Shellsharks Blogroll - BlogFlock

Theatre Review: Hay Fever at Wyndham's Theatre ★★★★⯪ - Terence Eden’s Blog

2026-10-08T11:34:40.000Z

I'm a theatrical cheapskate. I'm on all those last-minute seat-filler websites. I'll happily take a chance on an experimental play for a tenner a ticket or sit in an inexplicably unsold cheap seat at a major show. My philosophy is that the worst seat at the best show is preferable to the best seat at the worst show. But, once in a while, I'll splash out and pay full price.

When the email landed in my inbox that Richard E. Grant (!!) and Christine Baranski (!!!) would be performing Noël Coward's Hay Fever, I booked instantly. Yes, it's nice to see up-and-coming stars playing in a grimy basement, but sometimes you want 100% star power burning up the stage.

It was magnificent. The script stills draws gasps of outrage from the audience. The zingers ping around the stage. Baranski's matriarch channels her inner diva and dominates the stage while Lucy Karczewski subtlety undercuts all the pomposity thrown around.

The whole cast is superb, although perhaps a little under-rehearsed. The script is so tight that the few slips there were put a little brake on the frenetic pace. The set, costuming, and directorial deviations from the script are all perfectly in service of merriment.

I know the play is over a century old (!) but the wit is timeless. In a West End awash with Serious Plays dealing with Important Issues, it is delightfully refreshing to see something so silly and inconsequential. There's no deep trauma or challenging material, just the fascination of watching truly appalling manners. About the only content warning needed is for the copious smoking.

There is some interesting metatextuality having Sandy and Jackie played by non-white actors. Are the Bliss family so unbearably rude to them out of racism? It's certainly one reading of the script - and some of the lines certainly hint in that direction - but it could equally be their social standing which the Blisses find so distasteful. That's about as close as the production gets to modern social commentary.

I wanted light-hearted fluff performed by A-List actors - Hay Fever delivers just that. Noël Coward has an immortal ability to collapse an audience into helpless giggles, ably assisted by Emily Burns' inspired direction.

Pre-show and Post-show

As I've written about before, when people are paying West End prices, they deserve to feel like they're a valued guest - not cattle to be farmed.

On the run up to the Race For Space concert I attended the week before, I got regular emails letting me know about the performance, how excited the band were, and the like. Despite paying considerably more for a ticket, Wyndham's didn't send me anything. If I didn't have a reminder in my diary, I would have forgotten this show existed. I'm not saying I want a bombardment of emails - but a few messages to build excitement wouldn't go amiss.

Wyndham's Theatre is old - from an age where no one ever contemplated going to the loo, apparently. The gents are paltry and, to be frank, stank. The seating was well raked, allowing brilliant views - although the seats themselves were a bit tired and uncomfortable. Unlike other theatres, there was free WiFi which was good enough for uploading the obligatory selfie.

Pre-curtain there was period appropriate music. Charmingly the "please turn off your phones" announcement was also period appropriate. Much nicer than being shouted at by ushers. A special shout out to the glorious fire curtain - I won't spoil the surprise 😄

The programme was not too expensive at a fiver and full of content - rather than the usual explosion of adverts. Oddly, the theatre was also selling Hay Fever merchandise. I'm not sure how many people are desperate for a souvenir magnet of the cast…

Wyndham's certain do more than the base minimum - and it is a pity that is so notable. A pair of tickets in the stalls cost the same as a year of Netflix. Yes, seeing the stars in person is magical, and live theatre is exciting, and a laughing crowd elevates your enjoyment - but the toilets at home are nicer and the snacks are cheaper. Theatres need to deliver much more if they want to keep attracting new audiences.

Media helped create the crisis it finds itself in - Songs on the Security of Networks

2026-10-07T23:30:48.000Z

This blogpost is adapted from a transcript of my talk given at Breakwater Festival in Gdańsk. You can find the slides here.

I am an Internet plumber. I’ve been an Internet plumber in many organizations, including journalistic ones. I’ve also done information security work for media organizations, for example in the run up to and during the Panama Papers.

What I am not is a journalist. I have not studied journalism in any formal way. I’ve been writing for OKO.press and other outlets for several years now, but I don’t feel that alone makes me a member of that club.

I still see myself mainly as a techie.

So I beg your forgiveness, for I – a person with arguably no real journalistic credentials – will now have opinions on journalism, with you, actual journalists, present in the room. This might end up being a phenomenal demonstration of the Dunning–Kruger effect. I do hope you’ll at least enjoy the ride.

My one saving grace here is that I will focus on the interplay between journalism and technology. I will be making some generalizations; please bear with me. If your organization is one of the few that are the exceptions, thank you for that, and I’m sorry.

