Here’s a roundup of things, mostly media, I enjoyed in 2023.

Music

I create a Spotify playlist each year where I add songs I like. Here’s my 2023 edition.

I scrobbled about 6700 songs this year.

Here are my top ten tracks and top ten albums.

TV shows

Slow Horses — A season a year, six episodes each, sharp, great cast, Oldman ripping three zingers an episode, set in London which hits me in the nostalgia spots, can’t wait for this season’s finale next week.

The Bear — Season two built nicely on the first season. Episode seven of the second season was a highlight.

Scavengers Reign — Body horror stuff isn’t my thing but this show was great. The creativity on show in the flora and fauna design is incredible.

What We Do in the Shadows — After each season I feel like the show is running out of steam but then each season I laugh during each episode. It has the best intro song ever and Matt Berry is a genius.

Hijack — Idris and some tightly shot thrills.

Deadloch — Everything is inverted. Finished strong.

Succession — They stuck the landing.

Better Call Saul — Finally finished this slow burn. Satisfying finish to the series.

Jury Duty — Wild that this worked. Made me laugh.

Station Eleven — Unexpectedly uplifting post apocalyptic story.

Silo — I love a good mystery. Made me start reading the books.

Movies

Dune (2021) — Well done. Sent me off reading the books again.

John Wick: Chapter 4 — So over the top. Beautifully shot. They shouldn’t make any more, though.

Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse — The best comic movie fare by a wide margin.

Dunkirk — I’m seemingly on a five year lag with Christopher Nolan movies.

The Killer — Fassbender and Fincher on one.

Books

Dune Chronicles — I reread Dune and then read Dune Messiah, Children of Dune, and most of God Emperor of Dune. I underappreciated Herbert’s world building which is incredibly influential. I lost steam about three quarters into the fourth book.

Faith, Hope, and Carnage — Whirls around creativity, spirituality, loss, religion, partnerships. Probably only for Nick Cave sickos like me.

The Psychology of Money — Principles around money and how to handle it. Hold strong and let the power of compounding do its thing.

This is How You Lose the Time War — Sci-fi time travel done well.

Rendezvous With Rama — Classic mysterious space objects baby.

Podcasts

The Watch — Chris and Andy forever.

The Rest is History — Educational and funny. (The live show was great too.)

Dithering — 15 minutes is a sweetspot.

The Rewatchables — Always makes me laugh.

Conversations with Tyler — I love Tyler’s interview style. I always learn things.

Games

God of War Ragnarök — Nothing more satisfying than that axe flying back into your hand.

Elden ring — Only scratched the surface as I don’t have the hours or energy to get up the difficulty curve of this.

Diablo 4 — As addictive as ever. I ended up mashing buttons on this on many evenings.

Baldur’s Gate 3 — Throw back CRPG. Will crack this back open once time allows.

Cyberpunk 2077 — Cool world. Choices didn’t seem like that big a deal. Will crack this open again at some stage given the latest patch seems to have changed a bunch of things up.

King of Tokyo — The kids love playing this. Quick to set up and is great fun.

Products

AirPods Pro 2 — I use these every day. Apple’s best product in a while.

Leica Q2 Reporter — I’m back in Leica land. I carry this camera with me often and have shot way more this year as a result.

True Classic Shirts — These dadcore shirts go good.

Jacob Kaplan-Moss:

The heart of this process – the move that I think makes it work so well – is that in includes an explicit step to first decide how to decide.

I’m chuffed to see Leica are still rolling out firmware updates to the Q2.

The GPS accuracy was something I was hoping they’d improve, so I’m keen to see how this update addresses it.

Jacob Kaplan-Moss:

Performance is contextual: how well you perform your job is deeply dependent on the conditions around you.

Very true.

I always enjoy a peek behind the curtain of places like Google.

Some incredible work.

(via Kottke)

Privacy concerns aside, this has me intrigued.

I always enjoy reading these.

iA Writer dims the text you paste from AI tools. As you edit ChatGPT’s input and make it your own, iA Writer keeps track of what is yours and what isn’t.

An interesting feature. They have a spec for the Markdown annotations that underpin it.

I caught the lads on the last show of their Australia Live tour.

