Weeknotes #380 — 85%

Last weekend’s sore throat and feeling parched after a very warm cycle ride turned into something else on Monday. It started as a head cold and then later in the week worked its way down into my chest. I didn’t have any kind of fever; it felt as though I was running at about 85%, enough to be a little frustrating but not enough to keep me away from work. The week consisted of copious amounts of tissues, menthol lozenges and smoothies.

I’ve read somewhere that if you’re ill from the neck up, it’s still OK to do a cardio workout, but if you have a fever or something in your chest then exercise can prolong the illness. I skipped my midweek bike trainer session but by Friday I was itching to do something, so I hopped back in the saddle and had a long indoor ride on Saturday morning too. The cumulative effect of being slightly ill, having a long week of work and then doing some exercise meant that I found myself drifting off to sleep like an old man as soon as I sat down to watch anything on TV.

This was a week in which I:

Joined the team for an impromptu ‘all-hands’ meeting for one of our projects and completed a review of a couple of key project documents after the meeting.

Had an interesting discussion with a member of my team about how we organise our work and changes we could make for us to be more effective. We also looked at their priorities for the next few weeks before they take leave from the end of July.

Reviewed more RFP responses related to the setup of a new office.

Spent more time on one of our projects, getting into the detail of how we will make an architectural change to one of our platforms and the implications it will have. There are strong opinions about what we are doing and the speed at which we are doing it.

Dived into the task of finding out whether, how and how effectively one of our SaaS vendors manages their disaster recovery processes. It was great to find that they have a ‘Trust and Security Center’ where you can view the outcomes of independent reviews. I guess at some point your company reaches the size where investing in a portal like this makes sense. It was super handy and gave me exactly what I needed, without having to speak to anyone at the company.

Started planning our upcoming management team offsite meeting, something that was delayed from the start of the year. I spent some time researching and contacting a few different organisations to help us with the event, talking to two suppliers and lining up a meeting with another next week.

Caught up with an old colleague to talk about our need for a fractional technical architect role.

Enjoyed our monthly Lean Coffee meeting.

Met with two young people who were in our office for work experience. I love doing things like this. Having seen many people on work experience over the past few years, I find it fascinating how different they are and how varied the lines of questioning can be.

Booked some time off in order to utilise my ‘use it or lose it’ remaining leave days.

Had to negotiate the Tube strike during a rain-filled week. With the notable exception of walking home on Tuesday, I somehow managed to completely avoid the rain on my commutes. A colleague also discovered, bizarrely, that the Circle Line via Hammersmith was still running — an oasis in a sea of dead Underground lines — so I could hop on that to get between Euston Square and Moorgate.

Caught up with our personal financial adviser to look at our projected costs for the next few years in a bit more detail.

Had a weekend at home with my two boys as my wife went off for a well-deserved long weekend in Portugal with her friends. The whole weekend felt like a long series of home admin tasks with some breaks for shopping, cooking and watching the F1.

Ditched the club ride due to the rainy weather and made it onto the bike trainer instead, doing a two-hour session for the first time in a while. It was a big help in trying to get back on top of my podcast backlog, where I always seem to be a month behind. I worried that I’d overdone it as I wasn’t feeling great for the rest of Saturday, but a big sleep that night made all the difference. I made it out for a run on Sunday and felt good afterwards. Maybe I’ve just been a bit exhausted.

Media

Podcasts

Really enjoyed this episode of the Aboard podcast, where Paul Ford describes a personal software project to create a custom newsletter for himself using a bunch of RSS feeds and AI. It made me think of Scour, the very cool tool that Evan Schwartz is building that does a similar job.

Articles

Bradley Olson reports in the Wall Street Journal that “Corporate America Is Starting to Ration AI as Cost Skyrockets”. Whether I’m using Copilot, Claude or ChatGPT, I’ve developed the habit of checking the model before submitting a query and ensuring that it’s on the most recent, most ‘thinking’ version. I wonder whether this choice will be taken away at some point in order to keep costs down.

Just a few months ago, the prevailing sentiment around AI use at many big companies was the more, the better. All-you-can-eat subscriptions amounted to a subsidy by the model-makers, which often lost money on the intensive activity of power users. Exhorted to embrace the wave of change, employees at some companies engaged in tokenmaxxing, or using as much computing as possible in order to be seen as AI-forward—a practice that continued even as the model companies shifted to usage-based pricing.

Matan Grinberg, chief executive of coding automator Factory, said one executive at a top financial institution told him his employees were burning hundreds of thousands of dollars a month on tokens. Some, the executive said, were using powerful premium-tier models to answer the simplest of questions, or just engage in small talk.

“If your daughter needs tutoring in algebra, you can probably find someone cheaper than Albert Einstein,” he said.

Jamie John in the Financial Times reports on young people’s growing unhappiness with AI. Anecdotally, there does seem to be a growing backlash, particularly in the US.

Heather Burns posted about what looks like a very interesting symposium at the University of Edinburgh on “Rewilding the Web: Diversity & Resilience in Sociotechnical Infrastructure”. I love how she skilfully writes a post that is informative and celebratory whilst simultaneously calling out bad behaviour by a large corporate organisation.

Speaking of bad behaviour, the topic of Google Chrome came up in conversation at work this week. I’d glimpsed the story from a few weeks ago about how it silently installs a 4GB AI model on your device without users’ consent but hadn’t read the detail at the time. Chrome is almost the generic default browser for most people and is now abusing that position. It may not take much for companies to decide that they don’t want it on their standard desktop build.

My wallet is pretty excited that some waste ground not far from where we live will soon be turned into a Lidl store. Opening early next year, apparently.

Ted Chiang’s forcefully argued and well-reasoned philosophical essay in The Atlantic that artificial intelligence is not conscious is excellent.

Being open to the possibility that LLMs are conscious is the same as being open to the possibility that Microsoft Word is conscious, or, more precisely, that multiple distinct consciousnesses are dormant in every Word document containing a conversational transcript, and that they are awakened every time the document is loaded. Should you consider the possibility that every time you open a Word document, you are bringing multiple conscious interlocutors into existence, and every time you close one, you snuff their existence out? No. Contemplating that scenario is not a good use of your time.

According to Cloudflare, bot traffic has now exceeded human traffic on the web.

Video

Finished watching series two of The Assembly, including the episode with Rylan and another episode of bits and bobs that were cut from the main show. It’s superb.

Continued watching Paradise, but three episodes in, I’m still not convinced. If I could never watch another episode, I think that would be fine.

Finally got around to watching Portrait of a Lady on Fire and can see why it is so critically acclaimed. I’m sure this is a film that could easily be rewatched, where you would notice a whole lot of subtle things that you didn’t spot the first time around.

Audio

Enjoyed this Trash Theory episode on the Sneaker Pimps and how their delusions of grandeur and the sacking of their lead singer led to their demise.

Web

Is AI profitable yet? No.

What is the opposite of enshittification? Last.fm have announced that they are becoming an independent company.

Books

Continued with Kae Tempest‘s Having Spent Life Seeking. It’s fine, but not gripping.

Next week: Two days of work and two different conferences.