Weeknote 39
A week off, getting my running mojo back, finding some fossils, february cold water dip, getting ready to launch some things, context memory (again), interesting things
It was half term up here, unlike pretty much everywhere else in the country, so not much in the way of work this week. I did join a couple of calls and answer a couple of emails, but other than that not much client work.
What I did actually do...
My running has been off for a while. I dropped off at the back end of last year and then have found it hard to get going again. But this week has felt like I might be on the way back. Nothing major, but just some steady runs and feeling ok again. Maybe it's the weather or the lighter days, whatever it is, I'm happy to be running again.
Took a trip to Runswick bay. Last time I was here was when I was running the hardmoors 60 down the coast. Didn't have much time to enjoy it then. This time I managed to go fossil hunting and do my february cold water dip. Lovely!
Saw that a lot of people are jumping from chatGPT but worried about losing their 'memory'. I wrote a post about it
But one thing people have struggled with or have concerns about is losing their 'memory' - all the things your chosen LLM chat interface knows about you, that improves how it responds. This context memory is important, it's one of the ways platforms create moats. Yes you can get to this memory, but it's not always easy. Find the export, wait for the email, click the link, upload to a new platform etc. Now anthropic have been quite clever and gotten wind of this and created a switch process with a prompt - https://claude.com/import-memory . Nice.
But now you're just in Claude...what if they go (more) bad? What then? We are just relying on the ability to do this process again, and perhaps worse, we are relying on each platform to allow us that memory and hope it is one want to transfer. The more we give ourselves options, freedom, the better. It's why I've been vocal about building flexible api routes to be provider agnostic. And it's also something I wrote about in My Memory - A startup idea for 2026
It's the freedom bit I think is most important. Speaking of which
Doug has been busy on some bits on TechFreedom while I was off, and so we've played async ping pong over the last couple of weeks, but I think we are about ready to launch sign up for our first cohort. Read more here https://techfreedom.eu/manifesto/
Speaking of launching I'm also planning to soft launch a tool I built for Freelancers, myself included! Over the years I created systems to help manage proposals, clients, cashflow, time tracking. I've made them on paper, in spreadsheets, in airtable, notion you name it. All of them sort of worked without ever actually really working. They were all made in a few hours here and a few hours there. But over the past couple of months I've spent a proper amount of time actually creating something I want. Meet https://flowlance.io/
It handles time tracking, invoicing, contracts (including signatures and amendments), assisted proposal writing and cashflow forecasting (which has been a particularly interesting challenge to think through!). It's actually how I manage my work now.
Interesting things
- Cats in Japanese Folklore and Culture - From kawaii (cute) to kaibyo (supernatural)
- Stoat - Stoat is the chat app where you are the main character.
- Open Source in the age of AI - Early 2026 is a very weird time to be an open source maintainer. On the one hand, the burden of codebase maintenance has dropped dramatically. Small teams with long todo lists now have the ability to accomplish more than ever before. On the other hand, the dynamics of the software
- Computer Says Maybe
- "Made in EU" - it was harder than I thought. - I tried building my startup entirely on European infrastructure. Here's the stack I landed on, what was harder than expected, and what you still can't avoid.
- Leadership health metrics - Team health metrics focus on team performance, but leadership’s impact on teams is often overlooked. What if a leadership team’s effectiveness was measured too?
- Poverty Data Gaps - This data explorer has been produced as part of the Royal Statistical Society and Centre for Public Data’s research into poverty data gaps in the UK, funded by the Joseph Rowntree Foundation Insight Infrastructure team.
- Trapped in MS Office - Seeking IT independence, Europe wants to escape Microsoft Office. The question is: where to?
- not-knowing - Vaughn Tan - The organisations that we depend on — our governments, central banks, health agencies, multilaterals, major corporations — keep failing precisely
- Hackers Expose Age-Verification Software Powering Surveillance Web - Three hacktivists tried to find a workaround to Discord’s age-verification software.
- It’s a process; not a product – Terence Eden’s Blog
- Dougs weeknote including closing WAO - good composting
- Meet Thaura, your ethical AI companion