AI

I had assumed AI adoption was still on its way up and would keep going for a while yet. Ofcom reckons 54% of UK adults now use AI tools like ChatGPT, Copilot or Gemini, up from 31% in 2024, which means a bit under half don’t, and I had those people down as not having got round to it yet. Pew’s American figures from February say otherwise. Among people who don’t use chatbots, 60% give lack of interest as a major reason and only 29% say not knowing how, and around seven in ten say they’re unlikely to start within the year. That isn’t a queue waiting to be shown, it’s a decision most of them have already made, and I had it the wrong way round. ...

I was on site during a Windows 10 migration about eight years ago, and the group I’d cut over the previous day started coming to me with the same problem. They were opening files they’d opened the day before, and now some threw an error about a missing font and refused to open at all. Others opened with chunks of text gone, or the formatting pushed out of shape. The characters in those files were never damaged. Every letter was sitting there in the PDF and the file itself was fine, which is why the same documents opened without complaint on a machine that hadn’t been touched yet. What was missing was what turns those characters into shapes on a screen. ...

I was listening to the Era Vulgaris album before a Queens of the Stone Age gig, and it put me back in Birmingham between finishing secondary school and starting university. The technology I had then was a 17-inch gaming laptop running Vista, and I chose it over a desktop because I wanted something I could take with me. (A possible error given how heavy it was) It came to the US with me for my second year of university in 2008, and once I’d bought some cheap speakers it was the entire setup for the year, because the screen was big enough that I didn’t need anything else. Before that I’d never had my own machine at all, I shared a PC with my brother. ...

Back in May I wrote about asking ChatGPT and Claude where to put my circulator fan in my study. Last week the question was less relaxed and burning. The UK broke its June temperature record three days running, my study is a small room with the sun aimed straight at it, and I went back to both models to see if they could help. What came back read well and annoyingly didn’t work. Both kept telling me to aim the air just above my head, which puts the column over you, and when I said it wasn’t working they’d tell me to nudge it up a little more and that I was nearly there, pointing me the whole time at a placement that wasn’t going to achieve what they calculated. ...

A website serving Windows Server 2019 was returning the correct pages to every human who visited, to Bing, and to Yandex, and Thai casino spam to Googlebot alone. The admin who posted about it had spent days inside the box looking for the cause. They checked web.config, the URL rewrite rules, the HTTP redirects, the custom error pages, the IIS handlers and modules and ISAPI filters, robots.txt, the sitemap, and then ran findstr across every drive for the spam domain and the casino keywords. All of it came back clean. The same behaviour showed up on multiple unrelated sites on the same server, which ruled out a single compromised application and pointed at something sitting underneath all of them. ...

Three apps can still mean one underlying answer. I was heading to the ExCeL the morning after a tube strike, when the tubes were meant to be running again, and I had a session I wanted to catch. The boards outside the station said the trains were running soon, so I waited, switching between Citymapper and Google Maps to work out which one to believe. A woman walking past told me not to bother. She’d been standing at another station where the boards said the same thing and nothing had come, so she’d given up and was getting the bus. I ended up on a bus that didn’t go all the way, then the Elizabeth line, and the whole thing took far longer than I’d planned for a journey that was meant to be simple. ...

The system can keep running long after the reasoning behind it has left. You can’t test it, because the only place it runs is production, so you read the logs and you sit with someone while they do their job with it and build up a picture of what it does from the outside. The customer said it pulls from the billing platform on a schedule, but the logs say it pushes on a trigger, the connection string points at a host that isn’t on the network diagram, and the job everyone calls the nightly sync runs four times a day. At one point the worker does a step that makes no sense, and when you ask why, the answer is that’s just how it’s always done. It takes time and the picture you end up with is nothing like the description, but you get there. ...

I had Sora because it came bundled with my ChatGPT subscription, and I used it to make short clips for internal PowerPoints when a slide needed something more than a stock image. Not for anything serious, never built into any work I was doing. When the shutdown announcement landed on 24 March I read it the way I’d read a Microsoft deprecation notice, which is to say I assumed the date would move once enough customers shouted. ...

The biggest change in chat models over the last two years is not the one most articles focus on. It is that they can now actually look at things. Image input went from a feature you would test once and forget about to something I use weekly without thinking about it, and the gap between describing a problem in words and just showing the model what you are looking at turns out to be much bigger than I expected. The first time it really landed for me was a few years ago when I started feeding ChatGPT photos of error screens and bits of hardware I could not be bothered to describe. By the time photo-based questions felt routine I had built up enough trust in ChatGPT specifically that vision tasks became one of the things I would default to it for, even as Claude took over for almost everything else I do. ...

The biggest change I made for this AWS recert isn’t which AI I’m using, it’s that I moved my study notes out of OneNote and into Notion. Back in March I wrote about studying with custom GPTs for the AI Practitioner. The note-creation GPT had grown a system prompt that read like a software spec, the coaching one had stayed simple and useful, and the post ended with me saying I’d try Claude as a study partner for the SA Pro and figure out whether to move my notes out of OneNote. ...