Field Notes 14 // Hospitals, grindset cafés, and Weezer
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“It is not winter that defeats you. It is your insistence on summer.”
– Epictetus
My wife was recently in the hospital – a dated 1960s building that towers above the local area. She was only there for a week, not too long, but it’s still sad to see somebody you love confined to a bed in a ward. The worst part was when she walked me to the magnet-secured doors at the exit and stared sadly through the windows as I called the lift to go home. Heartbreaking.
While my main concern for her and her broken ribs, I was also completely drained myself from travelling back and forth every day. But the human mind is malleable. We can get used to just about anything, and I did, bringing fruit and games to cheer her up once she quickly got bored of the place.
It was the longest I’ve spent in a hospital since I had certain operations as a child, and I was surprised to note some similarities to my time at a business hotel last month. Most people in hospital are in unusual circumstances, more than likely a little anxious about what’s next. But everyone is in the same boat, and that changes the mood. People chat more in the corridors and lifts, allow each other more courtesy than they would on the street. It feels as though there’s an invisible field of empathy around the whole place.
Even during my relatively brief visits, I said hello every day to the older woman stationed next to my wife, helped a visitor to the UK who was injured at the airport connect to the internet to book a new flight, and chatted to another patient from the ward to the street one day (mainly to give him an outlet as he vented about his inconsistent diagnoses and surgery delays).
Alongside all of this, there were other consequences of the car accident to worry about. How badly damaged was the vehicle? Would the insurance cover my wife’s lost income? Worst-case scenarios kept creeping into my mind, and if I took a few minutes to unwind then I felt guilty I wasn’t doing enough.
I naturally seek control, but I realised I needed to accept it wasn’t possible in this situation. I couldn’t control my wife’s recovery. I couldn’t control what the mechanics would find when they inspected the car more closely. And I couldn’t control the actions of the insurance company or the other driver. Instead, I simply had to believe that everything would be fine somehow. I couldn’t fight what was happening and stress too much about things being imperfect. It would be useless to insist upon summer in winter.
With coincidental timing, on the bus to the hospital I heard a podcaster say that luck is a form of gratitude. If you believe good things will happen, you open yourself up to more opportunities. It becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. Anxiety, he said, is the opposite. It narrows your focus, closes you up to those same things. And the natural desire for control in situations where it is not possible becomes anxiety – something I need to be cognisant of.
To me, I think feeling lucky is more important than being lucky – at least sometimes. Thinking about luck, you might imagine a big event like a lottery win. For now, though – despite the bad luck of the car crash – I feel lucky just to have my wife home and for things to be slowly returning to normal.
When “old” tech outperforms LLMs
An amusing side story to the whole car crash saga was when I needed to identify a vehicle’s model based on a few stills from our car’s dashcam.
I fed the images to the big AI models – ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini – and they were so wrong and so confident about it. They were often so distracted by their first guess that they couldn’t drop it, no matter how many times I told them the grille pattern or the mirrors didn’t match. Then, focusing too hard on the grille and mirrors, the next results would forget what we’d discussed before about the headlights or wheel arches, and we’d be back to square one.
Google Gemini earned a special mention. Not only was it totally convinced that the car was a Suzuki S-Cross (despite looking nothing like it) – when I told it to discard that guess, it thought I was playing a game and asked for more clues so it had a better chance of “winning”. Hugely frustrating.
“So, spill the details—what car is it actually, or are we still playing mystery vehicle detective? Want to share a few fresh clues so we can try identifying the real car?”
It was my wife who eventually found the car we were looking for. How? She uploaded our images to Google Lens. That’s right – for all the buzz around LLMs in recent years, an “old” technology based on image recognition algorithms and a neural network outperformed all of the major models.
Visiting London’s new grindset café
One of my most-read blog posts covered the Claude pop-up café in New York and how it indirectly convinced me to switch LLMs. Perhaps the marketers were so excited that their “activation” had indeed activated somebody that they couldn’t stop reading. Either way, I realise that returning to the tech-adjacent café scene puts my blog at risk of becoming a specialist publication.
This time, there’s a new 24/7, laptop-friendly café in Shoreditch that’s caused quite a stir amongst the entrepreneurial crowd. I dropped by one morning, feeling quite the impostor on the way to my corporate job, and found the place almost empty. If there are people building in London, they certainly aren’t early risers. I settled in for a pricey (£4.10!) but admittedly very good coffee, and answered some emails while soaking in the atmosphere.
The space itself was very Shoreditch – bare bones, brick walls, and wooden floors. The ceiling sported a mural inspired by The Creation of Adam, with dogs in place of Adam and God. A line at the top of the menu read: “Coffee for building things. Tea for pretending you are taking a break.”
London lacks spaces open into the night that don’t revolve around drinking. All the coffee shops in the City are closed by the time I leave the office. So while my café visit didn’t trigger some kind of entrepreneurial epiphany, I do hope that the place marks the start of a trend, and that Londoners get more places to work, write, code, and create beyond regular business hours.
The Gold Album by Weezer
Weezer’s latest self-titled album – this time draped in gold – dropped this month. For me, it came out of absolutely nowhere. I like Weezer, and a few of their albums rank amongst my all-time favourites, but their output is too inconsistent to justify following their news on a minute-by-minute basis.
This one doesn’t sit amongst those greats, but it does well to capture the sound of Weezer’s early music. Certain moments could be mistaken for excerpts from the Blue or Green albums. The production is spot-on, and sounds a lot more like four guys just jamming out in a practice room.
The highlights for me are Say Yes, Don’t Make It Weird, Up in the Clouds, and The LA Sound – all of which have adrenaline-triggering shift-ups and chord changes. The rest sit between enjoyable but middling pop-rock (We Might as Well Be Strangers) and tracks I already skip regularly (Hoops, which opens with an anecdote about scanning a QR code on a newly purchased toaster).
It’s a mixed bag, but the whole trends above average. The Gold Album doesn’t come close to something like Pinkerton or even the later White Album, but I wouldn’t mind if Weezer played a few of these songs in London next year.
This month on the blog
In case you missed them, here are my best posts from August.
Things that left an impression
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The best thing I read this month was Paul Jun’s account of AI’s impact on creative industries. As we enter “a world of infinite drafts produced at nearly zero cost”, how do we know what’s worth making, and what’s worth consuming? Jun’s write-up is an intriguing and level-headed assessment of the current direction of travel.
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I follow The Ben and Emil Show mainly for their tech-adjacent output, so when I saw How Costco Mastered Capitalism in my feed I felt almost disappointed. However, it turned out to be a fascinating dive into the history of the big-box retailer and its corporate ethos.
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The Solved podcast’s Luck episode is the one that got me thinking about the role of luck and gratitude in our lives. It’s a long one, but there’s plenty of interesting discussion if you have a few spare hours.
Until next month – subscribe below to get October’s newsletter first!
