Google’s parent company, Alphabet, will publish its financial results for the third quarter today.

A couple of weeks ago, I was on a course for work about something utterly unrelated to technology.¹ During one presentation, one of the tutors said something along the lines of:

The report of that public inquiry is really easy to find on G—

I mean, it’s easy to find if you search online. I was going to say ‘on Google’, but that feels a bit creepy nowadays, doesn’t it?

It’s the first time I’ve heard someone express that idea in real life, which felt like a significant moment to me. I’m not suggesting that a perception of creepiness is about to make a huge dent in Alphabet’s profits, but it feels like a far cry from the social cachet that a brand like Google once held. It doesn’t feel like that’s a positive place for a consumer-facing brand to find itself, and certainly not for the long term.

1. It was about commanding the response to major incidents, which is the sort of course which is both incredibly useful and a bit frightening. ↩

The image at the top of this post was generated by DALL·E 3.

Twenty years ago, Tony Blair—then Prime Minster—was ‘rushed’ to hospital with a ‘heart scare’ resulting in a cardioversion.

A couple of days later, when it was clear that all was well, a single-word letter appeared in The Guardian. It was written by Percival Turnbull, and it was so perfectly pitched that I still often think about it:

I wonder whether this gently cutting humour still has a place in politics twenty years on. It often feels like public discourse has been overtaken by such violent polarisation that this kind of pointed lightheartedness has lost its place.

I hope there is still room for it. I think that interventions which gently and humorously needle in a way that makes people consider an underlying message can be remarkably effective.

There’s been a lot written about the death of the small smartphone, including two Verge articles that resonated with me: this from Allison Johnson back in April and this from Sean Hollister yesterday.

A lot of the coverage of small phones is imbued with an underlying assumption that it is people with small hands or pockets that particularly lament them: it’s often presented as an example of how the views of women are under-considered in the tech world.

I’m neither a woman nor a person with especially small hands¹ or pockets, but I am the owner of an iPhone 12 Mini. I mourn the passing of the iPhone Mini series. If there were an iPhone 14 or 15 Mini, there’s a good chance that I’d have bought one. Instead, all I’ve done is replaced the 12 Mini’s battery: far better for the environment, but less positive for Apple’s profits.

I prefer a phone with a smaller screen because it feels ‘handier’ than a larger phone and because it feels less immersive. It feels like using a tool, not like being sucked into a portal to a world of internet nonsense.

1. While writing this, I realise that I’ve finally forgotten my glove size. In surgery, sterile gloves are sized by number, much like shoes, and knowing which size gloves to pull off the shelf was an everyday essential. I reckon it’s fifteen years since I was last in an operating theatre, so perhaps it’s no surprise that I can remember that detail any more. ↩

There seems to be a trend for these to have more and more words on them. Someone must have determined that door hangers are a ‘brand touchpoint’ or some such nonsense.

Keeping them as simple as possible would make them maximally functional. Sacrificing function for ‘brand personality’ is probably not the best decision.

This book seems to have had a digital release in September, but isn’t coming out in physical form in the UK until 2024. It’s therefore the first book I’ve read in ages which I’ve read purely digitally. I bought it after the book was referenced in this Johnson column in The Economist.

It’s a short book largely based on behavioural science about how to write clearly and concisely. At work, one of my pet peeves is poorly written corporate communications. I get quite riled when people send mass emails which I can’t understand, frequently with calls to action that are bafflingly unclear. You wouldn’t know it from my rambling on here, but in professional life, I spend a lot of time refining things I write to make them as precise, concise and clear as possible.

As a result, I spent most of this book nodding along. I don’t think I picked up anything new from it, but I appreciated how to authors compiled sage advice into this short, actionable format. It should be required reading for anyone drafting any sort of corporate communication… and many of the principles are applicable in personal life as well.

This film, starring Michael Caine and the late Glenda Jackson, is one that I’d never have gone to see if it weren’t for my current project.

Due to a combination of my age and my complete lack of cinema knowledge, Glenda Jackson was mostly an MP to me, and it was a bit of a shock to see her acting in a film. She was, of course, a much-acclaimed and quite brilliant actor, so it didn’t take me too long to get over that.

This is a film which dramatises Bernard Jordan’s ‘escape’ from a care home in 2014, to attend the commemoration of the seventieth anniversary of the D-Day landings in France. Having seen the trailer before I saw the film, I had thought that this might be a gentle comedic film, and was slightly reticent about seeking it as a result. I didn’t really want to see something that made light of the terrible horror of war.

I was wrong to be sceptical. This isn’t a comedy caper, it’s a thoughtful and profoundly sad film about the long-lasting impact of the trauma of fighting in a war. It’s lightened by the reflection on a seventy-year love story. It explores the dynamic of a couple which has been together for so long: something that’s rarely analysed on screen. Jackson and Caine were both excellent, though I felt Jackson was the more commanding screen presence. I think I’d have given Danielle Vitalis equal billing too: she provided an important emotional core for the film, and matched Jackson’s power in their scenes together.

It was an understated, moving and beautifully acted film. I think there was room for a little more reflection of the moral complexity of the whole piece, but maybe there was a conscious decision to keep it simple so as not to crowd out the central themes.

This is worth 90 minutes of your time.

Last week, I reflected that I’d underestimated the potential of large language models by basing my opinion on the early versions of ChatGPT. Interestingly, Casey Newton has talked in the latest edition of Platformer about making the same mistake.

I had recently subscribed to ChatGPT Plus at the encouragement of a friend who had found it to be an excellent tutor in biology. A few days later, I found myself embarrassed: what I thought I knew about the state of the art had essentially been frozen a year ago when ChatGPT was first released. Only by using the updated model did I see how much better it performed at tasks involving reasoning and explanation.

I told the researcher I was surprised by how quickly my knowledge had gone out of date. Now that I had the more powerful model, the disruptive potential of large language models seemed much more tangible to me. 

The researcher nodded. “You can fast forward through time by spending money,” she said.

Naturally, Casey’s thoughts are more extensive and more fully formed than my own, and the whole piece is well worth reading.

I read the 2023 translation by Alison L Strayer of Ernaux’s 2022 autobiographical essay. It is not long: the Fitzcarraldo Editions version extends to 26 pages of very large print text.

The essay covers Ernaux’s relationship with a student thirty years her junior, which occurred around the millennium when Ernaux was in her fifties. It felt honest and thoughtful, with the plain and quite direct style of writing that I remember from reading Simple Pleasures a couple of years ago.

My overriding feeling was a sort of envy at Ernaux’s self-awareness and capacity for self-analysis, even if not for the choices she makes in her life. I think I’d enjoy reading more of her work.