• Ok, admittedly, that didn’t get off to the best start. So I’m writing last week’s weeknotes and I’ve missed/skipped a few weeks.
  • Work ate my weeknotes. It’s been very distracting and busy in work recently. To the point where, at the end of the day, if I’m not on my bike or cooking, I flop in a chair, the dog spoons my leg, and I nod off.
  • I hate this time of year. November. January to March. At least in April there is the promise of spring and summer. Things are waking up. It’s lighter. November and December is just dark, wet, and windy. Christmas and Emma’s birthday in January are short blips in week after week of dreary monotony. At least I have some cycling goals next year so I can focus on getting fit again.
  • Speaking of which, GCN Plus is shutting down! I’ve really enjoyed being a subscriber this past few years. Some really great content, good value for money to watch the live racing, but cycling’s bubble has well and truly burst and with it the pulling back from Discovery off offering the content. So, back to Eurosport or pay up for a Discovery Plus account.
  • A highlight of my weekend this weekend was fixing a Dyson vacuum cleaner. It’s the small pleasures. This handheld Dyson was telling me it was blocked. I literally took the whole thing apart. What do SpaceX call it? A Rapid Unscheduled Disassembly. It wasn’t quite the explosion we saw this past couple of days with their rocket, but let me tell you, I now know there are 5 different sizes of screw, and human hair is very tough when tightly wrapped around an roller. I fixed it, though. A tiny grub screw jammed the roller (not the hair), and stopped it turning.
  • I’m in London for the week. It’s very quiet in the office. Monday’s and Friday’s are optional work-at-home days. So I’m sat here listening to the steady hum of the air conditioning and gentrification works taking place outside in the street.
  • A couple of months ago a taxi driver in London spent a solid 30 minutes telling me how all across the east end of London they are adding too many plan pots and closing streets to cars. He was just so mad about it. ‘Who needs more bloody plants!? It’s just all this gentrification. Leave it as it is!’ he spat at me. I disagreed. I remember the east end of London twenty odd years ago and I thought it was grim. No plants. All bricks and concrete.
  • So AI all blew up and Microsoft has made a fortune this last year. Have you used ChatGPT in a useful way? Like, a really useful way? I tried asking it to write some javascript for me. It worked nicely. Yesterday, I asked it for a recipe for Shepherds Pie, using grams and quantities, and it missed one vital ingredient – tomato puree. You see, that’s my issue with ChatGPT. It has no opinion. What you get, when you ask it something, is a mashup of everything it’s consumed. Just unopinionated word salad. It’s not intelligent at all. It’s an approximation machine full of weird inflections.
  • There’s a well-trodden path in sci-fi, particularly any sort of Gibsonian cyborg culture sci-fi. It’s where something is almost human, but never quite is. Even the most sophisticated replicas have their tells. The tiny things that either don’t make sense, or are a hint towards a programmatic rather than a human background. Origami unicorns.
  • Speaking of sci-fi, I’m going to watch The Creator tonight. I shall report back.