I’ve just subscribed to YouTube Premium but for all the wrong reasons.

In some ways, I should have seen this coming. The enshittification of literally everything has gathered steam over the last 18 months with every last damn good thing about the internet slowly being turned in to complete shite. Nobody would be surprised that Google / Alphabet is nuts-deep in this movement but somehow, in amongst all the evil shit they get up to, they seemed to have somewhat left alone the one Google thing I really like - YouTube.

Following the success of building my home office, I doubled down and using about the only space remaining, built a workshop.

There is some backstory to it all - I used to have a workshop in the garage - the details of which I may cover in a later post.

The shed was far less sophisticated than the office, though - it is bascially a large shed, but it’s been done up to make it feel as un-shedlike as possible.

I recently helped a client with a lovely annual return to our friendly local regulator.

It required some numbers (from a SQL query) to be put in some boxes (yep, in Excel 🤐) against a list of 251 countries.

The row heights had been shrunken and the column widths strangely embiggened so that a manual cross-referencing-and-copying into the spreadsheet was a time-consuming and error-prone task.

You could copy & paste into the relevant column (indeed the guidance encouraged it!) but for this to work you would need the full precise list of countries in the correct order… except you couldn’t extract this list from the spreadsheet since the entire workbook was locked down - locked cells and then password protected. No dice.

Note to self:

You have to begin. Go, do it badly at first with sweaty palms and shaking limbs and gaps in what you know. You have to start, and perhaps you won’t feel ready or like you’ve fully prepared. Perhaps you’ll feel too late, too small, too scared. But it’s okay that you did not appear on Earth with all the skills and information. It’s okay that there are things you’ll have to learn, It’s okay you won’t be perfect overnight and people might see you try and that getting where you want will take some time.'

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Much of the fear surrounding the growth of AI, is the potential (and perceived) threat of machines replacing humans. This is intuitively not an unreasonable fear to hold (despite there being little in the way of evidence to support it¹.)

In August 2024, around the time of the Olympics, Google were forced to pull an advert for Gemini that depicted a child writing a fan letter to their sports hero. The public backlash was brutal. “This is not what AI is for” was the general sentiment.

The Association of Guernsey Charities hold an annual conference for the members where they meet and discuss all sorts within the charitable sector in Guernsey. This includes a series of talks, workshops and focus groups.

I was asked to present in 2023 on the topic of AI - specifically how charities can start using AI to help them. I elected to broaden the talk to also cover the effective use of SaaS as well as AI. They asked me back in 2024 to give an update.

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No need for a conspicuous intro - last year we introduced a summertime 4-day work week with mixed success.

This year we did it again, a little differently. With mixed success.

Learning from last year’s main takeaway, the key change this year was trying to smash a normal week’s hours into 4 days ultimately led to people getting tired and fed up.

It didn’t really live up to the dream of freeing up time for people to work on some geek projects and instead left people wanting time to rest.

It’s been a while¹ since I’ve had to debug obscure SharePoint issues but hey ho, my life remains a rollercoaster of excitement.

A client environment recently had the following updates and cumulative updates applied, which including their SharePoint 2016 Enterprise infrastructure.

• KB5043051 - 2024-09 CU
• KB5043124 - 2024-09 Servicing Stack Update
• KB5002624 - Security Update for MS Sharepoint Enterprise Server 2016 (Description of the security update for SharePoint Enterprise Server 2016: September 10, 2024 (KB5002624) - Microsoft Support)

KB500264 comes with ‘known issues’ that it might knacker workflows:

Yes. OK. I admit it.

When ChatGPT burst in to the scene 18 months ago I was amazed as anyone else. The speed at which it could produce words! And words that vaguely seemed to make some sort of believable sense! Incredible.

We all got excited by the prospect; washed adrift in the hype and excitement of it all. It’s no wonder the seismic shift it created in the public consciousness.

Within a short while of ChatGPT being generally available, all channels - social, blog, online, offline and further were awash with LLM-generated content.

This was today:

Back in 2021, I completed Guernsey’s answer to a (half-)IronMan - the GraniteMan - a 70.3 style triathlon in Guernsey.

I harboured ambitions of completing a full distance proper Ironman event - 3.8km swim, 180km bike, 42.2km run - but unfortunately, ’the plan’ never worked because 2022 went to shit.

And 2023 wasn’t a lot better.

Towards the end of 2023, though, I managed to start training again and decided to have another go at the plan… 2024 would be a trial year (marathon, triathlon, no injuries) with a view to Ironman in 2025.