Media ecosystem is in crisis

I think it’s fair to say the whole media sector is in crisis. Media organizations and journalists are hurting, and have been hurting for a very long time. There are obviously many, many reasons for that, most of them outside of media organizations’ control.

But not all.

There are three aspects of this hurt that I want to focus on: money, eyeballs, and trust. I don’t think it’s controversial to say journalism cannot thrive without these three.

The point I want to make to you today is this:

Media organizations have materially helped create the crisis they currently find themselves in, by being uncritical and naïve about the tech sector and power dynamics of its products and services.

Unchecked power

I don’t think I need to convince anyone in this room that tech sector’s power is currently not checked in any meaningful way.

Heads of state wait hat in hand on its leaders, legislation is being shaped by its interests to the detriment of everything else, regulatory action takes years if not decades, and usually ends up with a slap on the wrist.

President of the European Parliament meets with Zuck on his own terms, takes a publicity photo with the creepiest Meta product so far prominently displayed – and proudly posts that on Zuck’s social media platform.

Complete and utter capture.

Tech companies release and operate services that cause real, measurable harm to living, breathing people. Executives of these companies are aware of this, often having been warned early about these effects, and yet nothing changes in any meaningful way.

Political parties push for privacy-hostile legislation under the guise of fighting child sexual abuse materials online, and post about this on Twitter, a social network where generating child sexual abuse materials – from real photos of real children – was not a bug, but a paid feature. And one that doesn’t even apply the most basic filters to remove well known child sexual abuse materials. The lowest of bars to clear.

This is a good moment to pause and ask: are you on X/Twitter? Are you paying for it? We’ll get back to this.

A decade ago a person torrenting a few movies could end up in jail. Kids got sued for millions of dollars for downloading a couple dozen songs. Today tech leaders complain that if they were to pay the licensing fees for having downloaded literally every piece of digital content out there, that would kill their business model.

A business model which is so successful, by the way, that my tiny one-man company made infinitely more profit last month than OpenAI ever has. If you’re confused by that look up division by zero.

Information is power, and both journalism and the tech sector deal in information. They directly compete in the attention economy. But only the tech companies seem to be aware of this.

For the technology sector to have gained the effectively unchecked power it now wields, for it to have become the antidemocratic behemoth that it is today, for Zuckerbergs and Musks and Thiels and Bezoses of this world to become the all-powerful global tech broligarchy, the tech sector had to subdue, suppress, and subvert journalism.

And so it did. But not without help from the media itself.

Money

Funding journalism has always been difficult, but at least for a while advertising was a relatively effective way to do so, even once the Internet became a thing.

Until, that is, ad networks consolidated into what is effectively a duopoly of Google and Meta, controlling their respective surveilance ad marketplaces end-to-end. This allows them to extract as much rent as they feel like:

The Google/Meta duopoly sucks up 51% of display advertising revenue – more than triple the historic take for advertising intermediaries (buyers, brokers, agencies, etc).”

Media organizations didn’t have a lot of power over that process of consolidation. But they did have –- and continue to have -– a choice in whose ads they carry. They did have and continue to have a choice of whether they expose their readership to creepy targeted advertising – sending data wholesale to surveillance capitalists – or choose a membership and subscription model, or maybe go with contextual ads instead.

Like New York Times has done soon after the GDPR went into force:

The publisher blocked all open-exchange ad buying on its European pages, followed swiftly by behavioral targeting. Instead, NYT International focused on contextual and geographical targeting for programmatic guaranteed and private marketplace deals and has not seen ad revenues drop as a result, according to Jean-Christophe Demarta, svp for global advertising at New York Times International.

Media organizations did have, and continue to have, a choice whether they continue to feed and nurture these behemoths with valuable data, by using tools like Google Analytics on their websites, or integrating Meta’s intrusive personal information harvesting libraries into their mobile apps, thus having to force obtrusive and manipulative consent screens upon their readers.

They also often dive head-on into every shady hype-driven get-rich-quick scheme out there. That’s also a choice. Remeber Civil, the cryptocurrency that was supposed to “save journalism” through, among others, micropayments? Here’s Wall Street Journal had some nice words about them in 2018:

Civil applies the tenets of cryptoeconomics – the practice of powering online marketplaces with digital currency logged on encrypted ledgers – to the financial challenges facing the news industry.

It did not save journalism. It went defunct somewhere in 2020. That was not a surprise to anyone critically scrutinizing the cryptocurrency space.

“Why can’t journalists join the NFT party, too?” asks the New York Times in 2021. “Because it is a scam,” I’d have responded. NFT bubble popped about a year later. Loads of money was lost, with a few people getting obnoxiously rich off of the bubble. It was not a surprise either.

