Weeknote 803: the last show and the Victoria Line

This week I have learned:

Monday night felt weird. For so many years, it was the podcast night. Although the last episode was published on Monday, I recorded and edited it in advance. I sat at home, listened to music and read a book. I’ll miss WB-40, but it was time to move on.
Sunday saw a walk and a half. The Victoria Line, above ground, Walthamstow to Brixton. The north of the line, particularly Walthamstow and Tottenham Hale, has changed hugely since I knew them in my twenties and thirties. Manor House and Finsbury Park have barely changed. And the West End and Victoria remain familiar. Why did we walk it? Because London doesn’t have mountains.
I usually avoid Wetherspoons pubs, but in Brixton we made an exception because we’d walked 15 miles and wanted a celebratory pint near the station. It provided the most cosmopolitan people-watching I can remember in a long time.
I now look at the map of the Victoria Line and think “I’ve walked that”.
After recently reading Ed Conway’s excellent Trade World, I’ve been thinking about how the things he argues in that book(with modern supply chains, there’s no such thing as “Made in Britain”, etc.) impact the concept of “Sovereign AI”. Bottom line is that there can be no such thing. We are dependent on a massively complicated set of supply chains and manufacturers, even down to the generation of electricity to power a data centre. The idea that hosting AI in a warehouse in Solihull or wherever is “sovereign” is like imagining that Manchester City is an English football club. They play their games in the country, mostly, but apart from that…
The way in which large organisations end up with competing and contradictory incentives never fails to amaze me.
I’m often finding myself writing apps via Claude to solve minor irritations. For example, I’ve got an app that quickly dumps out what time slots I have in the days ahead because, over time, I’ve found that simply sharing my calendar blows some people’s minds. Or an app that creates 1″ badges easily and quickly so I can make them in my badge machine. Or an app that allows dozens of people to play a World Cup of dice throwing or coin tossing. This continues my long-held belief that LLMs are as much like drum machines as they are steam engines. They allow us to do things we simply wouldn’t have done before, rather than replacing things that already happen.
Barclays announced 5,000 job losses this week because of AI. Or because they might use AI in the future. Or because some of the roles might be displaced by AI in the future.
Or because “Because of AI” is much more market-friendly than “Because we are currently over-staffed if we want to hit our targets.” https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cm4g1p347qgxo
The Owen Cutts Experience on Saturday night was one of the most joyous things I’ve experienced in ages. If you don’t follow him on Instagram, are you mad? https://www.instagram.com/owencutts/