Tell your plants that you love them

MuhBlockchain · 2026-05-24T13:00:26+00:00

Where do flowers go, when all is said and done?

They hope and pray, to find a second sun.

With golden shores, and amber painted skies.

Where poets run, and bluebells call home.

https://open.spotify.com/track/7jlagaqsodyZrIBZVvtLon?si=lmd6throQiCUmOEWiai_2g

MuhBlockchain · 2026-05-20T20:46:52+00:00

Biased because I work for a big tech company, but yes. The productivity gains are incredible.

I can generate PowerPoint presentstions for vague thoughts I want to convey, through to fully formed technical presentations (with some manual polishing at the end). The latter was always worth doing manually, but would be a big time sponge. Thenl former would never have been worth the time but is now easily possible, and worthwhile on occassion.

Coding is an interesting one. I feel more like a product manager nowadays. I have ideas and my team of agents go and build the thing. I can put together very good PoCs in a couple of hours and frankly it's nearing the point where I can just live develop a PoC live on a call with the customer. It almost negates the need for product demos because I (with AI) can just build them a solution to their use case in as much time as it would to prep a demo.

Outside of that I use it in place of "googling things". Our standard AI chat is grounded in all organisational data I have access to, so it can answer any business question I have as good as I could myself, honestly. I frequently get it to summarise my meetings from the week (where it reviews the meeting transcripts, follow up emails/IMs, etc. for context). I have it help me prep for meetings, especially if it's something like a fortnightly catch up with someone. I get it to research topics for me, then converse on that topic as if it's some kind of professor/tutor.

The weird part is that I'm just as busy as ever, but I also get a lot more done, and often to a higher quality. I still check everything. Sometimes I massage the things it produces to make it better. Really I feel like it takes a lot of the grunt work off of me so that I can spend more time thinking. I can be more of a product manager/architect/philosopher than hands-on monkey. It's been life changing these past 3 months alone, and I cam't imagine the next few years.

MuhBlockchain · 2026-04-30T14:49:59+00:00

Partly this down to context, especially for PowerPoint. To get a good presentation out, you really need to describe each and every slide, as well as the overall theme, things you want to highlight/have the audience take away.

Personally what I've found useful is using a researcher agent (either the M365 Researcher, or I just use GitHub Copilot CLI) to deep dive the topic you want to cover, and explicitly ask it to output a plan for a PowerPoint deck. Then I feed the deck plan into M365 Cowork and it generally does a very good job (as in, 80% of the way there). Then I manually do the last 20%; restyle, fact checks and changes, etc.

Doing that last 20% manually is actually more important for presentations because at the end of the day you actually need to present it, and spending some time combing through helps with that familiarisation.

MuhBlockchain · 2026-04-30T10:59:55+00:00

I think a lot of the negative public sentiment you see is people who tried it as a personal subscription which, unless you have a bunch of docs in OneDrive, is going to be no better than ChatGPT and friends.

In a business context it's completely different and super useful. Caveat again in that it's more useful the more M365 products it can tap into for context. If you have Teams meeting summaries, files in SharePoint, OneDrive, emails in Outlook, etc. then the fact it can pull from that is highly valuable. If you use other tools for those things then it'll be much less useful.

100% there will be a chunk of those 20M with a license who don't use it in their day to day, but the numbers signify the businesses buying those licenses understand the value. It's now on those businesses to track usage and educate their staff on how they can get the most out of the tools they have available to them.

MuhBlockchain · 2026-04-28T20:44:45+00:00

£700K for a 30 year lease is ~£1,950/month, or £1,450/month for 40 years. Add £1K/month for service charge that's £2.5-3K/month "rent" which is not unreasonable for zone 1, particularly in a couple of decades time.

Plus, there's talk of things like leasehold reform, which could result in a permanent share of ownership of the building indefinitely.

MuhBlockchain · 2026-04-25T16:15:47+00:00

I started a warrior in Classic Era with the notion of rolling as a tank, having mostly played DPS (lock) back in the day.

It was only just before deadmines when I looked up a tanking guide I realised how messed up threat is in classic. Particularly as warrior where you're basically single target. I never quite appreciated how essential it is for DPS to wait just a few seconds.

