Hurrah. The latest issue of Standart (an indie coffee magazine) has arrived, ready for cosy Christmas reading.

A hand holds a magazine titled STANDART featuring a person drinking coffee while leaning out of a car window.

Interesting bridge graffiti

Brightly colored hearts, drawn in pink and yellow paint, decorate a glass panel overlooking a waterfront with buildings and boats.

Haven’t done one of these photos in ages. It’s easy to grow blasé about the beauty of where we live.

Small boats are anchored along a calm riverbank near a coastal town with buildings in the background.

Festive post box.

A knitted Santa Claus is depicted riding a sleigh pulled by a reindeer, sitting atop a green knitted surface with a Merry tag.A festive display featuring knitted figures, including Santa Claus, an elf, and a reindeer, is arranged on a green knit-covered surface outdoors.

It’s just possible that we left the Christmas tree purchase a wee bit late this year.

A greenhouse with a dirt floor and a chalkboard sign shaped like a Christmas tree bearing the words “Big Trees Priced Individually” is shown.A greenhouse contains several young Christmas trees with a dirt floor and a transparent roof.

Carol Service time.

For which I have had to learn to pronounce “Ephrathah”.

A room is decorated with a lit Christmas tree and Advent wreath in a church setting, featuring two wall crosses.

Dropped the girls at their Guides cinema trip, with time to spare for a sneaky coffee.

Something of an evisceration of Kier Starmer’s Substack.

I suspect that if you think of it as a marketing channel, you’ve lost before you’ve started.

Fun afternoon in the local Warhammer store doing the mini of the month with my youngest and her friends.

Apparently they had a queue at the door at opening time for the Deathwatch Space Marine.

A sci-fi miniature figurine dressed in futuristic armor holds a large weapon against a textured background.

Euan Semple:

Anyone who thinks that AI can write literature can only have seen reading as chewing gum for the soul.

This is a sobering look at OpenAI’s funding. No sniff of a profit for at least a decade, according to HSBC forecasts.

A lot of non-industrial AI use is predicated on it being a cheap and easy solution to certain problems. If customers weren’t being so heavily subsidised by investors, when does that equation start breaking down?

Turns out, AIs are a humourless bunch.

(I’m mainly talking about satire and cartoons here. Maybe the role of humans in the AI age is… taking the piss.)

Video generation is getting good scarily fast.

There are some weird, weird sheep in there, though.

Still, kudos to Google for digitally watermarking their AI-generated images.

A large robot with a Facebook logo steps over a crowd and scattered paper planes, accompanied by a caption about AI generation.

The challenging thing about running a training course on Ai over four weeks, is that things can change dramatically between sessions…

An AI-generated image of atoms arranged in the shape of a banana as if it came from an electron scanning microscope

One of the deep problems with algorithmic social media is the incentive to figure out how to game the system: “growth hacks” as a certain constituency likes to call them.

Some of them are surprisingly akin to religious rituals. You have faith that they work, but not a lot of evidence…

Nice to see that @marsedit@mastodon.social has escaped squircle jails…

Three app icons are displayed: a pink musical note, a rocket on an orange background, and a presentation graphic.

Hosting a Warhammer morning for my daughter’s friends. (Kill Team and Underworlds: Emberguard)

A tabletop wargame setup is displayed with miniatures, terrain pieces, rulebooks, and dice on a wooden table.

I was chatting to a former student the other evening, and I predicted that it would be ages before The Telegraph sale was resolved, after the collapse of the Redbird deal.

Not one of my better predictions. In fact, it has aged like rancid butter.

Welcoming @ashleyjkirk.bsky.social from @theguardian.com back to City St George’s for an energetic guest talk on visual journalism.

I love bringing in expert guest speakers, but former students in particular. Even if it occasionally makes me feel old…

Ashley Kirk is giving a presentation in a conference room, gesturing with open arms beside a projector screen and a table with a water bottle.