Weeknotes: Week 4 - Q1 - 2025
I’m writing this on Australia Day and as we close in on the completion of the first third of the quarter. In step with the mixed feelings across the country today, I’ve been thinking a lot about the past while looking forward. With Australia Day out of the way, school starts back next week and everyone starts to get back to work. I’m no different but this year is different as it’s a much slower start than usual.
So whats been happening over the last week? Well, first up, lots of bike riding. I’ve also started doing some work with Open Australia Foundation. They try to give Australians the digital tools they need to participate in the democratic processes on a local and national basis. To do this, they scrape a stack of data from across the web to power community sites such as the Planning Alerts website. Scraping is a tricky, fragile process and I’m going to be helping them to improve this. I’m looking forward to sharing what I can once I get stuck in.
I spent a day in Sydney this week catching up with some current and prospective customers. Getting into Sydney is getting harder these days as there’s ongoing industrial action on the trains but I’m hoping take more trips down over the next couple of months.
A couple of new large language models from Chinese firm DeepSeek were released over Christmas too so I’ve spent a lot of time working with it. Deepseek R1, their reasoning model which was released this week is very good. I think it’s going to cause a few ripples as it certainly fires a shot across the bows of OpenAI, Anthropic et al. It also required a heck of a lot less compute to make so I'm sure NVIDEA won't like that. After this week’s big Trump Stargate announcement I’d be surprised if there wasn’t some kick back.
I’m becoming increasingly frustrated with social media and with myself. I’m aware that my attention is being spread too thin and that my ability to concentrate is in tatters. I don’t read books so much anymore, i spend far too long scrolling through rubbish and I’m despairing more than ever about what the platforms have done to the web. I’ve been on Twitter (I refuse to call it X) for 19 years, my bubble never really exposed me to the bad stuff, but now most people I followed aren’t there anymore, the junk is through the roof as a result and Musk is a undeniably dangerous nutbag. Everyone moved to Mastodon, then to BlueSky and to Threads so I set up accounts there too. So now i'm checking feeds in three places. There’s also Instagram, Reddit - i'm getting tired just listing all this. But now Mark Zuckerberg is now driving people from Facebook, Threads and Instagram with his controversial decisions in the wake of Trumps return to government. Even Wordpress is going to crap. I don’t have the energy to uproot my networks and start over. Again.
Our friends and communities are on bad social media networks because they love each other more than they hate Musk or Zuck. Cory Doctorow
So I'm not rage quitting, but I may be taking a break from socials. I haven’t decided yet, like any addict I may need to come down slowly and i'm not looking forward to the withdrawl.
Next week starts with a public holiday so it will be a short week. I’m ready to get stuck back into work but that’s not going to happen until February. Not long now.