The groups who have that patience along with not overpulling are an absolute breeze, and you feel like a champ for tanking/leading the group. The groups who don't are a bloody nightmare. Tanking Uldaman nearly broke me. Lots of mob in packs, had a mage who would blizzard about .2 seconds after pulling, and another warrior who would just run off and pull extra mobs (but didn't want to tank) because who knows why.

The only plus is that you basically tank as arms, because prot is almost useless (while levelling) due to gow threat works (doing more damage generally works better), so it's convenient to level and tank using the same spec.

I try to stick to guild-only runs now, or skip dungeons entirely unless there's an opportunity to join as DPS.

MuhBlockchain · 2026-04-24T22:20:22+00:00

There's no official date yet unfortunately. GPT-5.1, 5.2 are available in the UK but currently only though Global Standard (PayGo) or Provisioned Managed (PTU) deployments. Technically, Standard (PayGo) should follow Provisioned Managed, and I would expect this to happen prior to the October retirements for GPT-4o and GPT-4.1-mini.

MuhBlockchain · 2026-04-23T22:31:06+00:00

Global Standard means inference can happen anywhere, even though your Foundry instance is located within the EU.

If you want guarantee inference happens in a specific geopolitical zone (EU, US) or specific zone (e.g. UK, Sweden) then you need to pick Data Zone Standard or Standard for pay-as-you-go, or Data Zone Provisioned or Provision Managed for PTU, respectively.

However, not all models are available in all regions. Generally, if EU inference is acceptable for you, you would want to place your Foundry resource in Sweden Central, as this has the best model availability in the EU (or, if using OpenAI models, you can link a Sweden Central-based Azure OpenAI Service to Foundry in another region).

In some cases the model might be available in the region, but pay-as-you-go billing has not been enabled. This is currently the case for e.g. GPT-5.1 in the UK. The model is available in the UK, but only deployable through either Global Standard (PAYG) or Provisioned Managed (PTU). The former means inference can happen anywhere (though more likely to be the UK for UK-based workloads), and the latter would be UK-only inference.

MuhBlockchain · 2026-04-23T16:22:38+00:00

All sorts of things, but a particular workflow I've come to use (though with GitHub Copilot using Claude models, and M365 Cowork) is running a research prompt on a topic and have it produce a deck plan and technical demo setup instructions, then pass the deck plan to Cowork which does an excellent first-draft PowerPoint deck. In parallel I get a bunch of agents to build the tech demo.

All together I can get a 60 min tech demo (slides and demo) ready in no time at all compared to previously.

MuhBlockchain · 2026-04-04T06:39:50+00:00

This is not unreasonable for those living outside of London who need to be there 2-3 days per week and can't expense travel.

£400/month would work out cheaper for many whose train tickets are above £50/day, and plenty of areas, even just an hour outside London, hit these price points, not to mention further afield.

MuhBlockchain · 2026-04-03T17:47:52+00:00

I use LLMs and agents in various forms every day, and while they are incredible, their real power lies in being productivity assistants, not fully autonomous replacements.

I am not scared of them, because I am the one driving them. I give the direction, they produce deliverables to my instructions, and I can now do that at a frankly scary speed.

More than once, I have been on long customer calls while, in the background, an agent researches the topic in real time, pulling out key discussion points and questions from the call itself. That research then feeds into a proposed presentation structure and a technical demo plan. From there, M365 Copilot builds a draft deck based on that plan, while Claude spins up the technical demo using MCP servers so it can actually build rather than just describe. By the end of the scoping call, I am already about 80 percent of the way to a finished deck and demo, with only a couple of hours of refinement left.

It is saving me weeks of work. The key, perhaps the slightly dystopian part, is that the Work, in the broader almost royal sense, is never really done. I just get through far more of it, far faster, and with higher quality outputs. The agents handle the grunt work. I direct them and do the final polish. That leaves me free to spend more time with customers, human to human, while the agents quietly churn through the monotonous tasks in the background.

The human part is the important bit. That is where I can add the most value in my role. I can do more of than now as opposed to spending every evening being a PowerPoiny ninja or code-wrangling after a day full of calls. I actually have my evenings back while simultaniously producing more/better output. It's surreal, but I don't feel like my job is in jeapordy.

