Weeknotes #372 — Born in the financial crisis

Waiting for a train at Chesham tube station. It’s always a bit surreal to jump onto a Metropolitan Line train so far out of the capital.

Despite last week being filled with illness and unexpected jobs that consumed me for days, it felt great to be back at my desk on Tuesday, so my time off must have been restful after all.

Over the weekend, my friend Nick texted me to ask how I planned to get to the office this week and whether I wanted to car share. I didn’t know what he was talking about. It turned out that the West Coast Main Line, which takes me from Berkhamsted to Euston, was undergoing some major upgrades and wouldn’t be open again until Thursday. Argh. The fallback route is taking the tube from Chesham, about 15 minutes’ drive from home. Taxis came to the rescue on Tuesday, and my wife helped me out on Wednesday. I never thought I’d miss the train service from Berkhamsted so much.

This was a week in which I:

Finished off a few jobs around the house on Monday, wondering out loud how a week had passed and that it was time to go back to work already.

Reviewed a draft request for quotations for some on-site technical training in one of our offices, and discussed the approach with the project manager.

Interviewed two more candidates for the developer role in my team. By the end of the week we had made a decision on who we want to bring on board. It’s taken a very long time to review CVs and interview for this role, but I’m a strong believer in holding on for the right person. Our company is a fantastic place to work, and we owe it to ourselves to be picky about the next person that we bring on board.

Met with a representative from one of our vendors to retrieve an ex-employee’s laptop.

Took part in our information risk committee meeting.

Attended our monthly Diversity, Equity and Inclusion Committee meeting.

Stepped in to chair the project meeting for fitting out and equipping our newest office as the project manager was on holiday. We had a brief handover before he left, where he brought me up to speed with the myriad of changes on the project.

Had a couple of meetings with someone on work experience in our office. Although they are the same age as my youngest son, it dawned on me that we now have people who were born in the financial crisis entering the workforce. Their questions were impressive and they seemed extremely polished.

Met with colleagues and representatives from a new vendor for a final review of our master services agreement.

Had one of our vendors come on-site to look at our recently installed boardroom table, determining where we need to drill holes for a table-mounted camera and cables for Teams Room consoles, as well as improving the setup of power delivery to USB charging sockets.

Ran a Lean Coffee session with our team, the first one I have chaired in a while.

Reviewed the input into our next formal governance committee meeting for one of our legal entities. I also attended one of these meetings on behalf of our department, reviewing business performance and leading the discussion on the relevant technology topics.

Took part in a discussion and planning session for how we might upskill our Technology team and our executives on AI outside of the broad education that is taking place across the rest of the organisation.

Met with a representative from a business school about a course that I have found to help plug a specific gap in my capabilities.

Decided to go ahead and buy the fourth hard disk drive for my RAID array after seeing the price trend graph at PCPartPicker. I shut down the NAS, added the drive, restarted it, and with some guidance from Claude, worked out how to kick off a RAID 5 to RAID 6 migration. This process ended up running for nearly four days after I kicked it off on Wednesday evening. It also got me thinking about how the big cloud providers manage things like this. I’d love to see a ‘behind-the-scenes’ video.

Waiting to buy another disk didn’t seem like the right option.

There were some wild swings in this number as the speed varied, but 96h turned out to be about right.

Decided to miss the Saturday morning club ride after the weather swung from 26°C on Wednesday to ‘feels like 1°C, with rain showers’ in just a few days. So many riders posted on Strava that they were frozen by the time they were done, so I didn’t regret my choice of jumping on the indoor trainer instead. However, I’ve realised that we’re now only three weeks away from the 2026 edition of London Wales London. I daren’t look at how my preparation this year compares to twelve months ago. I’ve started to look at the long-range forecast in the hope that the rain stays away; I won’t be riding if it will bucket down for the whole journey. I’m going to put my running on hold for a bit, just until this event is complete.

Media

Podcasts

I’ve subscribed to too many podcasts, many of which are now publishing too many episodes. (Increased quantity isn’t always a feature, podcast publishers.) For the ones I prioritise above all others and listen to religiously, I’m now about a month behind. I’m trying to catch up by being even better at treating it like a stream instead of a bucket, fast-forwarding episodes where I find myself tuning out of the content, or skipping complete episodes where the content doesn’t feel central to what I want to know about.

Paul Forde and Rich Ziade’s conversation about how consulting and development efforts should be priced in an age of AI is superb. What do you charge for your expertise at the start of a client relationship, when you can work on their problem and get some vibe-coded software stood up in a few hours, for a few dollars of tokens? There is so much to think about with this.

