Paid subscriptions and membership schemes are in vogue: there’s one for pretty much everything under the sun — newspapers, gyms, music and film streaming, bank accounts, restaurants, delivery services, education apps, dating apps, &c, &c. As we’ll see in this post, there are good reasons for companies to introduce paid…

There’s a lot of debate these days on whether we’re on track to build Artificial General Intelligence, and on whether succeeding in doing so poses an existential risk: people like Eliezer Yudkowsky are convinced that AGI will kill us, whereas those in Demis Hassabis’s camp are optimistic that AGI will…

Last month I wrote about how I used ChatGPT to build a simple word game (which is live, here!). This is a quick addendum to that, to note two things: First, the infrastructure for hosting & deploying code is awful. Now that LLMs make it extremely easy for non-technical people…

I recently had an idea for a web-based game I wanted to build. Unfortunately, I have zero experience with web development, HTML, JavaScript, and CSS. So I thought to ask ChatGPT for help to get started. It worked (well, sort of! …

When my son was born, four years ago, I wrote two posts on my first thoughts on being a father. Four years + a daughter later, here’s the sequel. Re-evaluating my priorities Two of the qualities I valued the most before having children were intellect and wit (if asked, I’d list integrity as…

A lot of people I know complain that the organisations they work for move too slowly. I’m often frustrated by the same thing, so I decided to jot down some thoughts on possible root causes. Culture Culture is an obvious and much-discussed culprit; here’s my £0.03 on it. First, many people…

In two of the three companies I’ve worked, “receiving good feedback” is one of the things people are the least satisfied with according to employee surveys. Cycle after cycle, senior leaders see this result, and implement the standard responses: they make qualitative feedback a core component of employee evaluation encourage…

Companies live and die by innovation: those that invest in it prosper, and those that don’t become obsolete. Even monopoly power does not create a moat to defend against innovation: the railroad companies’ monopoly power did not prevent their industry being overtaken by the rise of the automobile and aviation. …

Many people want to become entrepreneurs but haven’t found the right idea yet. Here’s a list of suggestions, on me; bear in mind, nothing is new under the sun, so it’s very likely there is already someone out there pursuing each of these, but I promise you, I came up…