Phil Bowell

Niq touches on a subject I’ve been thinking about over the last few days, online reviews. His focus is on the fake ones that people write in return for a discount, reviews that don’t offer a true reflection of the work/service/product received. Quite rightly, he points out that:

Online ratings are built upon trust. Of course, every person has their own rating system, but still, if anything on the internet has a rating close to 5 stars, you can usually expect it to be a genuinely positive experience.

Fake online ratings, however, destroy this system of trust. Dear people of the internet: Don’t take the bait out of personal greed to get a lousy 10% discount when you have to sell your soul in exchange.

Whilst I agree with this, I am starting to land in a different place. The general population should not be allowed to post reviews. It’s a little extreme perhaps, but bear with me.

I think reviews should be entirely objective and there should be no space for a disgruntled customer to post a quick, one-line, one-star review on Google. It benefits no one other than to placate a temporary feeling by the poster. It is an ineffective byproduct of our society which places strong emphasis on instant gratification before moving on to the next thing. It encourages a world lacking in forgiveness and compassion.

Before the internet, we turned to experts to understand what was good or bad about something we are less informed of. The world of food has the Michelin guide, hotels have AA ratings, businesses relied on good service, but now a Google rating of 4.5 or above is a marketing gimmick.

One of my favourite local cafes consistently serves top-quality coffee from friendly and knowledgeable baristas. Its Google rating just dropped to 4.4 because of one disgruntled customer posting a 2-star review that by all accounts is inaccurate. It certainly does not reflect my experience or the experience of the many regulars I see in there every morning. If it did, they wouldn’t keep coming back.

The question ultimately, is: why do we give people the power to post a negative review (or positive) when they could be having a bad day and one thing out of character happens in a cafe that tips them over the edge?

I would much rather pay attention to an objective review of a place written by someone who knows their stuff and who likely has visited multiple times before forming their opinion.

I absolutely love this two-part desk setup.

Instead of having a single, tech only desk, I now use one large desk that is split into two parts: a digital side and an analog side.

My desk used to be my dining table, but when Covid hit I quickly realised the small occasional desk I used wasn’t big enough for me. I gave that desk to my Mum and set up camp on my dining table. Over time it’s become my place of work for 90% of my job, the other 10% is begrudgingly spent in the office. It’s dominated by my Samsung display (I would love a Studio Display) but if I have time in amongst the calls today I might try to rejig and create more space for my analogue tools. Some kind of split like this might work, rather than having my offline items mixed around all the tech.

I proved a very well known hypothesis in UX/UI design this morning. Users don’t read. I also proved that primary buttons need to be very carefully chosen, especially when they don’t do what the user thinks they will do. On a somewhat related note, Bitbucket’s commenting system is very poorly designed.

They shall grow not old, as we that are left grow old:
Age shall not weary them, nor the years condemn.
At the going down of the sun and in the morning
We will remember them.

From For the Fallen By Laurence Binyon

After finishing work for the day I spent a little time futzing around setting up an MCP server with my Obsidian vault and it seems like a fascinating way to interact with the notes I have in there.

The initial setup wasn’t as smooth sailing as it should’ve been. The MCP server plugin requires installing another plugin which creates a secure Local REST API for your vault, try as I might, I couldn’t get it to enable. Of course this meant I needed to get it working more than ever! Turning off all the community plugins and turning the REST API one on first got things working and when I enabled the rest of the plugins again it continued to work.

As a test I asked Claude if it could see my Obsidian notes and it came back with a summary of my vault. Huzzah!

The next step was to ask it to find a recipe note, take the ingredients from it, and then make a groceries project with the ingredients as tasks in Things. It worked and was a much smoother process than finding the recipe in Mela and adding the ingredients to Reminders.

What I like about this is that it all happens locally and none of the conversations are used to train Claude’s models. This kind of connection between local apps is the first time I’ve felt like these AI tools could become useful for me.

An interesting thread from Jessica Hische about the new Affinity.

I’ve been using the Affinity suite for a few years and looking forward to kicking the tyres on this new version. Some of my fears of free have been dispelled by threads like this and the elsewhere. They aren’t using any of the IP created in it to train AI.

Matthew Smith is sharing the photos he took on his recent trip to Japan and there are some lovely shots that capture both the people and the place. Well worth a scroll if you’ve any interest in Japan and it’s culture.

Last week Cheltenham hosted it’s annual literature festival and I was able to make it a long to a couple of events. First up was a discussion on Agatha Christie featuring Poirot himself, David Suchet.

It was a fun evening hearing about the efforts Mr Suchet went to in order to portray Hercule Poirot consistently over a period of 25 years. I would’ve loved to have seen the notes he made after reading all of the Poirot books that culminated in a list of 92 things he would need to bring his character to life. The most famous one for me…

Poirot doesn’t run.

The second event I made it to was to see the wonderful Charlie Mackesy. He has a new book out, but hearing about his creative process was both inspiring and humbling.

I’ve come across many artists and designers in my life. Most have a common trait, they are generally very self effacing, preferring for their work and others to be in the spotlight. Charlie takes this to a whole new level. As far as he is concerned he is just a man who like to draw and made a book.

The fact people enjoy his work so much speaks to it’s quality, but also it’s message. I first came across Charlie just before the pandemic when he released his first book, I had been through a difficult time and his work was comforting and encouraging. It seems I was not alone in finding that.

Finished reading: Always Remember by Charlie Mackesy 📚

We always like to imagine mastery as a kind of arrival. You work and work and work, you practice something for 10,000 hours or – in the case of the violin – even longer, and then, one day, you’re there. You’ve reached the peak, the struggle is over. You can lean back and enjoy. But it’s not really like that, is it? And wouldn’t it be a bit boring as well? The gift of mastery is that it sharpens your senses. The cost is that you never again hear things the same. Because you care.

Matthias Ott writing about the true meaning of mastery and its impact on your life. I would add one thing, true masters require great humility. The ability to understand their current limits and to honestly look at themselves and figure out where they can get better.