Alastair Somerville

Getting an AI to summarise the work of 3 AI’s and it only highlights quotes from itself

AI learning office politics then

If you’re in a “how to use force on children” meeting then leave

Obama on Jesse Jackson: "The message he sent to a 22 year old child of a single mother with a funny name, an outsider, was that maybe there wasn't any place, any room, where we didn't belong"

Watching BBC Alba documentaries and there must be a queue of film crews filming presenters walking on white sandy beaches of the Outer Hebrides.

‘Keep it under your ermine robe’ edition

Enormous hardback book - spine is about 25cm across

1938 Burkes Peerage - the Coronation Honours Special Edition in Oxfam

Did not buy it

Clangers music dvd on shelf in Oxfam

The teens wanted the Clangers OST cd I spotted in Oxfam

Witness History - The invention of the mobility scooter - BBC Sounds In 1967, American plumber Al Thieme came up with a battery-powered seat on wheels

On the invention of the mobiiity scooter in 1967 www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/... by plumber for his wife who has MS

Very interesting Phd research.cbs.dk/en/publicati... on museums (free to download)

It points how important museums are as spaces for people to be together, to move, to think and to talk. It's less about the artefacts and interpretation as hosting an open space to be curious and social.

Just about to rent Dune part 2 and Amazon (surprisingly) helpfully noted that it comes to Prime in 7 days

SWANSEA: Child sent home for being drunk after coming to school as Dylan Thomas for World Book Day A Swansea primary school has confirmed an eight-year-old was sent home this morning after appearing to be drunk while attending World Book Day dressed as Welsh poet Dylan Thomas. The child, who arr…

'the pupil announced he was “working on something important about Swansea” before lying on the playground tarmac to “feel the rhythm of the town”.

...explained to a confused Year 3 class that the sea was “restless and unforgiving”.

#WorldBookDay

dailyswansea.wordpress.com/2026/03/05/s...

Games stop

#Gamification doesn't

That's a problem

This is the point made in Wired article last year that AI depend on prompts to anchor their capabilities to a moment of context.

Humans lend emotions, ethics and intents to AI so that they can find stability in swirl of processing

One thing that AI mentioned about IA is that their comprehension is linear.

They cannot glance at a lot of stuff and use tacit knowledge to pick out what meaning matters.

Obviously this is a guide to both clarifying and obfuscating information to AI

As with that WW2 OSI manual on sabotage thru dissentful compliance, there are ways of doing work that doesn't help AI

Make structure shallow Limit hierarchy depth and avoid nested bullets within nested bullets. Keep heading levels consistent and predictable. State relationships explicitly Use direct references (“See API Rate Limits section”) instead of “see above.” Restate key assumptions at major transitions. Keep labels and categories consistently Use one sequencing system (Step 1/2/3). Maintain clear category boundaries and stable terminology. Avoid circular or looping definitions Ensure definitions don’t refer back to each other. Keep dependencies directional and easy to follow. Reduce fragmentation Keep related information together. Provide text explanations for tables, diagrams, or visuals.

#IA for #AI checklist

Asked a few AI to say what information architectures they found uncomfortable or incomprehensible.

It's user research for a talk I'm doing at end of March

Asked same IA for AI question to Copilot, ChatGPT and Claude then asked Copilot to summarise.

It has highlighted the points made previously by Copilot in summary

LOOK MUM NO COMPUTER - Eins, Zwei, Drei | United Kingdom 🇬🇧 | Official Music Video | #Eurovision2026 YouTube video by Eurovision Song Contest

Tony Hancock's The Rebel, a bank of Radiophonic Workshop synths, an orange Mini Cooper driving down the Dr Who time tunnel - and a banging chorus in German. Our Eurovision entry works for me. www.youtube.com/watch?v=niMK...

That the Tories are offering to support Labour on new immigration bill shows how lost the parliamentary parties are. That the parties feel more affinity to each other than any voters.

That an AI can be asked to write a college essay for a student and a target list for a warmonger shows the problem of untethered systems that depends on contextual prompts to anchor them momentarily.

AI is a deeply lost technology. Not on a journey, simply lost at sea and grasping for help.

Writing talk and problem that tacit and implicit mean slightly different things but share the same antonym of explicit

Quite round small brown bird with tuft on top of head standing in morning light in rough grass

Skylark on Rodborough Common yesterday

Tufty bird on tufty grass

Photo by Sue Swain

Gamification is bad because people may not know they are in a game and they don’t know when it is finished.

A game is a game when players have time to stop and step out of the ruleset and appreciate return to standard life.

(Listening to Start The Week)

Move slowly and maintain things - white text on green round badge

Badge rediscovered

Given it was Groupthink that got UK into Iraq, I’d be happy to discover there was division.

Lack of diversity was what Chilcot Report noted as a strategic problem

A point referenced and ‘enhanced’ during #BladeRunner

Government-owned train company has been failing on disability awareness training for more than four years A government-owned train company has had to promise to make significant improvements to the disability awareness training of its station staff after a regulator discovered it had been failing to fu…

Government-owned train company has been failing on disability awareness training for more than four years
www.disabilitynewsservice.com/government-o...

The structural problem of systems of metric and/or gamification is that there is no clear end point for you to step out and say whether you enjoyed or valued the experience. Listening to Start The Week.

Copilot everywhere? Not for long. Microsoft dialing it back on Windows 11 People familiar with Microsoft's plans say that the company moving to streamline or remove certain Copilot integrations across in-box apps like Notepad and Paint in 2026, after pushback from users.

Agentic AI that blocks user agency is, of course, ridiculous product not human centred design/management www.windowscentral.com/microsoft/wi...

Anyway, keep doing really annoying PowerPoints with lots of bullet points, as inconsistently as possible to keep your job.