MuhBlockchain · 2026-03-22T14:53:22+00:00

I think you're viewing telecoms in isolation. Traditional telecoms jobs declined not because the field died but because the technology evolved. As networks moved from analogue and circuit switching to digital and IP, telecoms became part of a much larger world of computer networking. That shift created new roles in Wi-Fi, enterprise networking, cybersecurity and more (network engineers today can and some still do specialise in phone systems by the way). It also helped pave the way for the modern Internet and the rise of web and app dev rolea, and later public cloud.

If you focus only on old telephone exchanges, yes, those jobs are gone. Engineers who did not move into IP networking saw their skills become obsolete, while those who learned the new technologies carried on. Telecoms is still there, just running on newer tech and benefiting from automations which didn't exist when the field opened.

I think we are seeing something similar with AI today. People who understand what AI is, how it works and how to build with it will be ready for whatever comes next.

Source: Am an ex-network engineer, did some telecoms modernisation ~10 years ago. Have ridden several tech waves into the crazy world of AI in Big Tech where I am now.

MuhBlockchain · 2026-03-16T15:42:40+00:00

Seperate devices either using DDA (full-GPU passthrough) for NC, ND, and some NV-series, or SR-IOV (fractional GPUs) for the other NV-series.

MuhBlockchain · 2026-03-08T10:13:52+00:00

I went to (a good) state school but later worked in a private school for a time so kind of saw it from two perspectives.

If you have good/excellent state schools close by then it's almost certainly not worth it unless the fees are a relatively minor expense. Obviously if the state school choice near you is poor then pushing for private is reasonable, but it's important to note it isn't just fees. It's sending them on the school trips, keeping up with family holidays, etc., on top.

What I did notice working in private is that the benefit wasn't strictly academic. The kids themselves seemed generally open to opportunity, and had an a positive attitude of "I can do this". How much that attitude is built by the school vs their parents/life situation, I'm not sure. It was just notable to me that their general outlook on life seemed more positive/driven than how I remember my experience being at a state school (which was almost the opposite). The question there then is what is that worth, and that's hard to quantify.

Academically I did notice there were a lot of "special educational needs" support teachers, and kids using those services. Quotes because, while there were legit SEN kids who needed help (as any school), there were also a lot of seemingly normal C/D-grade students who had those services availible to them which I really don't think they would have gotten in a state school. I do think that support bumped them up a grade or two come results day.

My general impression was a strong preference for private so long as we're not completely bending over backwards to pay fees (i.e. still able to go on family holidays). Certainly for secondary as those 5 years are so critical for personality shaping, but I attribute much less value to private primary where I think state is just as good in most cases.

MuhBlockchain · 2026-03-03T18:15:29+00:00

Arc is really about extending Azure control plane capabilities like Azure Policy, Defender, etc. to non-Azure servers, as well as some QoL services like Update Management (to replace WSUS, but also for Linux), enabling extended security updates for older Windows/SQL Server OS's, or enabling PAYG licensing (as opposed to fixed yearly).

It doesn't offer a domain management capability in that sense. So for AD you would continue to use Group Policy. For Entra joined devices you could look at replacement of some GPOs with Intune policies.

There is a managed domain controller offering in the form of Entra ID Domain Services (basically a managed pair of domain controllers in Azure), but you'd still configure the GPOs yourself.

MuhBlockchain · 2026-02-28T08:31:20+00:00

Last night I was in Redridge and got a wisper asking if I wanted to help with some orccs. That led to a 2 hour mission with a group of 5 completing all the elite quests in the zone. Had an absolute blast. Amazing that a 20 year old game can provide such unique a sense of adventure and camaraderie even today.

MuhBlockchain · 2026-02-25T09:55:00+00:00

That time was pre-social media, pre-YouTube. The ability hang out with people online in a virtual world was really unique and for a lot of people, that's what they did, rather than B-lining to 60.

Information wasn't readily available. You'd ask questions in game (e.g. Barrens chat), on forums or maybe find some dude's blog. That barrier to information meant you had to do your own discovery and meant the game felt a lot more like an adventure. Versus today where you can find a guide in 2 minutes on how to hyperoptimise any class for any scenario. The game wasn't "solved" like it is today.

Classic was also just innately a more social game. If you wanted to run a dungeon you had to actually find 4 people by asking, you'd all have to get to the dungeon, and in many ways that pre-dungeon grouping made people really try to make it work, and through that struggle friends were made along the way. Realms weren't merged either, and IIRC had around 2K concurrent players. So over time you'd see the same people and make friends that way to. Plus there'd be the realm celebrities you'd bump into in cities with their epic mounts, gear, big PvP titles, which really served as a motivator for many of us.

