Weeknotes #333 — Man-Wulf

At the start of 2019 I wrote down a colleague’s wise words that “the days are long but the years are short”. Six and a bit years later, it feels like the days are now also short. This is not a good development. I’ve got so many things to do at the moment that it is difficult to prioritise, and more than once this week I found that I got to 7pm each day without having ticked many of the top things off the list.

Memories aren’t reliable, but I don’t recall such a long heatwave at this time of the year in the UK as the one we’re experiencing. We had a little reprieve at the start of the week with some rain on Monday, but the temperatures are now right back up again. Out of necessity, we’ve got into a good routine of cooling the house down after dusk. Windows open, lights off. Despite this, I still don’t think that I’ve been sleeping that well as I’ve felt tired all week.

Lots of people have their summer holidays mapped out, but we’re in limbo. Our eldest son is planning to run and study abroad, but the process to get there doesn’t have much of a fixed schedule. We’re beholden to various forms turning up at the right time and the visa application process being open when it’s time to use it. The project manager in me isn’t comfortable with how opaque the milestones are, but there’s not much we can do.

This was a week in which I:

• Met with our external building consultant to take a look at the accessible door that we installed a couple of months ago, as well as to discuss a couple of outstanding items from our refurbishment project.
• Got agreement from our Information Risk Steering Group on continuing to nudge our staff towards using our approved password manager. Having our staff use the tool means that we have visibility into issues such as where passwords are being reused across multiple services, or where they have been compromised. We can then follow up with the impacted individuals to help them to update their passwords. Our next step will be to disable saving or updating passwords in web browsers, eventually eliminating these tools completely.
• Discovered that there are legal restrictions on Wi-Fi equipment in a country where we are in the process of setting up an office. We’re having to change our sourcing approach for laptops, but it has also kicked off a useful side discussion about how we can architect our systems in a different way.
• Had a couple of meetings with our audio/visual design partners. A missed requirement has resulted in some design rework for one of the important meeting rooms that we share with a sister company. We also reviewed the payment schedule for the work and agreed a couple of minor changes.
• Met with colleagues to discuss our procurement approach for the audio/visual equipment for our shared meeting spaces.
• Had a call with two colleagues who were looking for advice on how to introduce and roll out a major update to some internal management information reporting. I really enjoy consulting on this type of work. Changes land so much better when there has been a significant amount of pitch-rolling beforehand.
• Ran my fortnightly staff meeting, the last one to have everyone together for a couple of months as we soon enter holiday season.
• Had the weekly project meeting to cover the construction work taking place in our building.
• Met with a colleague who took me through a list of activities that he has gone through with his team in his staff meeting over the past few years, with the aim of improving team dynamics and building cohesion. There are lots of great ideas, which I may use in my own meeting once everyone is back from their holidays.
• Had our monthly operational risk management meeting, where we reviewed last year’s self-assessment report and discussed what would need to change for this year’s.
• Joined a Logitech webinar to hear about their latest firmware for their meeting room devices, which includes the ability to have two Sight table cameras in the same room. Their demonstration of their audio improvements was also very impressive. The webinar had a lovely, relaxed feel about it whilst still keeping on task, which isn’t always the case.
• Started the GoCodeGreen Tech Leaders learning pathway, completing the Digital Sustainability Foundation Course and the Decarbonising Digital — Introduction to Green Design module. I’m doing this with a group of technology leaders across the organisation. We all met at the start of the week for an introduction to the course and to get signed up for the training.
• Met with senior leaders in Technology and HR to look at how we can approach our digital dexterity initiative. The group are now looking at my manager and me to pull something together, which we’ll have to try and do over the next couple of weeks.
• Enjoyed this week’s Learning Hour session where a colleague took us through the beauty and utility of regular expressions.
• Had an introductory meeting with our Group Head of Audit for Technology, Platforms and Operations as the audit team start to plan their agenda for 2026.
• Took part in the development team retrospective and sprint planning meeting. The team members are both on holiday at separate times over the coming weeks, but we’re in a good place to keep getting the work done.
• As an experiment, posted a version of my weeknotes onto my Storyline at work. Storyline is Microsoft’s latest attempt to make an organisation ‘social’. Everyone in our company now has one where they can share updates that are tied just to them as opposed to any specific group or community. You can ‘follow’ your colleagues to get updates from them when they post. The day after I published, a colleague messaged me that she had seen it as it was surfaced in one of those ‘things you might have missed’ digest emails that Microsoft 365 sends out. It took me a few minutes of editing to add a more appropriate level of detail than what I usually post here, but it was basically reusing this content. I’m going to try and keep it up to see what happens.
• Had to deal with the aftermath of a spider bite on the palm of my hand. I was getting some washing off the line in the garden when I noticed a spider on the inside of the peg bag. Blowing him away with a puff of air backfired as he fell in amongst the pegs. I emptied them out onto the lawn, but he must have been clinging onto one of the pegs and decided to give me a nip. Only fair, I guess. Spider bites are seriously itchy.
• Had my first dentist visit in…way too long. Usually I go in for my appointment and then book the next one on the way out. For some reason they cancelled my last visit and either never got back to me or I forgot to follow up. It turned out that I hadn’t been there in 18 months. I had no idea.
• Went out for a lovely impromptu dinner with my wife on Friday night. It was a fine summer evening, and we decided to wander into town without any plans. Tabure sat us at the bar and fed us well, leaving me grateful to have a walk back home again.
• Had a great morning on our weekly club cycle ride, covering 82km up to the gardens of Woburn Abbey and back. I also managed to get out for a run on Sunday, despite feeling tired and not wanting to get out of bed.
• Went into London on a boiling hot Saturday afternoon to meet up with some friends. We had some drinks out in the open at Between the Bridges, dinner at Wahaca and then went to the South Bank Centre to see Stewart Lee vs The Man-Wulf. It was a pretty perfect evening out. But the sunshine does seem to bring out the worst in people. The first part of the show was spoiled a bit by a couple of drunk guys a few seats ahead of us who talked throughout the whole thing. I spoke to the security team at the interval but learned later that the men had decided themselves not to return. We had to stand in our sweaty train carriage on the way home, and were suddenly alarmed by a woman getting up and swearing at another woman whom she had been sat next to. It turned out that the person being sworn at had been texting rude comments to someone about their fellow passenger, and that fellow passenger had read the messages over her shoulder. I’ve not been on active bystander training, but my friend and I managed to de-escalate the situation by talking to the person who felt that they had been wronged. We moved to a cooler part of the carriage and tried to talk to her for as long as possible about her work, her life and anything else we could think of.
  

