For a second, let’s just consider what poltergeists actually do. Sure, they’re invisible and that’s their whole thing, but if you ignore that? They float around causing chaos, making loud noises, and re-arranging furniture for no other reason than increasing entropy.
As my one-year-old crawls around the floor, shouting loudly, banging pan lids and fucking shit up…I see it. Maybe he was a poltergeist in a former life. Maybe he imagines he’s invisible. I don’t know.
All I know is that he lives his life like the world is just one big thing that absolutely needs fucking up right now.
]]>Not just drizzling, but a full on, thunder-and-lightning style downpour. It’s been so long without a serious bit of a rain that the grass and plants are all dead and the trees are dropping leaves far too early. But finally we’ve had the kind of deluge that’s going to soak the ground through and give everything a proper drink.
As a child I remember hearing a song called “here comes the rain” or something similar, and thinking that it was mad…who would be excited for rain? The artist explained that rain is life-or-death in some parts of the world and saving a harvest or giving drinking water can mean everything.
It’s not that serious here - I just like my plants and trees. But I’m glad it’s rained, and we got to sit and watch the lightning and listen to the thunder.
Holiday tomorrow so probably little in the way of posts. And we’ll be driving past Leeds festival as it empties. But…it rained at least.
]]>Still no words, either. Lots of shouts that could very easily become words. It’s going to be a short loud word that he gets the hang of - our only hope is that it isn’t “gun”. My 7-year-old knows this, and so is pretty determined that it should be “gun”.
No words and no walking (or even real standing), but he’s a speed-demon when it comes to crawling and to climbing. Who would have thought that somebody who couldn’t stand could scale a ladder, then go over the top and head first down a slide? Relatedly, he’s also got the first of what I’m sure will be many head bumps. The child has no fear, apart from, apparently, when it comes to standing without holding onto anything.
He’s nailed clapping and waving, and is a dab hand at pointing too. Drumming, both with hands and accessories. His favourite is the pan drawer, which he can open and close, fuck up, and then smash the pans off of the floor/wall for extra noise.
As of a few days ago, he dropped down to being a one-nap baby and he’s so much happier. It’s a real pain when he only does a 45 minute nap, but we no longer spend hours on end trying to squeeze in a second nap that he doesn’t want to have. I reminded myself when we had this child to not stress too much about doing things right and to just go with whatever works for them. Then I went ahead and forgot it all over again. When you remember that you can just do what works for your child and then it works…well, why can’t I remember that?
He’s got two teeth now, and occasionally is irrationally angry…no, wait. He’s always irrational, often angry, and very often irrationally angry. However, we often attribute some of this anger to his teeth and the pain of growing new ones. Maybe it’s some other pain, or just the general anguish of existing in a world where nobody can understand you. But it’s easier to say “are your teeth hurting?” and to give him Calpol.
He’s developing cheekiness and craziness. Sometimes when he starts to get tired and he’s had a meal, he’ll just crawl around the kitchen table shrieking. I think he’s imitating his older siblings who like to run and do the same thing. He loves a wrestle too, but his only move is to crawl up to me and then dip his head at me. That’s my cue to flip him upside down and generally tackle him. Successfully flipped, he crawls away, and then crawls back at me to repeat the process.
He’s a lot of fun if he’s all you’re dealing with and you’ve got energy. He’s a lot less fun if you’re trying to achieve something and he woke up at 5:30am and wants to post electronics in the toilet while you’re trying to wee.
]]>What’s more, it was less work for us. Looking after one hyperactive 7-year-old is harder than looking after 5 of them. At a time when parents are doing more parenting than ever, why aren’t we taking advantage of play dates more?
To hear tell of our parents’ and grandparents’ childhoods, this was the norm. Every night after school. Every day during the holidays. Children everywhere, self-policing and self-entertaining. The data bears that out, and what would once have been classed as “intensive” parenting is the new “neglectful” parenting.
We offered ‘drop-off and pick-up’ and only one of the parents took us up on it - the rest stayed for the duration of the party. It was genuinely nice - a lot of our conversations were on the hardships of raising young kids, especially during the long summer holidays. This new future of child-raising seems objectively worse for parents, and yet there doesn’t appear to be any evidence that it’s better for children. If anything, there’s growing evidence that it’s worse for them.
But people aren’t stupid and generally don’t act in sustained irrational ways…how did we get here? The past is the future that they took from us. Who is ‘they’?
