Doing some half-term Hallowe’en crafts…

A painted wooden cauldron with a grinning face and a wooden pumpkin are displayed on a table with paint supplies.

Emily Maitlis is somewhere in this scrum…

A group of people is gathered in an auditorium, engaging in conversations and taking photos.

Packed house for this discussion between Emily Maitlis and Dr Ayala Panievsky, despite a long day of teaching/learning…

A large lecture hall is filled with people attending a talk between Emily Maitlis and Ayala Panievsky, with a screen displaying the title “Journalism under attack”.

Listening to Emily Maitlis interviewing my colleague Ayala Panievsky about her new book The New Censorship.

Two people are sitting at a table with books titled The New Censorship, engaging in a discussion while someone takes a photo.

This morning I feel like a hoopy frood who really knows where his towel is.

It won’t last.

I thought we had autumnal mist forming outside the swimming pool, but as soon as I went outside, the smell told me it was someone burning something. And it’s still two weeks from bonfire night!

A pathway curves around a lush forested area with trees displaying autumn foliage under a cloudy sky.A cloudy sky looms over a landscape filled with trees, some showing hints of autumn foliage.

Bright, cold autumn morning.

Sunlit green leaves are in the foreground with a tall pine cone-shaped object and a car in the background.

Ten years ago this would have been very exciting to me: Movable Type 9 Released.

But then they started charging $499 for a licence, and MT and I were done. But I have a lot of nostalgia for it. It was MT that really made me fall in love with blogging.

That feeling when you realise that your Reddit account is older than many of your students…

A Reddit notification celebrates Cake Day for user u/adders, marking their 19th anniversary on the platform with cake and party emojis.

As a long-term enjoyer of titles based on classic UK tv shows, @paulrobertlloyd’s latest travel post made me smile:

Last of the Summer Shine.

John Naughton being as brilliant as ever about the AI economic bubble:

⛓️ Is the AI bubble history repeating itself? Ask a chatbot

Make no mistake: the technology is going to be transformative, but we are in a bubble of over-hyped expectations and (crucially) valuations.

Worth watching: ChatGPT growth has slowed, and time spent per user is down…

Or, so reports TechCrunch, based on Apptopia figures. So this is app usage, not overall usage.

But still…

I feel like AI is struggling with the idea of “scissors”.

Just as well it can’t run with them…

Various hands are shown cutting newspapers in implausible ways with scissors in different artistic styles and lighting.

Listening to Polly Toynbee and David Walker talking at the Jeremy Tunstall Memorial Lecture. Lots of opinions about the problems with political journalism today…

Watched: Ms. Marvel S1E2, Crushed 🍿

Rewatching this with the family made me realise that the under-rated The Marvels is a far more successful sequel to Ms. Marvel than it is Captain Marvel.

Finished reading: Soul Wars by Josh Reynolds 📚

Here’s a review.

Stunning autumn colours starting to emerge.

Red berries are clustered on a branch with a blurred background.

Matthew 7:16 is an incredibly useful lens to view the behaviour of people on social media, whether you’re a Christian or not.

Here’s my notes from the panel at the Future of Media Technology, about how publishers are shifting from search and social to community development.

This made me both excited (because this is exactly what they should be doing, and tired (because I’ve been banging this drum for 20 years).

O’Reilly Media: Don’t use AI to make content hamburgers, use it to allow customers to find great content steak.