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Weeknotes #376 — One Stop

Voting time for the local council elections in Holborn, London. I walk past this lovely London street on my commute to work.
Voting time for the local council elections in Holborn, London. I walk past this lovely London street on my commute to work.

A four-day week due to the plainly named Early May bank holiday in the UK. Recovery from the big bike ride felt good; unlike the year before, I had no major after-effects apart from slightly stiff legs and feeling thirsty for a couple of days. I recounted the tale of the ride to colleagues who humoured me when they found themselves hearing my stories for a second or third time.

Following a long ride, after a couple of days’ recovery, I inevitably find myself scouring the Audax UK website looking for the next adventure. London-Anglesey-London looks particularly interesting and somewhat ridiculous, covering 1,000 km in 75 hours. You set off at 10pm, riding overnight and through the first day to get the first 400 km done. After a sleep you then tackle 300 km on each of days two and three. I haven’t been able to find much about the ride online apart from this gorgeous video made back in 2022. My experience of almost falling asleep on the bike makes me very hesitant about tackling something like this. Riding with a friend would work, but over that distance it is difficult to be sure that you will keep riding together, if you could even find someone who is willing to give it a go in the first place.

This was a week in which I:

  • Attended our divisional technology Architecture Board meeting, joining it from my pocket on Teams as I walked to the City from Euston. It got me thinking about how and where decisions are made and who is in the room. Sometimes there are lots of good questions, but the people who need to hear them and answer them aren’t part of the group. But you can’t have everyone in the room in one giant meeting. Governance is hard.
  • Continued to explore the concept of ‘architecture as a service’, meeting up with different contacts in two separate meetings to discuss what we’re looking for. We’ve got another conversation lined up for next week as well as the names of some vendors to talk to. The discussions helped us to refine what it is that we’re looking for.
  • Met with colleagues to review responses to a request for proposal for a technology fit-out of one of our offices, agreeing how we will proceed.
  • Had some catch-up meetings with a colleague who has recently been out of the office for a while. It’s so good to have them back.
  • Met with colleagues to review updates to the dashboards that are being delivered by one of our projects.
  • Had a meeting with an analyst from our technology research and consulting vendor, discussing the market for alternative tools to in the data governance/compliance space. Our analyst had only recently left Microsoft, and it was interesting to hear a bit about the history of the product.
  • Joined an online ‘show and tell’ event hosted by the people at the heart of the nascent Society of Hopeful Technologists. There has been a lot of hard work behind the scenes, and some exciting plans for the future. I’ve not been able to keep up to date with the chats in the Signal groups in real time, but when I do catch up there are always so many interesting things in them.
  • Started digging into Model Context Protocol (MCP), a standard for making tools available to large language model-powered systems. Lots of the tools that I use — Remember The Milk, Drafts, Readwise — already have implementations that can be trivially connected to AI tools such as ChatGPT and Claude. I connected Remember The Milk and Drafts to Claude Cowork and started discussing how I might tweak my information workflow. It was interesting context to catch up with Simon Willison’s post on MCP’s prompt injection problems.
  • Had to get the Metropolitan Line to Chesham one evening when the mainline trains from Euston stopped working. Taking the Met Line actually results in a cost saving on my train fare, although there is often a £20 cab ride when I get there. This time I had the good fortune to be on the Tube with a friend, whose kind husband picked us up from the station.
  • Changed our eldest son’s flight back from the US for the summer break. It’s hard to believe that he’s been gone for the best part of a year already.
  • Enjoyed a fantastic club ride on a fast, flat route that took us north of the Chiltern Hills. Now that summer is here — or, at least, it’s light earlier in the morning — we’re setting off 30 minutes earlier and doing longer rides, typically over 80 km instead of our usual 60 km.

Media

Articles

The Prime Minister’s greatest failure is his operational absence. British politics relies on a figure at the top setting the path forward. They tell a story about what they are trying to do. This story forms their electoral mandate and it guides the civil service in what the prime minister wants. It grants ministers authority. It directs spending decisions. It resolves disputes between government departments.

Under Starmer, this guiding effort has been almost completely absent. Outside of net zero and, to a certain extent, housing, there has been a complete absence of leadership.

  • ‘Together Mode’ in Teams is being retired. I don’t think I ever sat through a whole meeting with it turned on. It was a fun gimmick at the start of the pandemic, when so many people were adjusting to life on video calls, but never seemed like the optimal way to view other participants in the virtual room. Even slight differences in how close people sat to their cameras resulted in silly sizing issues between everyone in the meeting.
  • My recent NAS RAID rebuild after a couple of drive failures was time-consuming and expensive. It’s hard to imagine what it takes to keep 210 petabytes of material online at the Internet Archive, but it’s getting more difficult and much more expensive. If you ever use the Internet Archive, Wikipedia or any other sites that store vast amounts of reference material, now would be a good time to set up a regular donation.
  • I had not previously heard of ‘Browsergate’, where LinkedIn are allegedly cataloguing installed extensions on people’s browsers. This is data that they can trivially link to individuals, because those individuals are logged into LinkedIn and are visiting it in their web browser.
  • Research on whether one ‘bad apple’ can ruin your team:

Putting up with a nightmare person might feel like part of the normal ups and downs of team work, but the research shows that it imposes an invisible tax on everyone else in the group.

Also, shout out to the good apples: if you’ve got someone who can keep the team flowing in harmony, who can help everyone stay on track despite the moaning around them, then they’re probably doing more for the team than they get credited with. Your good apples must be protected at all costs.

Video

Audio

  • Only realised on Wednesday that a new Aldous Harding album was being released on Friday. I ordered a copy via Bandcamp and the vinyl turned up at my house on the day of release. Very impressive.

Books

Next week: A friend’s book launch.

Published

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