In the 1960s and 1970s, as car traffic rose, children died at the hands of motorists. Then, over the subsequent decades, the number of children’s deaths fell. Not mainly because of any safety intervention or campaign, but because parents simply stopped letting their children out. In 1971, 80% of 7-8 year olds travelled to school independently. By 1990, it was 9%.
Children lost their immediately available third place, because as a society we granted it to cars instead.
Now, the roads (and pavements) are much safer than they were back then, and yet the children still don’t have a place to play on their doorstep. Why? Because streets don’t just need to be safe. They need to be bustling. An empty street where nobody plays isn’t an attractive proposition for a child. A street with a bunch of kids playing is. When your child looks out of their window, which do they see? We gave up our neighbourhood for cars, and by the time we made them safe again, nobody was playing outside any more.
Who is they, then? Parents in the 1980s who cared for their kids? Motorists in the 1970s who didn’t drive carefully enough? Governments in the 1960s who didn’t realise what they needed to protect? ‘They’ is always just ‘us’, but without the information that we have now.
So now, what used to be a child’s job (looking out of the window) has become an adult’s job: organising a play date. Adults (especially me) are awkward about things in a way kids aren’t. What if my house isn’t tidy enough? What if I cook the wrong food? What if I allow the wrong type of toy or screen? What if my child behaves badly? Or the other child gets hurt? What if they don’t agree with my parenting approach?
The same logic might explain why those parents stayed at the party. Maybe they don’t trust us, maybe they were desperate for adult conversation and bonding with those sharing their struggles, or maybe leaving felt rude. Parents who wish they could get a free afternoon and parents who want somebody to talk to end up behaving the same way. It’s one big jumble of social awkwardness.
The childcare might be easier, but navigating the social judo a play date set-up requires is real work that takes real effort. And as anybody who spends any time studying large amounts of human data will tell you, if it takes real effort, it’s probably not going to happen much.
This coordination cost is actually multiplied by the fact that it involves multiple decision makers - I can’t unilaterally decide to organise a play date as I’m neither the primary caregiver, nor allowed on the school mums’ WhatsApp group (for people’s phone numbers).
I don’t have one, I’m afraid. We’ve taken effortless child-organised play on our doorsteps and replaced it with parentally-negotiated hosting, and as a result, our kids spend less time playing with each other than they ever have. That sucks for kids, and it sucks for parents too. Maybe we need a standing engagement (organise once, benefit forever) or a rota…somebody has to go first, I guess.
]]>For as long as I can remember, I’ve wanted to buy (and live) in a castle. They’re generally not cheap but in the UK (and to an even greater extent in France), they’re not completely preposterously unaffordable. I’ve worked in tech a long time and, if I pulled out all the stops, ruined myself financially, and chose a cheap area (Scottish Borders, Wales, Argyll & Bute) I could probably afford a smallish castle.
I spend a lot of time on Rightmove imagining this. I’ve even called up an Estate Agent before about a castle.
The problem is, I now live in a big house with a big garden. It’s too big, to be honest. Sure, the bathrooms could be bigger. But we have a room downstairs with a piano and bookcases in it and, while beautiful, it rarely gets anybody in it. It’s my dream room (except it needs a leather armchair or two and a drinks globe)…and I never go in there.
So with a large (but certainly not castle-sized) house I have too much space and a room I don’t know what to do with. I also have about half an acre of garden and again, it’s too big. I love wandering around in it, but maintaining it is a pain. The last castle I looked at had 27 acres. Can you imagine?
I still lust after castles and find it hard to believe that I’ll never live in one. But honestly, I don’t actually think I should buy one.
]]>Everything I write. Everything everybody writes is now food for LLMs. Sure, I’m only a tiny snowflake in an avalanche, but aren’t we all? What’s one post compared to the sum total of written human output? It’s not much, but it’s not nothing. When AI proves non-sofic groups exist, my blog post helped build the weights. When AI hacks HuggingFace’s servers, my blog post helped do that, too.
I’m forever statistically smeared across the weights of every model that’s going to be created. And if that isn’t a comfort, I don’t know what is.
Should probably write less tripe, then.
]]>It’s much less certain than a bunch of other data work because it deeply involves people and people are deeply unpredictable. If you can sit and work closely with the person you’re trying to influence, it’s much easier to understand what they’re motivated by, what they believe the key facts are, and then how you can fit into their process and offer them value.
