Weeknotes #299 — Hedonic adaptation

Magdalena Bay on stage at HERE at Outernet, London, 13 November 2024

The day had come to re-open our office following all of the mechanical, engineering, technology and decorative works that had been done over the past three months. At the start of last week it felt very touch-and-go that we would be ready on time, but the team were incredible. The office looked, felt and smelled great; the final carpet clean had given the whole place a ‘new car’ smell.

The stakes were high as we had our new CEO in town as well as our Group CEO, and a special breakfast organised by our Marketing and Communications team. In last week’s Steering Committee meeting, we agreed that as Programme Manager I would say a few words to everyone in the office to welcome them back. I’d written and rehearsed a short speech but was conscious of trying to make it look organic, so in the end I printed it on an A5-sized sheet of paper and just used it for reference while I held a mic in my other hand.

As I packed up to leave the office on Monday evening, I checked in with a member of our Helpdesk team to find out how his day had been. His response of “I’ve had busier Mondays” left me smiling. I don’t think the reopening could have gone better.

When I hit a big milestone, I always find it difficult to get straight onto the next thing. There’s definitely a ‘post-launch depression’ that lingers for a couple of days. It was interesting to hear Paul Forde and Rich Ziade talk about this phenomenon on a recent episode of their podcast:

Rich: …I gotta tell you, I’ve launched a lot of products, like full products, that the world was kind of waiting for. The day after the euphoric day of launching and things went okay? It’s kind of quiet. Why? Because people are living their lives and your product’s not that important. It is a very depressing day. It’s actually really hard. You can’t believe there isn’t a ticker-tape parade down the street after you launch. And the world doesn’t work that way. And it feels very deflating.

Paul: This is real. I’ve often advised people on sort of post-launch depression. It’s very…

Rich: [laughing] It’s a real thing.

By the middle of the week I’d started to make good inroads on the fifteen other priorities that have been neglected over the past few weeks as we hit our big programme milestones.

It’s amazing how quickly hedonic adaptation takes place. By the end of the first week, most people will be used to their new desks, new chairs, and the new functionality and decor of the office. In some ways, I’m glad that we still have some visible enhancements to complete and that we didn’t get everything done ahead of our move back.

This was a week in which I:

Wrote up the minutes for last week’s Steering Committee.

Changed the scope of the remaining works for our office with our construction vendor, following feedback from the team.

Met with our audio/visual design company to get me back up to speed with one of our projects and agree what we will be doing over the next couple of weeks.

Discussed plans for new boardroom tables with our furniture vendor.

Had our monthly meeting to agree on the value of the work done so far by our construction vendor.

Set up and ran a workshop to review and brainstorm ideas in response to some physical changes that will be taking place near our office over the next couple of years.

Met with Internal Audit to give them an overview of our business and technology architecture.

Spoke to our technical account manager at our SD-WAN network provider, following up with some feedback I gave the company at the recent Gartner Symposium/Xpo.

Met with colleagues to talk through the next steps in the process of opening up a new office, with a focus on physical security.

Had a catch-up with a vendor to talk about the services they offer and to discuss how we might use them more extensively in future.

Started turning my attention to 2025 and what the shape of the year might be.

Popped into the leaving drinks of a colleague who is going back to Johannesburg after being with us in London for a while.

Listened to a fascinating talk by our Group CEO. He always speaks with such clarity, making the case for investment and business in Africa. I learned that:

Ethiopia is the first country in the world to ban the import of all internal combustion engine-powered cars.

South Africa is ranked fourth for budget transparency in the Open Budget Survey, just behind Georgia, New Zealand and Sweden.

After the most recent elections, political parties in South Africa agreed to form a Government of National Unity after just a couple of weeks of negotiations. In other democracies this process has recently taken hundreds of days.

Enjoyed our weekly Learning Hour session, hearing about the products and priorities of our Infrastructure and Operations team.

Demonstrated our digital signage solution and ultrawide digital display to representatives from our sister company.

Attended a webinar hosted by Leesman on The Value of Variety. One of the conclusions for me was that the best and most effective workplaces have unassigned seating with a good variety of places to work.

Helped a friend to fix his Sonos system that had stopped working after the lightning storm a couple of months ago. We had to faff around with resetting each of his units and using the app on my iPhone as opposed to his Android device to get it working. I don’t understand how non-technical people are expected to wrestle with this.

Got to see Magdalena Bay in concert for the second time. I’d decided to go on my own; I didn’t know any other enthusiasts for the band and wanted to make sure I secured a ticket.1 I’ve not taken to their new album quite as quickly as I did their earlier work, but the songs sounded great live.

Spent time messing around with Bluesky and Mastodon like it’s 2009. This week felt like Bluesky suddenly reached critical mass with tons of well-known people turning up on the platform. As fun as it is — and it can be fun — in some ways I wish I wasn’t sucked into it. Playing around reminded me of why I had taken a meaningful and conscious step back. As good as the platforms can be, I find them exhausting and not great for my mental well-being.

Media

Podcasts

Your Undivided Attention continued the conversation from the previous week’s episode about the harms being done — literally deaths being caused — by chatbots that are set up specifically for companionship. As difficult as the subject matter is, the episode contains some interesting thoughts.

The principle that platforms are not responsible for what users create on them may not be true if the users are creating chatbot ‘characters’ using an underlying large language model that is not user-generated.

There is a view that a chatbot is a ‘blinking cursor’ that will only respond to your input, and therefore you bear the majority of the responsibility for using the tool. However, does this still hold true when the chatbot continues a conversation with you, unsolicited?

Apparently, when the character.ai chatbot app was originally listed on the mobile app stores it was rated for users aged 12 and above. Google featured it as an editor’s pick app for kids, despite the company saying that user inputs would be used to retrain their model.

It’s amazing to me how quickly we got from the release of ChatGPT to these kinds of problems being surfaced. The philosophy of ‘move fast and break things’ can have dreadful consequences.

Ben Thompson’s Stratechery interview with Understanding AI author Timothy B. Lee was revealing when he spoke about his own use of ChatGPT:

So yeah, definitely, I don’t want to say never use it or it’s not useful. It’s definitely useful, but it’s 1% to 2% more productive over the course of a week rather than really transformational.

Video

Finished watching Rivals on Disney+. Not life-changing, but a lot of fun with excellent casting.

Charged through Boybands Forever on iPlayer over the course of two evenings. I was amazed at how many Five and 911 songs that I knew, without knowing that they were the bands behind them. I love a slice of pop culture, and this programme was perfect.

So pleased that Bad Sisters is back. Season one was superb. I love having a show to watch where you can’t consume the whole thing in one evening.

Audio

Still continuing to have Tears for Fears earworms. I started exploring the different versions of Mothers Talk and came across this video which has strong BBC Micro 3D Maze vibes.

Next week: A four-day week packed with meetings from beginning to end, and a visit to the physio.

It turns out that Sky News’ Sam Coates is one of them, though. I walked past him as I went to retrieve my coat and bag from the automated locker.