Dan Oxlade

Last quarter I rolled out Microsoft Copilot to 4,000 employees. $30 per seat per month. $1.4 million annually. I called it "digital transformation." The board loved that phrase. They approved it in eleven minutes. No one asked what it would actually do. Including me. I told everyone it would "10x productivity." That's not a real number. But it sounds like one. HR asked how we'd measure the 10x. I said we'd "leverage analytics dashboards." They stopped asking. Three months later I checked the usage reports. 47 people had opened it. 12 had used it more than once. One of them was me. I used it to summarize an email I could have read in 30 seconds. It took 45 seconds. Plus the time it took to fix the hallucinations. But I called it a "pilot success." Success means the pilot didn't visibly fail. The CFO asked about ROI. I showed him a graph. The graph went up and to the right. It measured "AI enablement." I made that metric up. He nodded approvingly. We're "AI-enabled" now. I don't know what that means. But it's in our investor deck. A senior developer asked why we didn't use Claude or ChatGPT. I said we needed "enterprise-grade security." He asked what that meant. I said "compliance." He asked which compliance. I said "all of them." He looked skeptical. I scheduled him for a "career development conversation." He stopped asking questions. Microsoft sent a case study team. They wanted to feature us as a success story. I told them we "saved 40,000 hours." I calculated that number by multiplying employees by a number I made up. They didn't verify it. They never do. Now we're on Microsoft's website. "Global enterprise achieves 40,000 hours of productivity gains with Copilot." The CEO shared it on LinkedIn. He got 3,000 likes. He's never used Copilot. None of the executives have. We have an exemption. "Strategic focus requires minimal digital distraction." I wrote that policy. The licenses renew next month. I'm requesting an expansion. 5,000 more seats. We haven't used the first 4,000. But this time we'll "drive adoption." Adoption means mandatory training. Training means a 45-minute webinar no one watches. But completion will be tracked. Completion is a metric. Metrics go in dashboards. Dashboards go in board presentations. Board presentations get me promoted. I'll be SVP by Q3. I still don't know what Copilot does. But I know what it's for. It's for showing we're "investing in AI." Investment means spending. Spending means commitment. Commitment means we're serious about the future. The future is whatever I say it is. As long as the graph goes up and to the right.

@lecreuset is it normal that my brand new cast iron rectangular grill is not flat on the bottom? It’s not terrible but feels pretty shoddy for the price

Okay, okay, even I am unblocking Elmo

@easyJet is twilight bad drop only for customers with a flight 8:00 or before at LGW? My flight is 8:15 and I was hoping to use the service

@stockbella @realDonaldTrump You misspelled Russia

@TLRailUK Couldn’t see any indication of how long this is likely to last?

@doxla Hi Dan. Due to damage caused by flooding last week, City Thameslink is only open between 09:00 and 23:00. London Blackfriars is the closest alternative. We have more information on this here: thameslinkrailway.com/service-update… ^Will C

@TLRailUK why isn’t the 07:21 from Horsham stopping at City Thameslink?

Apple, I gotta be honest with you. I respect how difficult it is to ship products & I genuinely don’t mean to put too much negativity out into the world… But you need to revert the changes to the ‘Photo’ app… > Difficult & unintuitive to navigate > No way to distinguish the differences in entry points and sections > Dumping WAY TO MUCH info into one page. Etc. It is the worst UI I have ever seen.

this is an absolutely bananas complaint to have about the Vice President of the United States

@TLRailUK Thank you!

@doxla Hi, Dan. Just so we're able to double check this, could you please send us a DM with a picture of your season ticket? ^Shawn twitter.com/messages/compo…

@TLRailUK if I have a weekly ticket from CTK south bound, can I occasionally depart from London Bridge given that’s a couple of stops along the way? Will the barriers let me in?

Oppenheimer in a letter to Eleanor Roosevelt in 1950.

@RoyalMailHelp I understand mail can sometimes be damaged but this is frequent tampering targeted as specific profiles of mail

@RoyalMailHelp how do I make a complaint about my mail being frequenting tampered with? My daughter has had something stolen from inside a letter and I’ve noticed that envelopes are often torn/opened, especially when they look like they could contain something!

@RoyalMail how do I make a complaint about my mail being frequenting tampered with? My daughter has had something stolen from inside a letter and I’ve noticed that envelopes are often torn/opened, especially when they look like they could contain something!

I can’t be the only one that thinks spark dependencies are a complete 💩show. How do people work with this?

@MichaelDnes1 I don’t really buy the logic behind adding a lane making the road better and so making the problem worse. Regardless I’d rather see something done about the efficiency of the m3 junction. Since it was redone it’s always the major choke point.

Everything in this thread comes from publicly available information at assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/media/5aabe222…

People wanted a better M25. But at the expense of digging up large chunks of London or Surrey? No. Could we make a meaningful improvement with anything less? Very unlikely. Is the M25 intolerable? Absolutely … until you look at the alternatives.

@NetworkRailSE @SouthernRailUK Does it not have backup power? Like generators?

We’re really sorry to customers disrupted this morning on the Brighton Main Line. Shortly after 3am, a UK Power Networks outage significantly impacted our Three Bridges Signalling Centre, which controls the railway’s traffic light system across the majority of our Sussex route.

@ClubMedUK having trouble working out how to pre-hire skis from our hotel. Suggestion is from the website but I can’t find it, please help!

Faulty @KITKAT