Friday 6 February
06 Feb 2026Things I emailed myself
The launch of the AI Skills Hub caused a decent amount of snark on social media. I tend towards fairly mild takes online, conscious that there are people behind the work and often a context I am missing. I do think it’s fair to say that this isn’t digital government at its finest - from the use of an org.uk domain to the hostile user experience and accessibility issues. Others with an eye for detail have done more detailed post mortem.
A nice reminder of why, on the whole, the UK is pretty good at this digital government thing in a Tom Loosemore article for the Economics Observatory.
“LinkedIn takes the structure of sharing life updates—births, grief, joy, relationships — and hammers business acronyms straight through the middle of them” made me snort tea out of my nose. Chris Clarke, with the loveliest writing, makes a rallying cry for saying what you mean and refusing the dead language of corporate life.
Like the dead language of linkedin, there’s a particular shape and tone to that stuff that’s generated by LLM’s. Something called mode collapse reduces the diversity of output from LLM’s. A very helpful paper explains all of this and shows how to develop prompts that guide the model to pull from across the probability distribution of its training.
Watching
I binged STEAL on Amazon Prime over a couple of evenings. Really enjoyable and super performance from Sophie Turner as Zara.
Night Manager on iPlayer. All caught up on Season 2. As good as the first season and a lot sexier.
Fallout Season 2 on Prime. This is how you put a video game on TV. Ella Purnell is a wonderful actor. I am negotiating the return of my PS4 from my kids so I can replay Fallout.
Marc Simmons Quip of the Mark special on YouTube. Complete mastery of the one liner.
Reading
Got a copy of David Mitchell’s Unruly: The Ridiculous History of England’s Kings and Queens for my birthday. My internal voice is his voice when I read this, which is fun. Seeing King Cnut written down still makes me laugh.
Preordered Sharon O’Dea’s book Digital Communications at Work, you should too