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Now: 24 February - 2 March 2025
On Friday night I worked late while the first recordings of Trump’s meeting with Volodymyr Zelenskyy played in the background. I think—I hope—that it was a wake-up call for Europe, which since the second World War has enjoyed the protection and stewardship of the United States and for which reason has basically been sort of languishing from the perspective of contributions to the global community.
Then again—over the past 20 years China has quietly been munching on America’s lunch, and if the American government is willing to nuke the country’s international reputation then I guess I’m okay with that too.
The next question is what can I do about this.
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Now: 17 - 23 February 2025
What do you use AI for? I’ve lately been using large language models for getting me over hurdles that a little bit of perspicacious search-engining would have done, in the past. “How many days ago was 11 January?” or “Given this JSON structure, how do I use
jqto get only these keys?” I’ve put five quid into OpenAI and have been using their API access via Simon Willison’sllmcommand to generate alt text for pictures on my blog. A lot of the time I have to edit these down because gpt-4o-mini tends to be a little whimsical, describing things in terms of “dark and moody atmosphere” or “placid, becalmed setting” and I don’t think that’s much help to anyone. I know that alt text should be bespoke and artisanal but when I do it myself I just wind up writing things like, “A picture of me on a snowy hillside,” which is probably also not much help to anyone.I’ve lately been trying to use AI more to shore up the technical gaps in my own background. I famously didn’t study the thing that currently pays my bills at school, but as I try to move more towards a senior-level role at work this is starting to feel less like a point of pride and more like a Deficiency in Experience. When I looked up some old computer science A-level tests, I didn’t understand much of it at all, so basically fed the questions back into ChatGPT, along with the answers, and got it to explain why the answers were what they were. By the end of the night, well I wasn’t in any position to undertake a compsci A-level but at least my eyes had reverted from being the 🌀 emoji.
Anyway there was a fun thread about the same on Hacker News, and now that I’m sharing Hacker News posts on my personal blog my transformation into tech DudeBro is complete.
Saturday was officially the first Nice Day of the year (weatherwise), so Sam and I went on a big run+bike ride with Ghyll, going all the way up to Sunderland on the lines and then getting the train back to Horden. Ghyll was good overall and totally unfazed by running 30+ km, but I was pretty much shattered by the time we got back home. Then it was a quick turnaround to take the bus into Durham for a fancy dinner at Cellar Door and a couple of pints at the always-cheerful Swan and Three Cygnets and the actually-not-that-nice Market Tavern. Durham was bouncing and the vibe was good, but on the bus ride back home a couple of 12-year-olds heckled me for my accent and then tried to sell us cocaine, which was nightmarish.
Quiet Sunday in recovery, pancakes for breakfast and then a walk on the beach with Ghyll. Wind has been blowing a gale all day but apparently not strong enough for the Met Office to declare an official storm or anything. Anyway all of the bins have been knocked over and rubbish is starting to collect at the end of the street. I expect we’ll be back to cold weather by morning.
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Now: 3 February - 9 February 2025
Led a lesson on space at Scouts on Tuesday; was very nervous leading up to it but it turned swimmingly. With a little guidance kids will basically teach themselves, it feels like. Maybe it’s just the good kind of kids that go to Scouts.
On Wednesday night I was feeling a little peckish so I made an entire bag of sugarfree cookie dough mix. The cookies tasted like chemicals and the sugar simulate made my insides roil. At least the mix is no longer in the cupboard, tempting me.
I got a new pair of running shoes at the end of last week, and spent this week breaking them in. Road shoes! Not to be found on my Footwear Bingo card for 2025. I took them out for a long run at the weekend as a sort of dress rehearsal for an upcoming marathon and was pleasantly surprised. The Shoe Industry will make a conventional runner of me yet.
Spent the rest of the weekend eating—first a Jamaican takeaway (from Easington of all places!) and then a homemade barbecue out of the 4 Rivers cookbook. I consider a ruined baking tin a small price to pay for better pork than most British people will eat in their entire lives.
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Now: 27 January - 2 February 2025
This year is quickly turning into a series of weekends where I do fun stuff and weekdays where I sit around and try to stay on top of everything else.