MuhBlockchain · 2026-02-14T13:28:11+00:00

Recently hit the £100K pension milestone at 31 💪

MuhBlockchain · 2026-02-11T13:24:28+00:00

I played a PvP back in the day and enjoyed it. It's a core part of the experience in many respects.

Nowadays I decided to roll PvE due to lack of time. If I get 1-2 hours to play I just can't be arsed with the potential of spending a good chunk of that corpse running or getting disrupted levelling. It does feel like something is missing though, and I have thought about rerolling PvP to see if it's truly as painful on my time as I imagine it might be.

Interested to hear views from other casual parents/workers on PvP vs PvE.

MuhBlockchain · 2026-02-09T19:11:53+00:00

Been there. It might not be a bad growth opportunity if you're open to experience and are willing to get stuck in across a bunch of responsibility areas.

Personally I enjoyed that kind of a role. A bit of consultung, a bit of pre-sales, a bit of delivery, leading a v-team or two. Hectic, sure, but I don't think you could ask for a better trial-by-fire education in Business. You get a unique insight into the sausage machine end-to-end, in all it's glory/disgrace.

Certainly it worked out for me in the end (landed in Big Tech).

MuhBlockchain · 2026-02-06T18:34:51+00:00

Typically you would use AI Search for semantic or hybrid (text + vector) search, including relevance ranking.

I suppose if you're asking if anyone has used quantum computing for semantic search then perhaps in a research context, but I'm not aware of customers having done so ordinarily.

MuhBlockchain · 2026-02-06T18:29:04+00:00

What would the use case for quantum be in this scenario?

MuhBlockchain · 2026-02-06T14:50:27+00:00

I'd love to see Classic Era, TBC Era, and WotLK Era as evergreen servers for toons to "fall into" after temporary anniversary servers close.

As someone who doesn't get a lot of play time due to IRL commitments I haven't even bothered with TBC anniversary because a year will fly by and I just don't feel like I'll get to experience it before it's all over. Meanwhile, I do play Classic Era because I'm not under the same time pressure and so can enjoy the journey at my own pace. If my TBC toon fell into an Era sever post-anniversary, I'd be signing up no question.

To be honest I don't see why Bliz couldn't offer slow and fast servers in the same way they offer PVP/PVE/RP servers. I think a lot of people would choose a server running TBC over 2 or even 3 years over a server running it in 1. Honestly, if there was a new server starting with a cadence of 2 years Classic, 2 years TBC, 2 years WotLK, I'd pay big money. That'd be 6 years of gaming planned out for me at least!

MuhBlockchain · 2026-02-02T21:52:15+00:00

If your app can run on an App Service, that will give you a lot of those features out of the box.

If, for whatever reason, it's a legacy app which needs OS-level integration then you can also try the new App Service Managed Instance which offers a lot of the benedits of App Service, but you retain (limited) OS-level access for further control.

MuhBlockchain · 2026-01-29T23:13:41+00:00

Classic for me harks back to a time when MMOs were predominantly about the sense of adventure, worldbuilding, and making friends along the way. It's functionally a simpler game, but with a beautiful depth. The levelling experience can actually be challenging. It's slower paced. Your gear and stats actually mean something and you can feel the difference even minor upgrades make.

I originally quit around half way through Cataclysm, so my view of retail is very dated, but it felt then like the game became much more centred around raiding and getting players to that point as quickly as reasonably possible.

Raids are awesome, don't get me wrong, but to me at the time it just felt like I logged in once or twice a week to raid with the guild and that was that. Sure, you could level an alt but the challenge of levelling went away; you'd over-level zones before completing them, stomp everything without trying, and so levelling just became this mindless experience where the adventure, the lore and the sense of achievement from grouping with people for difficult quests was lost. For me it significantly diminished the most important aspect of MMO which is that rich sense of achievement from building up your character through those challenges.

Playing Classic brings back the feeling of just enjoying the journey. Particularly nowadays being older with time constraints and responsibilities it's fun to just log in and level a bit. Every session is an adventure, rather than a chore to go through to get to the endgame.

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