Media

Podcasts

• On this week’s episode of Quiet Riot, Alex Andreou educated me that the law changed in the year 1999 in a significant way. Prior to that year, the accuracy of computer records had to be proven in court. After the law was changed, the assumption was that the computer was correct. This has had a massive impact on the people implicated in the British Post Office scandal. BCS, The Chartered Institute for IT, have said that this law should be reviewed to avoid future miscarriages of justice. Given how people are now using non-deterministic generative AI tools such as ChatGPT, I think that this law will be under an increasing amount of scrutiny in the future.
  

Alex Andreou: The second thing is the legal position.

And the legal position, PACE Act 1984, was that accuracy of computer records, it used to require a sort of basic threshold of proof that the system in question was operating properly and the record was accurate.

This was amended in 2000 to make that a rebuttable presumption.

What that means in legal terms is that anything produced by a computer system is presumed to be accurate, and the burden shifts on the potential defendant to show that it’s not, which without access to that system is nearly impossible.

Basically, an assumption was made, which was very much in keeping with the spirit of that period, that IT systems were foolproof.

I think it’s high time we reviewed that presumption that a computer system is always accurate.

Articles

• The FT’s Martin Wolf says that “The roots of the British malaise lie in a sick economy.” I was born in 1976. It’s amazing to see how the economic growth trajectory that dominated my life came to a sputtering halt around 10 years after I started work.
  

• Simon Willison reports on a macOS app built entirely by Claude Code.
• It was fascinating to read about a company adding a feature to an application because ChatGPT ‘hallucinated’ that it existed. In this case it’s probably a better use of time and effort than trying to push back, disappointing potential users. Talking about this article with some friends was insightful in that they suggested that “perhaps ChatGPT thought that…”, which led me to respond that ChatGPT didn’t think anything. I’m quickly becoming a pedant for the language we use to describe these systems.
• The Guardian reports that “almost a quarter of all foster places in England are now provided by private equity-backed companies making millions of pounds in profits. […] Placements for foster children are paid for by councils, who either provide the placements themselves or outsource them to IFAs, which now provide about half of all places, up from a third in 2016.” This seems like a massive failure; it shouldn’t be something that should require the existence of private for-profit companies to work properly.
• Fascinating experiment of adding a prompt injection to a LinkedIn profile.
• Simon Willison reveals that Grok is searching for Elon Musk’s stance on an issue before providing an answer to a question.
• Mark Wilson wrote an excellent post about his experience of enshittification through the lens of trying to get a taxi on holiday.
• “Graduates share their job-hunting woes amid the AI fallout.” I don’t think it’s just AI; modern tools make it too easy to apply for a role with a simple click. This is seriously disheartening. “Platforms use AI to search for key words. I have friends who have copied entire job descriptions, pasted them into the Word document, reduced the font, and turned the colour to white so AIs find the words they’re looking for. It feels dystopian.”
  

Video

• Took a trip with my family to see F1 (2025). Predictably, it annoyed me. I was ready to suspend disbelief and enjoy a good action movie. The first 20 minutes or so started great, but some of the choices that they made were so awful that I ended up checking my watch, wondering when it would be over. I’ve heard very mixed reviews; I won’t post any spoilers here as you may want to see it and might love it, but it felt like an insult to me.
• The Sky documentary about Damon Hill had me in tears. It’s a moving, beautiful film. He and his family seem lovely, and it’s so good that he followed in his father’s footsteps to become Formula One World Champion.
• Live Aid at 40 is everything I want from a documentary. Lots of detail across three hours, with honest appraisals from the people involved at the time.
  

Books

• Started reading Apple in China by Patrick McGee and it doesn’t disappoint. It’s masterfully written, with just enough detail and a fascinating narrative. I’m only about a fifth of the way through the book, but I can’t wait to read it every night.
  

Next week: A big birthday for our youngest boy.