undermanager

Thoughtful. And a great way to 'present' a 'presentation'"Humans are not efficient readers. We can read about 240 words a minute, and an agent can write about 4,500, which is 19 times faster than we can read. So there’s a huge mismatch between the amount of text agents produce and the amount we can consume.We get tired, we skim, and we miss important details. This is one reason why so many people report burnout and exhaustion with agentic work.They’re trying to make hard choices all day while…

I apologise for starting with Eno but he's like a stopped clock with extra hands; quite often right.He once wrote this:"Whatever you now find weird, ugly, uncomfortable and nasty about a new medium will surely become its signature. CD distortion, the jitteriness of digital video, the crap sound of 8-bit - all of these will be cherished and emulated as soon as they can be avoided. It’s the sound of failure: so much modern art is the sound of things going out of control, of a medium pushing to…

I'm working on a long, slow am-I-really-doing-it? project looking into the possible merits of putting digital business systems back on paper. (Contrary? Check!)In my head I call it Paper CRM. It might be that. A side effect is that I notice/get a lot of ads for the various ways people are trying to do personal productivity. Both the new AI-powered and digital ways and the new new analogue versions. It's fascinating to see both technologies trying to solve the same problem.The copy on the Kings…

The 4764 podcast grinds on. I still love it. The latest episodes are also built from video, if you'd like to look as well as listen.

I was lucky enough to have another great internet chat the other day. This time with Tom Loosemore. We discussed bins, bin day, whenisbins and, as the literary non-fictionists would say, used that as a lens to talk about digital public services and AI.Tom has written words about all this.

I was recently very annoyed by an episode of Past, Present, Future about how short-form video is a Bad Idea. It was lazy and silly and I vowed to make a short form video rebutting it all. (I haven't done that yet, probably because of my terribly-reduced attention span. Though I did a trial run.)One of their lazy assertions was that short-term video is incapable of nuance, complexity or making a sustained argument. That's obviously wrong and I thought I'd gather some examples from my own feed.…

Some good stuff in here"We're maintaining institutional complexity by transferring its cost downwards and calling it efficiency.""The problem is that cultural risk and organisational waste were being subsidised by the same cheap money, and we learned to treat them as the same kind of inefficiency. They aren't, and that's what we need to correct.The mistake of the post-QE era has been cutting the cultural risk while leaving too much of the organisational waste intact. We should put way more…

I've been a fan of Matt Jukes for ages. He has a deep commitment to digital public service. He has a sly sense of humour. He puts his effort where his mouth is and his heart on his sleeve.A little while ago he wrote a blog post about the demise of 'openness' of different flavours in digital services culture. That openness has always seemed like a such a useful thing to me, it makes so much easier and better. Recruitment, change, advocacy. But, also, I know why it gets chipped away at.Anyway,…

As previously discussed we're trying an experiment with an online mini-Interesting on September 30th.One short talk and then some discussion. Our guest will be the historian Dr Helen Castor who talked at Interesting 2016 about Digging Up Kings. I'm hoping we'll find out if any more kings have been dug up in the last 10 years.It'll be free - but you have to book.I'm hoping/planning to do these regularly. Monthly maybe? More news as it happens.

After a bunch of 'exploring' Flora and I have started on Season Two of our podcast. We're calling it After Advertising because that's what we are, and it's possibly an interesting theme. We've started off with three things each we've learned from it.It's on YouTube and your local podcast player.

Stumbled past this conversation on LinkedIn today...See...

Paninaro.uno

@painesplough_ blank is about blank who wants blank, but blank is stopping them… A writing prompt, imparted to Roy Williams from the late great Stephen Jeffreys. 📽️ @DMLK Video Meet the Writers is a video series from Paines Plough about the power of storytelling and theatre. Take a seat with some of your writing peers, who discuss their work and offer their words of advice and encouragement to you: the next generation of playwrights. Watch the full interview on our website or YouTube channel.…

I had a long and fascinating chat with David and Jeffre the other day. They wanted to talk about Cog for their interestingness project and knowing a conversation with them is always fascinating I asked if I could record it.We rambled on and on. But it reminded me of one thing I always want to tell younger people getting into the creative industries.We create this myth - it's a thing we sell to clients - that the process goes: StrategyBriefCreatives have ideasWhereas the process normally…

I've just recorded an hour's chat with the esteemed Dan Hill about the development of the BT Tower. It's on YouTube as part of my ongoing fascination with the tower, and it's development.And I've realised, it really is my happy place. I'm lucky enough to know a ton of good, interesting people and I seem to just find new and different ways to chat to them. There's WIP with FloraThere's I Saw This And Thought Of You with all sorts of people. More soon!