We spent the better part of our free time during the week watching Severance, which puts us in the one-half of the world who only started watching after Apple did a big marketing offensive, including a weird bit where Tim Cook pretends to have been severed and stares blankly into the middle distance, as if he’s not one of the wax figurines in the Perpetuity Wing. I really like Severance. I like shows where the audience gets to hold a bunch of narrative strands together and work to remember which characters know what. And they told me that I wouldn’t need to remember what dramatic irony is!
I also started listening to a new podcast called “Never Post” (should podcasts be quoted, or italicised?); it’s “about the internet”, which is what it feels like maybe 1 in 3 new podcasts in 2024 is about. Anyway this week’s episode about Cameo (the App) and some navel-gazing about cameras but had this interval in the middle about TikTok going down for like three hours that gave me chills. I try not to get involved in moral panics but listening to all these young folks being like, “keep scrolling—don’t eat don’t sleep just keep scrolling,” and “I refuse to read my posts—I’m not going to rewire my brain to read,” spooked me pretty bad. Lots of pundits out there seem to think that TikTok is a net good, and a few pundits out there seem to think that TikTok is a net bad—and for my part I think about TikTok nearly not at all—but I’m the teensiest bit concerned that shortform video seems to have replaced media as a monolith for a whole demographic cohort, and that this demographic cohort is about to inherit the earth while I continue to lose relevance. Ehhhhh
At the weekend I replaced the spark plugs in the Skoda in the hope that it would resolve our dwindling fuel economy woes (ChatGPT told me to—how’s that for a moral panic!). It didn’t. But I did find that the outgoing spark plugs were wildly overgapped, so I must have fixed something, right? Anyway ChatGPT says that the next thing I need to learn to replace are the O2 sensors pre- and post-catalytic converter.
Then on Sunday we dropped in to Durham to buy a pair of road running (!) shoes ahead of the Boston Marathon (not that one) in April. I’ve never had a pair of road shoes but I’m keen to see how I get on.
Then we went up to South Shields for the Temple Park cross-country running fixture. It was a really lovely day and not too tough going. There were a couple of steeplechase-style puddles to splodge through, which roused the spirit and got me good and clarty, and maybe even got some dirt in my competitors’ eyes. Finally breaking my Dry January Alcoholic Fast the night before probably didn’t do me any favours, but I finished in decent time.
Very few pictures this week; I should have taken pictures at Temple Park or while changing the spark plugs—but I didn’t!
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Now: 20 - 26 January 2025
The weather got a little warmer, then a little cold again, and then very windy.
I’ve started properly training for my marathon in April, a sort of comeback after my semi-spectacular bonk at Loch Ness last year. I think I’d forgotten quite how much running marathon training entails. Whereas I spent most of January and February last year nursing sore knees in the leadup to the Fellsman, and whereas I did most of my running in the dark after work, this year I think I’ve finally developed a habit of waking up for a run before work. Getting out of a warm bed is a high hurdle to clear, but on the flip side I do get to see the sunrise most days.
This picture was taken at 17:30! And there's still some light in the sky! Storm Éowyn blew in towards the end of the week. Sam had planned a solo trip to the bothy in Northumberland and by god she was going, weather or no. She had a cozy evening but woke up to find that a number of trees in Kielder had fallen across the road out of the forest, so she wandered down to the nearest farm and took shelter while another farmer fought his way into the forest with a chainsaw. Everyone made it out in the end (except for the trees).
Down our end, the storm raised a righteous clatter but was otherwise pretty toothless. I did find a wayward shed in the middle of the back lane on Saturday morning, but someone had cleared it away by the time I got back. And on Sunday I found some downed power lines on what I thought was a pretty busy section of footpath—though when I reported it to Northern Powergrid a couple of hours later it sounded like it was the first they’d heard of it.
After my Sunday run I went downstairs to fettle the underfloor heating once and for all, and found that there is a leak to earth somewhere on the circuit! I’m holding out a meagre hope that this is simply due to a carpeting staple somewhere on the stairs, because if the leak is under the tile floor somewhere, we’re basically SOL. I sulked about it for little while on Sunday afternoon and then went to bed at 19:30 and slept for ten and a half hours.
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