📚🐴 The tale of the librarian and the horse

The sun is out! Is it out for you? 😎

When the high air pressure and cloudless skies return, I feel a surge return to my creativity. I’m having so many ideas at the moment about products, about blog posts, about the nature of technology itself.

When my current contract finishes (more on that next month) I’m going to get right to work on my next product idea. No spoilers yet as to what it is, but it’s got the working title of Shufflehorse. I even made a silly logo! (If you’re a designer who might want some pennies to make this logo actually look good, let me know!)

And I also finally decided where I’m going to go on holiday this year… and it’s 🇲🇹 Malta! For my special interest (geopolitical history) this place seems so fascinating and I want to try to see all of it in five days. (It is possible: have you ever been on holiday with an autistic person?) If you’ve got tips for my visit to Malta, I want to hear them! You can reply to this email or click the button below. (And I know I’ve already missed out on seeing the Hypogeum. 🙁)

Send me a message?

There are two new posts this month on topics that I’ve not seen people covering before. I hope you enjoy them!

I’ve been professing this technique for getting internal documentation written for years but only this month did I come up with a memorable name for it. Maybe give it a try with your own internal documentation and let me know how it goes? Let’s celebrate our colleagues’ barfing!

I’m trying to be a bit controversial here and maybe I won’t win any favours with bosses who are insistent on their colleagues coming into the office to work. But I really think it’s possible to create all the same conditions for success when people are permitted to work from home. But it doesn’t come for free - it has to be wanted and worked at, and that’s where some of my tips might come in handy.

Read more on the blog

PS. My “new” blog is now long enough that this month I had to work out how to break the index into pages. Not as simple as you might think for a static site!

Anyone who knows me will know that I think generative AI is a fascinating (and useful) technology, but that it is not quite the saviour of humanity that some people are making it out to be.

I’ve seen a lot of takes on this but this week I really loved this short video by Hank Green, in which he talks about the age of AI moving us from an “intelligence-constrained world” to a “wisdom-constrained world”.

I’d really recommend the whole video but I loved this quote:

It is obviously true that it will be easier for AI to create a cancer drug than it will be to get that cancer drug to all the people who need it. […] The cancer doesn’t care if the drug exists; it is not going to be affected by the existence of a drug that is not being given to a patient.

Let me know what you think of Hank’s view. Do you agree?

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