Ed Parry | What I write of what I think

We’re hopefully moving home early next year so we’re in the spring clean, de-clutter phase a little earlier than normal. This time I’m also trying to tackle everything digital.

Digital storage has for so long been cheap that deleting files almost feels unnecessary. But now I look back I see thousands of pointless files. Documents from school days, inconsequential contracts that ended a decade ago, photos of where I parked my car in airport carparks to remind me upon return. Just because I can keep all of this, really doesn’t mean that I should.

I’m probably a bit of a digital hoarder. The question, “but what if?” plagues me as I go through things. With storage remaining cheap I’m being relatively lenient with what stays, but it still feels good to clear everything down and re-organise.

Today shows that you can still play this as a team sport, with honesty, fairness and transparency at the centre of every race and still come out on top as champions.

Papaya rules.

My favourite part of my watch is the part you almost never get to see. The hidden workings. The intricate details.

Objectively this isn’t a very good watch. After a couple of days it’s often a few minutes behind. But that doesn’t matter to me. It’s still by far my favourite possession. A gift from my wife. I love wearing it, and I love taking it off and admiring the mechanism each day. There’s something so appealing about mechanical watches. As long as it moves, it’ll just keep going.

I realise I’m a couple of weeks late to the party with this, but the onboarding user experience with poke.com is brilliant.

It immediately feels familiar, being positioned as a contact through an existing chat interface, and it feels as though it “knows” you within a few minutes. Negotiating a monthly price is also novel, though I expect the vast majority of users end up paying the same amount.

However, I’ve played and enjoyed it for about a week and the novelty is starting to wear off. Sure, it’s immediately accessible and has helped draft a few emails, but in each case I’ve felt the need to adjust the draft before sending. Scheduled reminders and daily briefings are nice, but I’ve struggled to fit them into any sort of routine.

This is very much the state of AI more broadly today. Novel, intriguing, powerful. But we’re still figuring out how to integrate it properly. The real power is still to come. We’re still in the dial-up era.

The overwhelmingly cheap cost of storage has meant that we rarely delete things any more.

At work we come up with an idea, research it and present our findings as something that we could do. A few months pass, an evolution on that original idea comes along. We refresh our memory from the original idea, research what’s changed and then present it as a new idea, leaving the old one as it was.

Storage is cheap. The old idea is doing no harm. It’s just a harmless old document that no one would go and read.

Until we come to train LLMs on our company documents. All of a sudden, there’s important context missing. All those old (and good bad!) ideas and out of date reports all of a sudden are presented equally for an LLM to train against.

When we then come to interrogate this knowledge, how will we know what’s useful? How will we be able to trust it?

I need to get back to writing. Capturing ideas. Sharing something. Not for any particular reason or for an audience but just to start the habit. Last day of Blogtober feels as appropriate as any.