The week was, again, one of those weeks that was stop-and-start. My guests were still on the island, and I had a couple of obligations to look after them during the week.

I ran another LLM training course for managers, making a total of around 60 or so managers on the island that I have personally trained in the use of these tools. My course focuses on using them sensibly and identifying where the law and the real responsibility lie. TLDR: You, the manager and enduser.

Newt week should be more of a normal week, although I have a conference (online) I’m attending for a couple of days. I’ll write about that next week.

I wrote a blog post for the Virtual School of Internet Governance entitled “Why I’m making Internet Governance central to my work, and why you should too.” You can read it on their site here. Without getting too bogged down in the politics and technologies, I wanted to make the main point that the Internet is changing, and not necessarily for the better. I’m going to rewrite it a little and issue it as a newsletter soon.

I’ll be working on a short talk about AI in the workplace at the end of the month, so I’ll be focusing on developing that over the coming week.

I recorded another episode of the Innovation, Agilité et Excellence podcast hosted by my friend Jean-François Nantel. We talked about Chiplets, Exascale computing, the Apple Vision Pro and a few other topics, notably Internet Governance. I’ll note here when it is published.

Jean-François kindly presented an hour-long masterclass for my Project Management students. I’m really grateful for his kind gesture.

Reading

I’ve spent a lot of time reading some of the VSIG supplemental documentation and read a few pages of the books on the reading list, but not much.

This week, I’ll get back to reading on a more regular schedule.

Of note

I’ve tried to stay away from too much media these last couple of weeks. I’m only starting to catch up on the list of articles and newsletters that have built up during these last couple of weeks of time off.

Not much else to say this time. Have a great week.

The week has really broken my routines but for a good reason. As I mentioned in the last update, I had decided to take a week off. That week turned out to be as packed as any other week but with activities other than reading papers, writing, thinking or consulting with clients.

In short, I had friends from the UK over, and I took some time to show them around and experience a few things that are not necessarily on the tourist trail… some of them.

We walked (or ran) in a rainforest on Easter Monday in preparation for a family lunch, which, like most big get-togethers, took the entire afternoon up with food, drinks and laughs. We walked up the volcano, and despite the rough weather and almost zero visibility, it was a nice walk. I love being in the forest and in the mountains. There is something really pleasing about being there on your own or with just a couple of people. I took them to see a waterfall that is well known, easy to get to and much fun to be rained on by cold fresh water. We took a sailing boat trip and had a quick swim and a glass of bubbles before heading back to the marina. The photo is from the journey back, sailing with both sails at around 6 knots. Wonderful.

Next week, it’s back to the grind, with a little time off to help out my friends.

The proposal I had put together with Michelle Marius wasn’t accepted, but we’re not done yet and looking at other funding opportunities. I’ll keep you posted. Remember, you can read about the project here.

Of note

The sentencing of Sam Bankman-Fried continues to impact. A letter posted to the court from his parents—as documented in Fortune—paints a less-than-savoury picture of the boy. This story has not ended, and I am sure that much more will come out.

On a note about Fortune, don’t forget how they were one of the “duped”, promoting his bullshit and the crypto “industry” as a whole. They should be ashamed of themselves and start putting more effort into due diligence, just like virtually every organisation that has anything to do with crypto. Some estimates put the industry at having only approximately half of its assets as legal. WTAF? Any other industry that was such a scam would have been closed a long time ago.

The latest scumbag criminal has also just been convicted of billions of dollars of fraud. When is the world going to wake up? Crypto has only a couple of use cases, crime and more crime. The “democratisation” or “banking the unbanked” is all a mirage and a lie to extract even more wealth out of those that can least afford it, making those that can richer and richer. It is obscene and makes me sick to my stomach. Use the morals your parents taught you FFS!

Have a great week.

This week, we received official notification that our proposal was not successful. There were over 230 proposals to be considered, and I believe ours was a strong candidate, but these things don’t always go your way.

While we are a little disappointed, the idea itself is not dead, and we are starting to think about how we can get some funding elsewhere to conduct the study.

I’ll keep this blog up to date once we have decided on our next move.

On a separate note, I have other ideas for research, and I’d like to keep those published here as a kind of register and reminder to help me move ahead with them. Keep a eye on this blog for further information.

No week note this week. I’m taking a well-earned rest and enjoying the beautiful island that I live on. I’ll be back in a week or two.

Have a great week.

It was another one of those weeks that seemed to come and pass without much particularly standing out, but when I looked back, I found that I had completed a lot of things that I hadn’t registered.

I finally got around to roasting the coffee beans I had prepared from the fruit to the bean. It was something I really wanted to do, and I really appreciated the effort involved. For the first coffee of Sunday morning, I made an espresso from those beans and thoroughly enjoyed it. Such fresh coffee has a much fruitier flavour and a strong and layered texture.

I decided to put the foot to the floor and finish the Virtual School of Internet Governance training. With only two modules left out of ten, I decided it was a good time to put in a little effort to finish them before the deadline. The materials are really good, and there is much to read and take on board. The questions for the test are not so hard, but that’s not really the point of these kinds of courses. The access to people, materials and discussion forums makes it interesting. Despite finishing the course, I have a pile of unread supplementary documentation to read. I’ll be going over them during the following months. I have an upcoming overseas voyage, so I’ll take advantage to read much of it then.

I ran one of my GenAI training courses last week with a small group of managers and directors. The idea behind these courses is to expose the people responsible for their companies to the capabilities, but importantly, to the risks and limitations of the tools. I don’t take a binary position in that these tools are either all good or all bad. I can see that they are a bit of both and need to be used responsibly, so I based my training on that premise. So far, it has been very successful, and I am happy to contribute.

Reading

I’ve not been reading novels as much as I would have hoped, but I think there’s something to be said for doing other things now and again and not getting saturated doing the same thing over and over. Again, that doesn’t mean I haven’t been reading. Like last week, I have been reading a lot, just not the things I had set out to read. For professional reasons, I had to concentrate on other texts rather than the books I had planned to read.

One of my favourite reads is The Internet Protocol Journal. The latest issue has a very interesting article about Ethernet. It covers the beginnings of the latest developments of one of the single most important technical protocols ever invented. It reminded me of a couple of books about TCP/IP that changed my life that I have lying around somewhere in the house. I can’t remember the exact title, but they influenced my understanding of networks, networking, and the infrastructure behind it.

Of note

I’ve been working with a couple of clients on aspects of digitalisation. It’s clear that there is a huge opportunity out there to help clients with the basics of digital organisation, document management, administration of systems, and, of course, compliance.

This was another big week for regulation news, with Apple being the subject of much scrutiny. There seems to have been a lot of cognitive dissonance amongst the pro-Apple media, with many journalists too young to remember what happened in the years of IBM, or later, Microsoft, when it came to regulation and compliance. There is a lot of misplaced attribution to the “genius” of Apple versus the reality of a market that allowed Apple to grow into the giant it is now.

I have two comments on Apple’s current attitude. Apple is a giant, and its priorities have changed. It is no longer as interested in serving its clients in the best way possible. It is now mainly interested in resting on the laurels of an admittedly hard-won position and extracting rents without doing the work it used to. Secondly, the pro-Apple press/bloggers and other commentators are mostly US-based and have shown absolutely no understanding of the reasoning and aims of EU regulation. This will bite them in the arse soon as the investigations play out. I’m getting the popcorn ready.

Have a great week.