint is still complaining after a harder ride, but staying seated seems to keep it within tolerable levels.
- Cancelled my remaining physio sessions as I feel that my knee is on the mend. Who knows, I may surprise myself and start doing the strengthening exercises any day now.
- Got annoyed at our pet insurance renewal when M&S attempted to put the premium up by about 40% versus the previous year. After calling them we ended up cancelling our renewal and going back to their website to start a new policy, getting us back to a monthly fee that is just over what we’ve been paying for this past year. Things that renew annually and gratuitously increase in price are horrible, but I’m not sure what the alternative is; making the customer have to do something might result in the service lapsing, which would also be a bad outcome.
- Joined my eldest son for a drive over to my parents’ house. It was the first time that he had driven on the motorway and it could hardly have been more challenging — a super-busy M25 with lots of rain and spray. He did great. We met my dad at the local driving range and then had a lovely lunch back at their house.
- Had a lovely visit from my wife’s parents for the day. In order to make things a bit easier we picked them up and dropped them off at Burford Garden Centre, which is about halfway-ish between where we both live. It’s a beautiful place full of lovely things, especially the deli, but you pretty much need to remortgage your house if you want to buy anything.
- Met friends for dinner at Tabure, which was as delicious as ever.
- Took a trip to Deco Audio to rummage through their records and CDs. For £18 I picked up seven used CDs to add to my once again growing collection.
- Enjoyed two Album Clubs, one online with the WB-40 crew and another in person.
- Had some lovely breakfasts and lunches out in town with my wife. It’s an extravagance, but it was lovely to do it and made it feel as though we were on holiday properly, just a little bit.
- Cycled the Tour de Ricky, which when combined with getting to and from the start/finish resulted in a 250km ride from Rickmansworth to Silverstone and back. It was much shorter than London-Wales-London but felt hard in different ways; for some reason my toes and feet were in pain for a lot of the ride, and I have no idea why. It was also much warmer, which meant needing to remember to drink and to regularly refill our water bottles. We made it round as a group of four and had a lovely day out.
Media
Articles
- Fascinating insight from Ben Thompson on how ChatGPT is an enabler for ’human AI agents’:
In fact, this is so effective that I wonder if enterprises everywhere are thinking about AI all wrong, at least in the short-term. There is a lot of focus on one person having a lot of agents under their control, and the allure of that — both financially and in terms of productivity — are clear. It’s possible, however, that a lot of the productivity gains are available now. A team leader can direct people (1) who use the same tools as them with a similar effectiveness (2) in an auditable way (3) and seamlessly extend or augment their work while retaining context. That’s pretty powerful!
The reason why I think this is novel and worth writing about is because none of the chatbots support multi-user. Daman and I hacked this together using the “Share Chat” feature, but this would be better if multi-user chats were possible by default. And, more broadly, the real unlocks from AI are not going to come from working the way we do but better; it will come from changing the way we work, and here at Stratechery we have started doing exactly that.
- Microsoft are looking to manage updates to third-party applications on Windows.
- Martin Fowler shares a tip for proofreading. I used to sit next to someone in our Marketing and Communications team who proofread out loud in the office, and it seemed to work for her. I tend to get ChatGPT to proofread my posts using a prompt rooted in the one shared by Molly White.
- ‘Link gaslighting’ is a horrible phenomenon. It would be much better that a link is broken than redirected to something other than the original page.
Video
- Absolutely loved The Assembly, a show where famous people are asked questions by a group of autistic, neurodivergent and/or learning disabled interviewers. Danny Dyer is the first guest and comes across as very genuine, honest and funny. Each episode includes a musical performance, and I haven’t been able to get their rendition of Sunshine on Leith out of my head since I saw it.
- Finished watching Sirens, which was strangely compelling and worth watching, but ultimately unsatisfying.
- Saw the first two episodes of American Manhunt: Osama Bin Laden. One of our boys wanted to watch it as his friends had been talking about it. It was a weird feeling to be sitting there watching it and talking to the kids about events that happened before they were born that don’t seem that far in the past.
Audio
- The Beta Band’s Dry The Rain came back into my mind this week. KEXP have posted a great live version by Steve Mason on YouTube.
- It’s brilliant to learn that The Beatles in Mono is getting a vinyl reissue. Signing up to the mailing list gets you a 10% discount, bringing the price to around £387, but it’s still a lot of money.
Web
- This website reinforced to me what an embarrassing southerner I really am. (Hat tip to Lisa Riemers for sharing.)
Books
- Still slowly working my way through Code Dependent by Madhumita Murgia.
Next week: Back to work, and out for a pub quiz.
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