@ticketybooks Ranking the greatest opening lines in picture book literature, including #EricCarle #ShelSilverstein #SandraBoynton #kidlit #picturebooks #booktok ♬ original sound - Tickety Books

I've been going out and streaming mixes from various outdoor locales. This morning I was by the lake in Regents Park. I think it makes for a nice combo of gentle ambient music and gentle ambient nature. It also featured a large fish jumping, occasionally, from the lake.

The original Peter Skillman talkTom Wujek's talk, with lots of data

Relevant links!Adam Morgan's eatbigfish podcast with Dave and Jeffre.

One of my favourite moments of the year. I look at the calendar. Pick a date, Ask Anne if she's got anything on. Do a bit of googling to make sure there's nothing important happening and email the Conway Hall.They send me back some forms. Different forms every year. I pay them some money. More money every year, but always a bargain.And then it's booked.Interesting 2027 will be Wednesday 19 May.And now I need to find some speakers.More news as we get it.

"Slop wins because it conforms to neat narrative arcs that fulfill our desires for cohesive stories: At crime scenes, children make the best witnesses because they simply report back what they saw rather than editorializing into a natural story arc. The adult brain is hardwired to eliminate cognitive dissonance by effectively hallucinating events that didn’t happen to make our memories fit into a tidy narrative.Does that sound like any of the AI tools you know? In many ways, a tragic flaw of…

"One garment became central to that image. The navy Howick jacket Burnham wore during the Tier 3 dispute in October 2020 is now held by the People’s History Museum. Its catalogue records it plainly as a Howick VI coat, bought from House of Fraser. Yet within days British Vogue had described it as an “Orwellian Proletariat jacket”. Two months later, the same writer called it a “dark navy workers’ jacket” in the Financial Times, a description subsequently adopted by the museum. A mainstream…

Talking with Dan on an internet screen. Friday. Come and say helloHow People Work, Live! ... with Russell Davies - Dan HonHow People Work, Live! -- the live show about how to people, based on the How People Work workshop that helps teams deliver better, faster.Join Dan, a very special guest, and any number of interesting people for a free, candid, ad-hoc series of gatherings on Zoom where we find out how to get hard

Inspired by this excellent post from Tom Stafford."Just imagining that you might be wrong is enough to create demonstrable benefits to problem solving and estimation, which has been variously called “the wisdom of crowds on single player mode” and “dialectical bootstrapping”. I like to think that the imaginary crowd has a similar salutary effect on more complex thoughts. The audience does more than just make me imagine I might be wrong. It invites me to consider, from the diverse perspective of…

Giles and I were swapping postcards a while ago. Middle-aged affectation but fun. And it struck me that a Haudoo on 'how to write a letter' would be a good idea. I suggested that to Giles and, because he's a genius, he wrote a letter instead.It's a lovely thing so I wondered how we could get it into more people's hands. And this is now the plan:There are 50 copies of it available on Fitzrovia Light Industries. They have individual 'edition' numbers. They will be hand-stamped with the Haudoo…

At the last Interesting I threatened to come up with a plan to do 'other things'. I love the feeling at Interesting and it'd be nice to have it happen at other times and places, I've never quite worked out how to do this BUT I'm now ready to do some experiments.My thinking is this:Interesting itself is probably 90% Short Talks About Interesting Things and 10% Hanging Out And Chatting. And people always tell me that, while they love the STAIT they'd love there to be more HOAC.So, how about we…

Arthur's written a play. And it's being performed. And it's quite short. You should come!

The always stimulating Tom Whitwell was kind enough to put up with me asking him for some recommendations...

Cycling corner: @jbillinson if you’re watching the tour de france this year, keep an eye out for a very funny form of cheating: the sticky bottle #cycling #TourDeFrance #sports #bike #sportstiktokcontest ♬ C.B.Rhumba by Sage Guyton and Jeremy Wakefield - SpongeRadio @blakeoftoday