Started reading: Groundbreakers by Chantal Lyons 📚

Been eyeing this one up for ages. Just dived in and am loving it already. 🐗

Sunday morning swimming pool whiteboard wisdom.

A motivational quote by A.A. Milne is written on a whiteboard, accompanied by a simple drawing of a person swimming. It reads; “You're braver than you believe, and stronger than you seem, and smarter then you think.”

Started reading: Sleepless by Annabel Abbs 📚

I saw her talk about the book on Wednesday, at an event organised by the Steyning Bookshop. I’m really intrigued by the subject, especially as I’ve battled with insomnia myself this year.

The author Annabel Abbs stands at a podium in Steyning Methodist Church, with a laptop, speaking in a room with wooden paneling and a floral arrangement in the background.

Very proud of my eldest daughter. It’s a seemingly small thing that really matters: she’s choosing well in her friendships.

The Ghost ActivityPub team being even more spicy than normal in their latest update, talking about choosing their first beta testers:

How did we select the 3? First we asked everyone to promise to give us 8% of their revenue, or else. Then, when that predictably failed we ultimately just selected 3 of the private beta applications with the smallest audience sizes.

🔥 🌶️ 🔥

It was a beautifully misty autumnal commute this morning.

A person with a backpack walks along a foggy train platform, with tracks running parallel and a digital signboard in the distance.A misty train station platform is depicted with overhead lights glowing and a few people waiting alongside the tracks surrounded by trees.

Finishing the (working) week with a round-up of news from the scrum where AI and journalism meet.

Technology is great. People are idiots.

This is great reporting from 404 Media - but I do feel they buried the lead. The Blind stuff is more jaw-dropping than the second buyout offer.

Things are not good inside Automattic.

Dashed dreams of better EV batteries are a core disappointment.

I love Discworld and I like TTRPGs. But I’m not convinced that the combination that’s being Kickstarted is something I’m interested in. What makes Discworld special is Pratchett’s words.

And we ain’t getting any more of them.

This looks worth a watch:

Not gonna lie, it sometimes righteously pisses me off that journalism was going in exactly the right direction with community/audience work 15 years ago — and then we got distracted by Facebook and Google.

Is it too late to change course?

Finally had a much-needed trim.

Adam Tinworth with long, unkempt hair is wearing a hoodie and jacket, standing in front of a brick wall with a cloudy sky above.Adam Tinworth with neatly cut gray hair is outside in front of trees and parked cars, wearing a dark jacket and a hoodie.

Y’know, I’m beginning to suspect that it might have been Agatha all along.

A good rule to keep online debate constructive is “play the ball, not the man”. If you attack the poster, not the ideas, you’re playing the man.

Mullenweg’s response to DHH is pure playing the man, not the ball.

This is the problem with AI:

  • “AI can help you create this” is a successful marketing message
  • “This was created with AI!” isn’t

Far more people want to create with AI than want to consume the results.

The growing tsunami of AI slop is going to force us towards a new wave of trusted curator.

Optimistic? Perhaps. Idealistic? Certainly.

But that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t take this moment of opportunity and need and do something with it.

Set up author attribution on Mastodon on my Ghost blogs, based on this handy guide.

It’s basically just setting up the meta tag using Ghost’s Code Injection settings, and then adding the domains in Mastodon.

Now, this is what Sunday evenings are for: a hundred-odd Kathys dancing to Wuthering Heights.

Oh, yes.

Hey, random guy on Threads. I’ve only been managing large scale blog platform installs on and off for two decades now. I really need you to come and lecture me on how I should chose a platform.