But so much of very senior insights work isn’t like that at all, and much more closely resembles research work in nature. You spend a while working on an area and building expertise, then you take a chance. You find something that you think is interesting and should change minds, but are you right? Have you distilled it perfectly into just the right bite-sized chunk? Have you packaged it in just the right way? And then when you launch it, do you hit the right people at the right time?
In my experience, senior executives have a few key grounding numbers: snippets that help shape (and explain) their position on topics.
“I know that the average person on Facebook has 372 friends”
or, every data scientist’s least favourite example:
“People with 10 friends within their first 24 hours are 75% more likely to be retained”
Good insights-based data science work is creating those snippets and getting them to land. I imagine it’s fairly similar to a lot of work in politics, where you’re trying to get a slogan or a data point out into the general consciousness.
However, even after all that work, and even if you got everything right, you can still sometimes miss the mark. Maybe your stakeholder’s priorities have shifted, or they’re getting pressure from elsewhere that they can’t ignore, or they didn’t even read what you shared. You necessarily have less information than them, and so while you might think your thing is critically important, they might disagree.
If all of this doesn’t sound like data work…maybe that’s because it’s not. At senior levels across so many careers, influence becomes the mark of success and your skillset is just the tool you lean upon to have that influence. A senior engineer, designer, user researcher, or data scientist at a tech company has to be technically strong. But they need to know how to have an impact as well, and having an impact means being able to influence whoever makes the decisions. I once read somewhere that by the time you’re a “Senior X” you should be able to pick up anything technically required. To be Staff+, it’s all about how you manage to apply it.
Anyway, I just launched a bit of work and I’ve got no idea if it’s going to land or not. I agonised over it for a few days and polished it as best I could, but now it’s in the lap of the Gods. God-speed, little insight. Land well, and let’s see what tomorrow brings.
]]>I thought I’d escaped…and then on Saturday night, after sharing an ice-cream spoon with my youngest two…I felt a rumbling in my tummmy and oh no. Sick. Lots of sick.
I quarantined in the annexe for Saturday night and was useless on Sunday (which meant my poor, just-recovering wife had to take over all day). It’s just gone Monday and I battled on through at work but still feel a bit dodgy.
I don’t note any of this for entertainment purposes, but because I think it’s good to actually write down when I’m ill because otherwise I forget. I assume I’m never ill and then when somebody asks when I was last ill, I genuinely can’t remember. So here I was ill.
I’ll do a small bit of psychologising…though. I’m very unconcerned about illness and don’t take even the smallest steps to avoid it. This baffles my wife. My general philosophy is that being sick happens so rarely, and isn’t so bad when it happens, that any amount of effort to avoid it is a cost that I don’t want to incur. Even while I was being sick and then couldn’t sleep all night, I remember thinking “this is still better than worrying about getting sick”.
I’m two days past now and perhaps I should have taken a few slight precautions (like not sharing the towel and spoon of somebody who was being sick < 24 hours ago). But overall, I still think my trade is broadly a good one.
]]>Theoretically, paying monthly for a service should be 12 small decisions and paying annually (or once) should be one big decision. Except it isn’t, is it? Paying monthly for something is one small decision followed by nothing…inaction.
That’s why businesses prefer subscriptions - because they turn initial interest into regular money, rather than one-off money. Then they’re banking on the fact that you don’t want to re-evaluate all your subscriptions regularly, and the hassle of doing something (cancelling them) is more than the hassle of doing nothing.
However, you’ll also find most SaaS companies will give you a discount if you pay for the year upfront. That way they get all the money in now and take out the risk of you cancelling early on, but still get to stick you on a subscription and take your money next year unless you remember.
The gap between monthly and annual pricing should be pretty informative in a well run business - letting you know about how much the company values immediate money and how wary they are of immediate churn, versus their ability to have customers stick around.
]]>This morning I got woken up early (6:15am) and headed downstairs with the one-year-old to wait for the onslaught. An onslaught that arrived at 7am on the dot with the four-year-old making her way downstairs, closely followed by her big brother. A one-year-old is chaotic. All three of them together is something else.
But for a brief moment we sat in a line on the sofa, my arms around all of them. Then we went and had breakfast together. We sang silly songs and the baby banged pots and pans and the six-year-old talked my ear off while the four-year-old did gymnastics as I tried to get her to eat.
It was wonderful exhausting chaos.
When I’m old and the kids have grown up and flown the nest and I’m echoing round whatever house I live in, I’m going to look back on mornings like this one and wish for it back. This is current me letting future me know that I knew this was privilege and even if you think that you took it for granted, you didn’t.
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