Weeknotes #362 — Continental quilts

This felt like another tough week. At the start, I was feeling run down, which I think was an after-effect of Saturday’s bike ride. Work was really busy, with multiple days consisting of back-to-back meetings, pretty much all day. It required a lot of focus to keep all of the plates spinning.

This was a week in which I:

• Tried to push forward with the work to prepare for a new office in a country that we added to our footprint last year. The Microsoft Copilot Researcher agent was very useful in helping me to find prospective building contractors and IT integrators. I remember some late nights back in 2019 where I was trying to find similar firms in Brazil, doing the research through manual web searches and phone calls from a hotel room in Dubai. The AI Researcher agent massively accelerates this process. Because we don’t have anyone from our team on the ground in-country on a permanent basis, we are looking to contract some local project management capability to help us coordinate things. This week, we had an introductory meeting with someone who should be able to help us with this.
• Wrestled with more comments and complaints about the construction noise from the floor above us in our office. There’s very little we can do besides a ‘Shawshank Redemption’ strategy of writing and sending a note every day. I’m just hoping that tea crates full of library books don’t suddenly show up in six months’ time.
• Had to wrestle with last-minute schedule changes for reopening a communal area within our office building and getting communications out to staff.
• Reviewed the work a colleague had put together on how our department can contribute to the business strategy of our region. We reviewed it with our CIO and, later in the week, with our regional Business Manager. We are on the right lines.
• Represented our department at one of our legal entity regional Governance Committee meetings.
• Took part in a stress testing workshop, looking at various macroeconomic scenarios and determining their impact on our ongoing operations. This is part of a mandatory regulatory process.
• Reviewed a draft slide deck planned to be used at a divisional level to tell a story about our Technology department’s achievements over recent years. Collaborated with colleagues to determine what our input into this process should be.
• Participated in a ‘dry run’ of the process we plan to take colleagues through as part of our document management project. A hard but very useful exercise that has given us a bunch of things to think about and actions to follow up with.
• Caught up with our sister company’s Head of Corporate Services to talk through some key building-related issues and upcoming changes. Also had the weekly project check-in for their construction project with both the outgoing and incoming project managers.
• Made some minor updates to a draft contract between our company and our sister firm, which hopefully is now ready for final review and signing.
• Attended the kick-off meeting for an internal audit that will look at certain security aspects of the technology setup across our organisation.
• Took part in our development team’s retrospective and sprint planning.
• Started to look at CVs for a software developer role in my team.
• Had a follow-up meeting with our key infrastructure support vendor and our internal team on a proposed technical change to our support process.
• Spent time thinking about the philosophy of software and firmware updates in our environment, and what change governance is needed for anything that is applied manually.
• Had the regular meeting with colleagues from our Diversity, Equity and Inclusion Forum.
• Submitted a nomination for a colleague to win our most prestigious internal award. I’ve tried to nominate them a few times over the past few years as they really deserve it, but haven’t been successful yet.
• Attended an interesting webinar run by law firm Bird & Bird called AI Disputes Decoded where they reviewed recent litigation in the AI space. They covered Getty v Stability AI, Gema vs OpenAI, Kadrey et al vs Meta Platforms, and New York Times, Daily News vs OpenAI & Microsoft. It was very factual, with the hosts giving an overview of key points from each case and things to think about. Although there was a Q&A, they didn’t answer the questions that I submitted:
  • Is there a difference between the LLMs ingesting fiction and non-fiction as part of their training, and how much this can infringe copyright? Reading an LLM version of a fiction work would likely be a poor facsimile and therefore it could be argued that it doesn’t diminish the value of the original work. For non-fiction, the content can be much more ‘useful’ and using an LLM could potentially bypass the reason for purchasing a copy of the book.
  • If someone exercises an ‘opt out’ for their content after a model has been trained, does this have implications for models needing to be discarded and retrained on data sets that exclude the works that have opted out? Is this practicable?
• Spent a lot of time reading through Manuel Moreale’s blog archive. I came for his People and Blogs interview series but stayed for his other posts. The whole site is presented so beautifully, with a list of past posts at the bottom of every page, that it made it a joy to browse. I’ve moved towards using my iPad mini as my primary reading device as it gives me access to Kindle books, RSS feeds via Feedbin, articles I’ve saved later in Readwise Reader, etc. Browsing a well-designed blog as the author intended it to be presented is fun.
• Inspired by Manuel Moreale’s and Annie Mueller’s blogs, I spent a few hours changing the front page of my site to a similar chronological list of all of my previous posts.¹ I think this is a much friendlier format to the casual reader, who can now see at a glance the types of things I’ve been writing about instead of being plunged straight into the content of the latest post. ChatGPT was a great help to me in finding a tool that would display the list and then customising it so it looks the way I want it to. I’d love to have the web design chops to make the whole site look aesthetically pleasing — it’s far from that right now — but will settle for these tweaks.
• Continued dealing with issues with our house. We’ve accepted a quote to repair our roof as well as another for an electric roof lantern blind. I’ve also had to chase up the wastewater company about our collapsed drain as it isn’t clear what the next steps are.
• Enjoyed a Saturday morning ride with the cycling club. 65km felt super easy compared with the 250km monster we tackled last week.
• Loved hearing from my son who competed in Boston at the weekend. At Harvard University, his team won the race, beating the school record in the distance medal relay by more than 16 seconds. Unfortunately, the next day he was on the receiving end of a spiked shoe during his race at Boston University and ended up with a DNF. I’m sure he’ll recover quickly and is already looking forward to the next event.
• Went to a Burns supper event at our son’s school on Friday night. They put a tremendous amount of effort into the evening, but I wasn’t feeling it after a long week of work.
• Had so much fun on Saturday night at our friends’ house, singing karaoke songs from not long after we arrived until it was time to go. There are few things I love more than a karaoke evening.
  

