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Yodeller

Welcome to the Yodeller: my ongoing project to try and write something every day. You can read more about the background from here. If you are a new reader you might want to start from the beginning.

Watching TV in candlelight

What do we do if the power goes out?Well, then we just have to watch TV in the candlelight.

Today the world Earth hour once again encourages everyone to turn of all (non-essential) lights dor one hour. The act is a gesture to bring awareness to the climate change and encourage people to conserve energy.

It's a nice gesture and it's the thought that counts. But thoughts and prayers have never helped anyone. In grand scale of things one hour with lights of (even if would be all lights everywhere around the world ) doesn't make a difference. There are still billions of devices consuming electricity and it's much harder to get people to turn of those even for an hour.

Even for the lights we are only willing to give one hour. Is that how much we care about our future? Even mothers and fathers get one full day! We could at least tey to give at least that to the planet we depend on for our survival.

Maybe we indeed need aliens from other planet to come and save us if we can't do it ourself. (Yes, I have been watching the new Netflix adaptation of the Three Body Problem lately. Trying hard not to compare it with the books).

Leadership conversation

Our management team has worked in the current composition almost a year now. Most of us have been there for over two years and some much longer. Even though we have had a few dedicated occasions to get together physically most of our collaboration happens online.

The get together events have been great and I've learned a lot about my colleagues during those days. With some of them we have regular meetings where we often have time to also catch up on non-work related stuff. But what has been missing is seeing (or at least hearing) how each one of us lead our teams.

We have experienced leaders who have seen how things are handled in other companies and we have members for whom this is their first management team level leadership position. So there is lot to learn and share.

It is this meta discussion and knowledge that we have been lacking. Between talking strictly about work related stuff and catching up on personal matters this quite important topic we have mostly omitted.

Today we were supposed to kickstart fixing this missing piece. However the discussion drifted quite far from the intented topic on several occasions and at the end we decided we need to take one step back before we can dive deeper into this topic. We first need to define what leadership and management really mean to us and what kind of leaders we want to be for the company.

My two favourite things together

LEGO together with Wizards of the Coast are releasing a new Dungeons and Dragons themed LEGO set at the beginning of next month. The design is based on fan submission to a design competition under the LEGO ideas moniker held in 2022. The set is released to commemorate 50 years of DnD.

When our kids were young we used to play DnD together with the whole family. Back then I already used LEGO to create lively battle maps for their LEGO minifigure characters to interact with. It was a great way to visualize the playing field and the bricks offer endless possibilities to create different dungeons and other settings. There was already back then a great variety to also customize the player characters and create different monsters to challenge them.

The new set, along the DnD themed collectible minifigure set that is to be released in autumn will bring these possibilities even closer to the (DnD) reality adding to the pool of suitable figures and accessories included in medieval and fantasy themed sets released over the years all the way back to the original castle sets.

There will also be a standalone adventure released along the set that will fully utilize the out of the box build and included minifigs and monsters.

The good thing is that our company is paying us the yearly bonus at the end of this month. So I have some extra money to spent on this dream set.

Empty tank

If you are still driving an ICE car in Finland there might be an unhappy surprise waiting for you at the gas station. Due to the recent political strikes here the fuel deliveries have been suffering and in anticipation of shortages to gas people have been hoarding some reserves for themselves.

While there are attempts to secure the deliveries there has already been reports of some stations running out of gas. Of course there is always the next station bot too far away. But if the situation continues it could get more severe. The next one might not have anything in their tanks either. Surprisingly this looming shortage hasn't driven the gas prices up, yet.

As an electric car driver I don't have to worry about the situation. Even though the charging stations along the road might be a bit more sparse than the gas stations there is always an outlet somewhere where I can get more juice for the batteries.

It's not just more ecological and economical to have an electric car, there is also some certainty that in the time of crisis there is always a way to power them.

A.I. assistants

LLMs have been transforming many things how I both consume and produce content. While I still do enjoy writing these posts manually many things that I write at work are at least partially written by the help of A.I. tools. I also don't bother skimming through articles when I can just feed them to the A.I. and let it produce a summary for me. What's even better is that I can ask follow-up questions if the summary doesn't give the answer I was looking for or I need to dig deeper into the topic.

It's easy to use these tools for your own data as long as you remember bot to give them any too personal or confidential information. It's a different thing when you are looking into a tool that you would like to adapt to your whole organization.

Even with all the safeguards in place and access control implemented there is always the possibility that something sensitive might leak out of bounds. There is also the natural suspicion of people about what the data they enter might be used for. It's also harder to control what people are using those tools for. They might unknowingly do something that might cause trouble.

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