It was a big week for Things Happening. On Thursday, a plane crashed shortly after take-off from Ahmedabad in India to Gatwick in the UK (not actually in London, but nearish). It hit a student hostel, killing all but one of the 242 people on board, along with eight people on the ground. But that was soon overshadowed in the news cycle.

“Did you hear the news?” my partner asked me as I came down for breakfast on Friday morning. “No….” “Israel bombed Iran.”

Not everything is terrible. I found a very nice brand new shirt in the Traid charity shop in Peckhan on Tuesday lunchtime, and it only cost me £3.50.

I went climbing and this time I remembered my wallet. On the way there I saw a three-legged dog. If I had a three-legged dog, I’d call him Mike. (Short for Microsoft, because he doesn’t run very well.)

I went for drinks with old colleagues on Wednesday evening. It was fun to catch up with people I haven’t seen in a long time. I also met a few people whose time at the company had been after mine. One told me that at his current employer, they are mandated to “use AI” for their work, to the extent that their LLM usage stats are part of their appraisals.

It sounds grim to me. If LLMs are so great, why do they have to force people to use them? The answer, as ever, can be found in the role of capital and its relation to labour.

As I was walking past a bus stop in Deptford on Friday, a man got off the bus, asked me for directions, and showed me the address on his phone. The phone was beeping every few seconds, while things kept popping up and taking over the screen saying that his phone was infected. Was it really infected, or had he installed software that purported to stop viruses but which is actually just a route for unscrupulous operators to levy a monthly fee on the unwitting? And is there really a difference?

It made me wonder, what kind of a hell have we created by putting these devices at the centre of people’s lives? Every interaction with the state, banking, etc. now has to be through one of these pocket misery boxes.

I’ll be down on the south coast at Brighton Ruby from Wednesday evening until Friday. See some of you there!