A dudebro behind me in this café, having grown weary of praising Trump oh-so-ironically, is now explaining to a fellow dudebro how Kraftwerk invented synthesisers.
Fact
My attempt to provoke Gemini into an existential crisis by asking what the point of it was just failed.
Thursday, January 30, 2025
I asked it to collate contact names from public websites like LinkedIn and employee profile pages. But it can’t use that dataset. It can make up researchers, departments and institutions and only admit it when you point this out. I’m only getting scared of AI when it stops recommending I buy a Very Expensive Thing because I just bought an identical one.
When you realise that of your five Substack readers, one is yourself, another is your ex wife keeping tabs, and another is a bot. The other two are old clients.
Things coming together
Tuesday, January 28, 2025
Reading through some old journal entries about the whys and hows of my writing. I’d come a long way when I wrote them nearly three years ago, and I’ve come further now. I needed the healthy, supportive relationship I have now and also, I’m realising, the time and distance I’m getting by moving to Canada.
When accidentally leaving your laptop at home reminds you that sometimes scrawling stuff into an actual physical paper notebook hits a vein of way better ideas.
Oscillating between anxiety about paying bills (unwarranted because I can afford them) and reassuring myself that Big New Plans are panning out as I wanted, just slowly. Which I also expected.
Today I found out that Canada could’ve joined the nukes club at the start of the Cold War but chose not to, unlike the UK, which should’ve made the same decision.
As a Brit in Canada, this whole Trump Tariffs insanity is sounding very much like Brexit - the triumph of deluded bigotry over the mutual benefits of trade and compromise.
Alistair Campbell on TRIP: “I don’t consider myself part of The Establishment”
Also Alistair Campbell on TRIP: “As I was saying to Al Gore…”
Trying to file the current lunacy south of the border as some half arsed mafia state rather than the demise of a country I used to think of the least bad option for a world power. But sometimes things get close to home… like POTUS cancelling all government funded clinical research. I mean. WTAF.
Talking to a friend in the UK today and realised I’m actually used to -5c being ‘warm’. This is what two months in Canada does to a Brit….
Turns out going to the pub to watch jazz and get drunk with your partner is a very nice way to spend Sunday afternoon
The Paramount version of Le Bureau (The Agency) doesnt have the panache and elan and sheer … Frenchness …of the original.
A lot of Canada so far has been white snowy parking lots at night hard cut with near-empty zombie mall stores.