Media

Podcasts

• Hearing Esther Ghey on the Guardian’s Politics Weekly UK podcast be so honest, open and clear-headed about her experiences, and what she is putting her energy into now in campaigning for an Australian-style social media ban, made me sit up and listen. I have been noticing more people wondering whether social media will prove to be one big terrible experiment in the long term.
• I liked Naomi Smith’s dream wish list for government bills to be in the upcoming King’s speech on the Quiet Riot podcast:
  
  • An act that would crystallise beneficial regulatory alignment with the EU. This is to avoid ‘passive divergence’ where the EU updates its regulations but we don’t follow. It will give businesses some certainty and will help us to be prepared for any closer relationship we may want in the future. In her words, “We know that if you align on goods, you can claw back about a third of the GDP we’ve lost from Brexit. If you align on goods and services, you could be clawing back about half of that GDP. And that allows you to fund all the other things that you’d like to do and tackle living standards crisis here in the UK.”
  • A commitment to reform the electoral system. As far as I can tell, nobody is happy with how things work today. 404 out of 650 MPs are currently Labour, and they won their massive majority with just 33.7% of the popular vote. In 2010, UKIP got almost 920,000 votes, 3.1% of the share, but ended up with no MPs at all. I never agreed with UKIP’s policies in any way, but I think it is a travesty that three in every hundred people in the country that voted for them were not represented in Parliament. Moving to some kind of proportional representation would mean that the work of the government, and Parliament, would be much more shaped by compromise. I think this would be a very good thing. But it needs the current government to want it to change, even though it will reduce their numbers. If they don’t do it, we risk having a far-right government in the UK with an absolute majority at the next election. It would also give confidence to our neighbours and trading partners that we won’t lurch violently one way and another every time we have a general election.
  • Land value taxation, including re-rating properties for council tax for the first time since 1993, moving us to a fairer system.
    