Top drawer stuff. They had me laughing in my seat.

The Q&A questions from the audience were sometimes deranged which I loved.

Paul Robert Lloyd:

This small website provides a list of words that you can refer to when naming something like an HTML class, custom CSS property or JavaScript function. Each word links to a page on Wordnik, an online dictionary that does the hard work of providing multiple definitions and listing related words.

Annie Dean (via Jeremy Anderberg):

“What I can say is that when we look at the challenges at work today, I think it’s pretty well accepted that our greatest challenges have to do with distraction, the lack of ability to focus, the fact that we can’t prioritize important work fast enough because we’re letting our calendars dictate on time. And when you look at those as the key problems and impediments to productivity, fixing where we work is not the answer to any of them.”

Adaptive Audio on iOS 17 feels like an improvement over Transparency mode.

One thing that was driving me nuts however, was that whenever I’d put my AirPods Pro in, the volume would get dropped super low.

I thought it was Adaptive Audio doing it but in fact it was the Personalized Volume feature.

I’ve switched that off and things work a treat.

“Keep me signed in” is the close elevator doors button of the internet.

James Stanier:

regardless of how much autonomy and self-directed time you accumulate, optimal allocation of your capacity is not a box packing problem where you must allocate every single minute of your day. This is an anti-pattern.

…

If we’ve been lucky enough to work with leaders that manage their capacity well, then we may have been surprised that when we reach out with something urgent, they are able to respond quickly and effectively: perhaps they’ve offered to jump on a call straight away. This isn’t luck or anything to do with you. It’s just good capacity management on their part. Make sure that you’re always available for your team when they need you.

Moxie Marlinspike:

As a young person, though, I think the best thing you can do is to ignore all of that and simply observe the older people working there. They are the future you. Do not think that you will be substantially different. Look carefully at how they spend their time at work and outside of work, because this is also almost certainly how your life will look. It sounds obvious, but it’s amazing how often young people imagine a different projection for themselves. Look at the real people, and you’ll see the honest future for yourself.

Jason Cohen:

90% utilization is causing more failure than you realize, not just in burn-out, but in productivity and output.

…

Worse, in many organizations everyone is operating at 90%, which then reacts like the three-server system, where the inevitable hiccup from any one person causes a ripple effect that hurts several other people or projects. Since they are over capacity, rather than absorb the spike, they too will ripple the problem to others—a cascade like the the run-away chain reaction of an atom bomb.

Things getting on top of you?

Need to quiet it all down?

Go sit in front of a campfire under the night sky.

A campfire is like a broom for the mind.

A big part of leading teams is identifying issues to address and opportunities to exploit. The bigger the team, the harder it is to sense trends that need attention. Your job is to help ferret out the signal from the noise—like a human high-pass filter¹.

It’s tempting to jump in at the first sign of difficulty—this can send you around the bend as you chase an increasing number of tails. It can also lead to intervention bias.

The trick, instead, is to slow down and “debounce the signal”. Wait for input around a topic to collect, then take stock of your response.

Having a broad purview and taking the time to think means you can internalise things that others haven’t yet. Typically, the challenge isn’t whether something needs resolving but which of the many opportunities you should direct your constrained capacity towards.

Letting some time pass and banking a couple of nights of sleep can soften your view and reduce the effect of tilt. Working with trusted advisors in your team can also help establish perspective and modulate your response.

What happens when you slow down?

Sometimes, things resolve themselves. The team steps up and sorts things². Internal or external factors change and obviate the issue.

Sometimes, new information comes to light that contradicts what you’ve previously heard. Follow-up conflicting information is particularly prevalent with interpersonal issues within teams. Welcome to the Rashomon Effect. Regardless, you need more information to establish what is happening.

Sometimes, you don’t hear anything more on a topic. Given a large enough team, this scenario is pretty standard. The risk here, of course, is that low-frequency issues can still have a high impact.

Sometimes, things are chronic and severe enough that they need more attention. It becomes evident that you need to do something.

Finally, some issues or opportunities are significant enough that you need to act immediately.

The art is in knowing when to act and when to wait.

Aswath Damodaran is a hell of a speaker. This talk on the lifecycle of businesses feels like a masterclass.