I don’t do newsletters, but this is how those funky cool kids are naming their newsletters, so why not me?
After my stint at Kaluza helping them with their Mission Transition to help consumers reduce their energy usage in measured, sustainable ways I’ve started as Head of Engineering at Macmillan Cancer Support (by some counts the most popular charity in the UK).
Like many large orgs that have been around for a few decades they’ve got a healthy mix of legacy and modern applications, both in-house and outsourced, which has left them with a mixed take on their approach to managing their Digital Stuff* so part of my job is to tidy that up a bit, with frequent reference to the Yak book.
This means it was existentially reassuring to read Dan Hon’s issue the other day s11e31: Team Calculating Monster meets Team Wild Yak which reminded me not of conversations I’ve had but ones that I perpetually fear having because that area is where Conversations And Paperwork lie and they are the bane of Getting Things Done, even when the Things that are Being Done aren’t actually as important as the Conversations And Paperwork, but it’s lovely to be able to tick something off your todo list sometimes, isn’t it?
Anyway, in other, more terrifying takes on the future is this incredible demo of DALL-E integration with replit which just reminds us all that when it comes to the Hyundai Boston Dynamics robotic warfare division, they’ll probably be working out whether they should kill, maim or just bury you under rubble using some training set they’ve obtained by downloading Twitch streams of tweens playing Call of Duty. Gotta love the future!
* Software, services, infrastructure, you get the idea