Dan Oxlade

Principal Engineer, Dad, climbing frame, trampoline, tired.

[Peter Girnus 🦅 @gothburz]

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.

[Dan Oxlade @doxla]

@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

[Illia Ponomarenko 🇺🇦 @IAPonomarenko]

Okay, okay, even I am unblocking Elmo

[Dan Oxlade @doxla]

@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

[Dan Oxlade @doxla]

@stockbella @realDonaldTrump You misspelled Russia

[Dan Oxlade @doxla]

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

[Dan Oxlade @doxla]

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

[dar @radbackwards]

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.

[Leah Greenberg says NO KINGS ❌👑 @Leahgreenb]

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

[Dan Oxlade @doxla]

@TLRailUK Thank you!

[Dan Oxlade @doxla]

@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?

[Ash Jogalekar @curiouswavefn]

Oppenheimer in a letter to Eleanor Roosevelt in 1950.

[Dan Oxlade @doxla]

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

[Dan Oxlade @doxla]

@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!

[Dan Oxlade @doxla]

@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!

[Dan Oxlade @doxla]

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

[Dan Oxlade @doxla]

@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.

[Dan Oxlade @doxla]

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

[Dan Oxlade @doxla]

@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!

[Dan Oxlade @doxla]

Faulty @KITKAT