Weeknote 64

What I did

• I caught up with Jo about The List. The website version is a year old now! Here's some stats I put together

• Pretty wild really for a spreadsheet that I threw a website and database together for. It shows how valuable the information and community that Jo has built. The website is just the method, not the thing. Always remember that.
  
  It costs about £50 a month just in email and database costs for The List at the moment. We got some good news this week that at least the hosting costs will be covered for the next year.
  
  I had to do some maintenance this week as The amount of info has grown. Beyond that I've got plans to do a few more interesting upgrades when time allows.
• Had a catch up with Stu about doing another couple of sessions with them which is nice. Enjoy working with the team, who are doing cool stuff AI stuff yes, but at scale, in the right way, and it's all a mix of people & technology.
• Did more work on the Race Report platform. It's been a bit of challenge. Not the team, they are lovely, and not really the original spec of the platform, but balancing old expectations (data collection has been going for 5 years) with a newer approach has been tricky. We have legacy data structures which are a bit of nightmare (hence the change) and newer, cleaner structures which was part of the plan. But some people still want the option to revert to the old structure (urgh) even though it's more work for everyone. Tough choices upcoming as the budget is pretty much gone...
• Got turned down for a piece of work I went in with as a collaboration. We'd umm and ahh'd about the work anyway, as the timescales and the ask was a bit ridiculous, but the potential impact of the work was really high. Maybe we were too honest in the pitch. Maybe we are not shiny enough.
• But, as part of the roller coaster week there was some really positive news as well! Won some work for FIELD STATION (subject to etc) which is cool, and is a longer term piece which is really nice. More to come on that.
• Also got news about a small grant to spark a Digital Sovereignty Unconference in Newcastle next year. It's a tiny bit of money, but it was something. Hoping to stretch this as far as possible I put a call out into the wild to beg borrow and steal as much as possible. Honestly the response has been awesome! People have come from all over to see if they can offer support and to come along. I think people are crying out for in person things, and I guess we are, for once, on the pulse of both that and the topic in general. But just because other people have come forward, doesn't mean you shouldn't! Let's make this a kick ass event, so if you've got something, or just want to be involved, LET ME KNOW.

Writing

Another bump for a piece I wrote last week about Friction which seems to be right on point at the moment for a number of people. - Finding friction

"In a world of easy answers what we really need is space and time to work reflect, adapt and evolve. Maybe we need friction. Real work isn't always about answers, it's about the unpicking of things, of thinking critically, of knowing whether an easy answer the one to go with, or even if the question itself is the right one to start with. And more than that, it's going beyond easy answers to stretch ourselves to new heights, new ways of looking at things, of dreaming. Are there new ideas anywhere?"

This week I wrote another post, with ANOTHER climbing reference in...yes I may have a theme at the moment. This one is about slack. No not the company. But more about how we need slack in what we do, especially for the pioneers. It's a very short piece called Cut me some slack

A tight rope, is a safe rope. But only if it doesn't break.

Building

Lots on Map My Patch V2 this week and it's really come on. The paper map to digital map work really improved with image clean up and auto labelling really improving, meaning we can link geo data (what people drew on the map) to their contextual responses.
Beyond the paper map improvements, I also upgraded the digital experience. This now allows shapes, text, post it notes, icons, along with changing base maps. A richer mapping experience. I'm quite happy with this.

I also made a bit of progress with a tool called Ship-Check which is a local first (and now npm) tool that allows users to run a scan on repos and databases for things that might have been missed in fast AI development - bit's of security, inefficient (and costly) llm calls, api calls etc. It can scan your local files, github, db's (if you give it a read only connection) and load in exports from things like Loveable etc. Everything that comes out stays local to you, and flags things that might need fixing, the technical way of doing it, and a prompt for your LLM to fix it, and then you can check whether it did actually fix it!
It's in Alpha right now and I'm looking for testers. So hit me up if you would like to try it out!

Random

Became a bit of a binfluencer with my 'Quiet Tech' bin reminder which pops up the day before, intermittently with other calm images, to tell me which bin it is.

Life

• I generally try to go to the forest every Friday. Sometime's it doesn't happen. This week I went on Monday and Friday. Is twice as often twice as good? You're damn right it is. I should do this more
• Today I'm off to https://twisterella.co.uk/ festival in The Boro, to listen to bands I've never heard of, and probably feel old. Or maybe I'll feel young.
• More work on the campervan! After realising I couldn't get it done for summer, I kind of lost a bit of motivation. But I've made progress this week.

Links This Week

• greenit.fr- AI's Unsustainable impacts to grow x7 by 2030 - Green IT
• CLEER Dashboard | AI Inference Energy+CO2e - excellent work
• Sustainable AI Group launches CLEER - Sustainable AI Group launches CLEER to quantify the environmental impact of closed AI models.
• Calm Technology - Like my epaper attention agent/bin reminder - I've called it quiet tech, but calm tech is nice
• What are the principles of prototyping? - this is a very good piece - should read
• The Map · Regenerative Atlas - this is really cool (and looks like a bouldering map which is obviously hitting the spot for me currently)
• Insight Infrastructure Conference - might pitch something for this?
• Think First - Doug sent me this and I was immediately YES! This is what I do. I do it for two reasons. One as a very personalised bench marking of different models. But also, because the act of thinking through what I think might come back is really helpful in both maintaining my own thinking, and also in considering if what comes back is actually useful.