Once you see builders at work and you realise walls are just wood and plasterboard, it's really hard not to see your whole house as more easily changeable.

I enjoyed writing weeknotes but they took too much of my time. So I'm experimenting with ways of automating parts of it to make it faster. Pulling in my summaries of things that I've read, watched, or listened to is fairly easy (see below). But getting an LLM to reliably summarise my notes from the week is proving really hard. The hallucinations are pretty wild and it seems to struggle to judge what things I was most excited about (usually flagged by me writing 'I'm super excited about this.'). I've been trying Deepseek so I can keep it local, but maybe I should ping ChatGPT and see if that's any better.

I've been thinking a lot about creativity this week. Iain and I put out a Sidebar chat on the subject and I wrote a blog rethinking the assumption that in-person group work is the best environment for creativity.

Matt Webb reports in this talk that the doorway effect (the tendency to forget what you were doing when you walk through a doorway into a new room) applies to digital doorways too. For example, switching windows or logging into a site. I do wonder if sitting on back to back meetings in the same software feels so tiring because you miss out on the doorway effect and what Matt wonderfully calls the 'deallocation and reallocation' of attention. Those transitional moments are when we often have great ideas. Does missing out on emptying our mind affect our creativity?

Stuff I consumed this week

Why Probability Probably Doesn’t Exist

This was an interesting argument about how probabilities are subjective, there is never an absolute probability of an event occurring. For example, even when you flip a coin, your guess has a different probability of being right to someone who has seen the coin. This casts an interesting light on the Monty Hall Problem where you should always switch because the probability of the prize being in your original choice is 1/3 while the probability of it being in the other box is 2/3 because the probability doesn't change when you remove the third, empty door. And this reminds me that humans are terrible at dealing with probability. In Intuition Joel Pearson writes that we should never practice intuition when probabilities are involved.

Where do you put the camera?

Great little video essay about the importance of the directors' choice of what perspective to shoot a scene from. It boils down to 'what are you trying to say?' I've always thought about creativity, design, and strategy as a set of choices. So I liked this line: "There are the choices that make sense to you and those are the choices that you must make." This talks to the importance of having a different perspective or stance. It's the choices that make sense to you.