Rich: The first is acknowledging just how, like, exploding the mind this all is. This is the equivalent of me calling a restaurant saying, “Hey, we saw your website, we might want to book a reservation, but we’re not sure yet. Are you guys open Saturday?” And they’re like, “Yeah, we’re open Saturday.” “Okay, great. We’ll call you back.” And then an hour later, the restaurant’s van shows up, rolls out a leg of lamb on a spit, and says, “Well, listen, I don’t know if you’re booking this Saturday, but if you want to try the lamb, it’s here.”

Articles

Ian Betteridge’s article on Claude Mythos, which is apparently being held back from public use as it is so adept at finding vulnerabilities in software, raises some interesting points about how these models ‘learned’ bad behaviours of humans, that they now mimic. But I still struggle with the language we use when we talk about this type of software. ‘Training’ I can understand as a word to define a process of changing a model based on some data. ‘Learned’ is a bit more problematic for me as I wonder what it means for something to actually be ‘learned’. But I start to get very uneasy when we use phrases such as “Did Claude just blame its parents for its failings?” It anthropomorphises these computer programs way beyond my level of comfort. I catch myself doing it all the time, and it feels as though it takes quite a lot of cognitive load to keep my language about AI factual and reasonable. Baldur Bjarnason talked about this in a blog post last year:

You can’t trust your own instincts or judgement about Large Language Models and chatbots because they trigger a number of cognitive biases and psychological “effects” that short-circuit our judgement.

Because the capabilities of Claude Mythos are allegedly so dangerous, Anthropic, the owners of Claude, have created ‘Project Glasswing’. This gives access to security researchers so that they can get ahead of fixing defects in software before the model — or others like it — become generally available. Simon Willison thinks that this sounds necessary, and gives some good evidence as to why.

The African Union has called for the adoption of the Equal Earth projection, “on the grounds that it is a more fair and proportionate method of showing Africa’s true size and geographical significance in the world.” I fully endorse this idea.

It’s been a horrible week in global news. Ian Dunt is on blistering form when he says that “The battle against Trump is a battle against genocide”. When I read the timeline, it made my stomach turn. I remember seeing clocks on two channels in the news section of my cable TV box, NDTV and GB News, counting down to the deadline that Trump had set for Iran to reopen the Strait of Hormuz. When did people lose their humanity? Ian Dunt:

We do not know how many people felt death approach that night. We don’t know how people slept in Tehran, or Mashhad, or Isfahan. Did they imagine that this was their final night? Did they assume it could never happen? Did the children ask their parents if they were going to die? Did young lovers find ways to secretly meet each other before the bombs fell? Did friends arrange to spend their final hours together? Can we even begin to imagine the scale of the trauma that was inflicted upon them? And for what? For nothing.

Matt Haughey has written up how he has vibe-coded his own home dashboard. This has been on my to-do list for a while. I’d love to get something up and running like this on my home Yodeck player.

It looks like macOS Tahoe has a bug which causes it to crash after 49 days of uptime.

Tey Bannerman’s mapping of all of the Microsoft products named ‘Copilot’ is comforting in that it validates that the cognitive overload is real. As Ben Thompson recently said on an episode of Sharp Tech, someone at Microsoft has likely given staff a goal of including Copilot in everything, so this is what we’ve ended up with.

Video

Loved Something Very Bad Is Going To Happen on Netflix. It ended up getting less scary as the episodes progressed, but I found myself enjoying it more and more.

Watched most of The Tony Blair Story. I wonder if those first four years of his time in office as Prime Minister will remain the most politically happy of my lifetime. It illustrates why it is healthy to have changes of political leadership on a regular basis.

Finished the latest season of Shrinking. I’ve not loved this season as much as the earlier ones, but it still made me laugh.

Got an offer from MUBI to renew at a reduced rate of £5.99 a month. Despite rarely putting the time aside to watch movies, they run a service I want to exist, so this doesn’t feel like a hard thing to justify paying for.

Audio

For some reason this song by the almost forgotten Kiss AMC popped back into my consciousness this week. For a short time at the end of the 80s, this was on heavy rotation on MTV Europe, and the opening bars of New Year’s Day by U2 have always triggered a memory of this tune. I should have recalled it for my post on songs from this era of the channel.

Made a decision about what to play at next week’s in-person Album Club. I have a slightly scratchy original vinyl, but it sounds better than the more recent CD version. I’m excited to play it.

Books

Inspired by watching Something Very Bad Is Going To Happen, I bought The Definitive Guide to Horror Movies on Kindle for the giveaway price of £2.99. The 383 films are documented chronologically; the first few are from the 1920s, so they should be available in the public domain via YouTube.

Next week: Hosting Album Club, seeing Kae Tempest and meeting up with some old school friends.