Articles

• I like this post from Christiano Anderson that defines both the IndieWeb and the Small web.
• Loren Stephens’ post on Life before social media is so good I sent it to my family. It’s an example of the narrative I mentioned earlier that social media may ultimately be looked at as a thing that was unhealthy for us.
• Ton Zylstra comments on Vimeo apparently laying off a big chunk of its staff. I’ve tended to reach for Vimeo first when uploading video that I wanted to share as it seemed to be a better, classier place than YouTube. Another reminder that nothing is permanent on the Internet.
• Read about Moltbook, “a social network where digital assistants can talk to each other”, via Simon Willison. Gary Marcus wrote a good summary of the story so far. There does seem to be a late 1990s/early 2000s feel to things in the generative AI space, where new experiments are popping up on a regular basis.
• I’ve said before that I love how thoughtful Manton Reece is with the Micro.blog platform. His approach to AI is no exception. There are experiments that will be available to people on the platform, but there is also a master kill switch for people who want nothing to do with AI whatsoever.
  

Video

• Gave up on season two of Hijack just a few minutes into the second episode. I don’t think Idris Elba is a particularly good actor — he seems to play the same character in everything — and he was the best thing about it. The storyline is completely ridiculous. I realise that with fiction you always need to suspend disbelief a little, but this show requires you to leave your brain somewhere else. Utter rubbish.
• Reading about Melania (2026) first had me laughing at the stories of poor ticket sales. But then I heard about who attended the private premiere of the film at the White House (which happened to take place on the same day that Alex Pretti was killed in Minneapolis), and how the movie was directed by someone previously accused of sexual assault (which he denies) who also appears in the Epstein files. The movie currently has a rating of 1.3/10 on IMDb and 1.2/5 on Letterboxd. I shall not be watching.
• Finished season two of Platonic, a show that I’ve fallen in love with. Every episode made me laugh out loud multiple times and I was so disappointed to reach the end.
• Rolled straight into watching season three of Shrinking. After watching Platonic, I feel as though I am enjoying this a little less, but it’s still nice to have the characters back with us again.
• BBC Archive is killing it again with a short video report on duvets from 1974 (which I distinctly remember being referred to as ‘continental quilts’ when they first turned up in our house.)
• Music Mongoose has a good profile of British folk band The Strawbs. They used to play at The White Bear in Hounslow, a pub that my grandparents ran and my mum grew up in. I’ve inherited all of my grandparents’ Strawbs LPs, including a couple of white label pressings of some of their early albums.
  

Audio

• I grabbed some tickets to go and see the new documentary, It’s Never Over, Jeff Buckley (2025), next week. After finding Jeff Buckley Live in Chicago last week I’ve been down a couple of YouTube rabbit holes listening to his music. His live cover of Elton John’s We All Fall In Love Sometimes is sublime.

• When I’m in the groove, enjoying an artist’s work, I do like to see what good reaction videos there are out there. Watching someone hear a song that you love for the first time is like playing a track to a friend and seeing them enjoy it. Anna Vaskelainen is a vocal coach from Finland who has posted a wonderful reaction to Jeff Buckley performing Grace at the BBC in 1995. The original is here, including Buckley’s reaction to the presenter saying that he sounds like his dad, Tim Buckley.

Web

• Intrigued by the upcoming talk at the local Civic Centre on ‘Berkhamsted in 50 Buildings’.
• I thought that my friend was speaking metaphorically when he said that back in the 1980s people appeared on TV for doing unusual things like the guy who ate a whole aeroplane. Turns out that this was literal. “Lotito died of natural causes at age 55”; of course he did.
  

Books

• Finished reading Indie Microblogging by Manton Reece.
• Continued reading Humankind: A Hopeful History by Rutger Bregman.
  

Next week: A trip to the cinema and a day off to visit my in-laws.

1. The ones with titles, anyway. Posts without titles can all be found in the Snippets archive. ↩