Weeknotes #347 — Another detached retina

Two and a half years after it happened the first time, my wife developed another detached retina, this time in the other eye.

Late on Friday afternoon, my wife texted me to say that she felt as though it was happening again. She tried all of the opticians in town for an emergency eye examination; only Boots were able to fit her in, but not until the following day. The optician couldn’t see anything, but they were happy to refer my wife to the hospital for a closer inspection. On Sunday we arrived at an incredibly quiet Stoke Mandeville Hospital, where they confirmed that her retina had indeed suffered a slight detachment. They booked her in for emergency surgery at 7:30am the next day, told her to go home and minimise movement to avoid making it worse.

My wife is incredibly brave. The operation itself is simultaneously a miracle of modern science and the stuff of nightmares. Having people poke and prod at your eyeballs with needles and various instruments is very high on the list of medical procedures I hope I never to need. But she just went into practical mode, putting one foot in front of the other to get it done. Having been here before, we found it much less terrifying as we knew what needed to happen.

Her post-operative recovery is going much better than the first time around, mainly because they somehow — and I don’t understand how — managed to avoid putting stitches into her eyeball. This means that she doesn’t constantly feel as though she has grit in her eye. She’s putting in eye drops four times a day, waiting for the gas bubble to slowly dissipate as her eye refills with fluid.

When the NHS works, it is amazing. We’re so fortunate to have access to these incredible facilities that are free when we need to use them.

This was a week in which I:

• Was extremely grateful for the team’s well wishes and offers of help when I had to go to the hospital with my wife instead of going into work. People can be so kind.
• Reviewed progress on our document management initiative with the project team, and drew the rough outline of an approach to make a start with the changes.
• Got a purchase order in place with the integrator that will fit out the shared meeting spaces in our office with new audio/visual equipment. As soon as the document was issued, we got a meeting in the diary with our AV designer and the integrator team to review our timeline and agree next steps.
• Had calls with the project manager at our sister company about their office refit. We had some work done in our office a couple of weeks ago that turned out to be incorrect, so the construction company had worked on a plan to put it right. I also got to review the proposal for some thoughtful changes to the set-up of our company café which is due to reopen in a few months.
• Got the order placed for the new table, chairs and credenzas for our largest internal meeting room. They will be significant upgrades to what we have today. Hopefully we’ll be able to get them delivered and installed by the end of the year.
• Had an internal meeting followed by a meeting with Microsoft on how we can structure a Copilot-focused week in our London office.
• Reviewed a colleague’s plans for their long-distance trip to another of our offices this week.
• Updated slides for two of our regional governance committee meetings, including a summary of our position on AI-enabled voice recording and translation tools.
• Made updates to the project status deck for the opening of a new office. We’re now only a few weeks away from the launch event, but the project work will continue well beyond this date. I also consolidated the various threads on our approach to the technology in this office to try to ensure that everyone has the same understanding of what we’re doing.
• Joined our monthly operational risk review meeting.
• Listened to a colleague give a presentation about Agentic Banking in our weekly Learning Hour meeting.
• Had the absolute pleasure of seeing Grant-Lee Phillips at The Lower Third. I’d never been to the venue, so it was a very happy discovery to find a lovely underground room in the middle of Denmark Street. Having seen Phillips a couple of years ago, I knew what to expect, but this time his performance was even more delightful. My friend and I somehow found ourselves standing directly in front of him as he played. And I mean directly. He commented that it was unusual for him to play for a roomful of people on their feet, but I think it added something; lots of people around us in the crowd were getting into it by singing along and shouting out requests for their favourite songs. It was superb. Even the £25 for two Red Bull-sized cans of red wine didn’t spoil the evening.
  

• Enjoyed hearing Michelle Shocked for the first time at this week’s Album Club.
• Was so sorry to hear that another school friend, Michael Lilley, had passed. I wasn’t close to Michael but we bumped into each other at the University of Warwick — he went straight there from school while I took a year out, so he was in the year above me — and he seemed very happy. The messages on his tribute page are wonderful and show how loved he was.
  

Media

Articles

• Richard articulates the possible enshittification coming for Strava after its upcoming IPO.
• The headline of this article is clickbaity, but the sentiment that the number one priority at Microsoft seems to be driving Copilot adoption rings very true. I see this as part of the attempt to keep the bubble going, with people scratching their heads as they wonder where all of the productivity gains will really manifest.
• Anil Dash articulates how weird everyone is being about AI and wants to see it treated as a normal technology. I completely relate to this. Even if you think that the approach to AI should be to wait and observe, that’s not what people want to hear or what they expect of you as a technology leader. It’s the equivalent of looking at the financial markets in 2006, prior to the crash, thinking that there is something amiss, and trying to make the case for moving a bunch of your investments to cash. Nobody will reward you for that in the short term while everything is heading to the moon.
  

Perhaps the biggest cost of ignoring the voices of the reasonable majority of those in tech is how it has grossly limited the universe of possibilities for the future. If we were to simply listen to the smart voices of those who aren’t lost in the hype cycle, we might see that it is not inevitable that AI systems use content without the consent of creators, and it is not impossible to build AI systems that respect commitments to environmental sustainability. We can build AI that isn’t centralized under the control of a handful of giant companies. Or any other definition of “good AI” that people might aspire to. But instead, we end up with the worst, most anti-social approaches because the platforms that have introduced “AI” to the public imagination are run by authoritarian extremists with deeply destructive agendas.

• Baldur Bjarnason has come to an understanding that software is “A creative medium driven by fashion that operates with limited regard for practicality or productivity.” There’s so much to this.
  

Video

• Trash Theory has a great new video that showcases “The Most Bizarre UK No. 1s of the 1990s”. It’s an underrated, eclectic decade.
• Parlogram has a great review of the new John Lennon and Yoko Ono box set. There’s so much debate online about whether the lead song from their Some Time In New York City album should have been included, but I do understand why they didn’t. Perhaps it’s best to look at this as an adjacent work, and if you want to hear the original album as intended you can easily purchase or stream it.
• Started watching Elliot Roberts’s new and incredibly long video about Ringo Starr. The work he puts into these videos is unbelievable. It’s not generally available on YouTube yet, but it will be well worth the wait.
• Continued watching Slow Horses on Apple TV. This series seems particularly slow, with the episodes too short to be satisfying.
  

Next week: More medical things and an online Album Club.