Many media organizations have tied themselves to surveillance capitalists so tightly, that they push for measures that give them even more power. Like “link tax”.

What are the power dynamics of link tax? Who ends up controlling the money faucet?

What happens if a media organization funded largely through link tax starts writing critically about the very companies that are paying it directly? Will the money well conspicuously dry out? The incentives are perverse.

By all means, tax these companies to the ground, and give the money to journalists! But do so in any of the myriad ways that does not end up giving them even more power over the information ecosystem. Because they will wield it to your detriment.

Besides, link tax or no link tax, Big Tech can just stop linking to media organizations. Or, meddle with where media links end up in the user interface. Or can start limiting reach and charging for restoring it – or for the ability to post links at all.

In fact, they did all of these things already.

Click-throughs from Google are drying out. So are click-throughs from Facebook, and from X/Twitter. These companies do not care about you and your content anymore, because they don’t have to – Google said it outright. They even did a little experiment to prove their point.

Meta is actively pushing for auto-generated slop and polarizing disinformation instead of promoting actual journalistic content the same way TV stations have been pushing reality shows when they figured out they don’t have to pay scriptwriters.

How did they become such powerful gatekeepers?

Eyeball silos

Facebook can shut down your account. Your hosting provider can shut down your website. These are not the same.

If a hosting provider shuts you down, you find another hosting provider, and everyone can reach you again. It’s a few hours, maybe a day of disruption and you’re back up and running; your previous provider has no say over this. All your readers need in order to continue to read you is a web browser.

When Facebook shuts you down, that’s that.

Nobody can reach your Facebook page. Moving to another social network does not solve the problem, because your Facebook followers are on Facebook – they would have to set up an account on a new service, learn a new app, accept new Terms of Service. Which they won’t.

Big Tech services are designed to be like that on purpose. To be centralized, to be vertically integrated, and through that to be de facto monopolies. Centralized, vertically integrated services are silos. Monopoly is the business model. Gatekeeping is how value is extracted.

“Competition is for losers”, as Peter Thiel said in 2014; he is one of the first investors in Facebook… and a recipient of 2026 Axel Springer award.

Hosting providers compete with one another because their services are standardized. This makes switching relatively easy. Same with e-mail providers. Or Fediverse instances.

I am not saying “market will solve it”; it won’t. But I am saying: ability to easily switch providers is a crucial safeguard in the context of any service.

Instagram is not competing with TikTok in the same sense as one hosting provider competes with another, because these are both vertically integrated, centralized platforms, even if the functionality is somewhat similar. To follow your Instagram account your readers must necessarily have an Instagram account and submit to Instagram’s Terms of Service, and to follow your TikTok account they necessarily need to have a TikTok account and submit to TikTok’s ToS.

Core issue behind the crisis

And I get it. This is boring. Nobody wants to constantly think about protocols and silos and centralization and vertical integration. But nobody wants to think about ownership structures and shell companies and money laundering schemes. And yet we do, because we recognize that is important.

This is just as important. This is the core reason why these platforms can be the gatekeepers they are today. This is one of the core reasons behind the spread of disinformation, the dwindling click-throughs and ad revenues, and ultimately behind tech companies explicitly, insolently telling news organizations they don’t matter.

Journalists and media organizations by and large refused to acknowledge and understand and act upon for two decades. And continue to.

Eyeballs in the silo

An eyeball silo is no good without filling it with eyeballs. That’s not trivial… unless you get a bit help.

Media organizations have been promoting Facebook, Instagram, X/Twitter for years, relentlessly. Not so long ago, every article on every media site out there had to have “Like us on Facebook”, “Share on Twitter”, Facebook-powered comment sections, and other similar UI elements. Many still do.

Most news sites still cannot imagine publishing an article that does not embed content from X/Twitter or Instagram. Most still have little icons promoting these platforms on their websites.

How much would any other company have to pay for placing a small logo on a large news site? How much more for the logo to appear under every piece published on that site? X/Twitter gets it all for free.

Just consider what this means. A reader is on your website, engaging with your content on your terms, via infrastructure you actually control, hosted on a service you can switch providers of at will – and what you do is send them over to some locked-down third party silo instead.

Not only that, but at some point media sites started removing RSS/Atom feeds and shutting down their newsletters. Two phenomenal channels of direct communication with your readers, both relying on services that do not lend themselves to becoming gatekeepers, gone.

Is it any wonder that Google killed Google Reader? Standards-based services that do not lend themselves to siloification are not in Google’s best interest.

But they are in yours.

Through media’s own choices relationship with their audience suddenly had to be mediated by social networks, and generally the only social networks journalism treats seriously are only those controlled by the tech giants openly hostile to it.

Consider these two pieces from the same seasoned tech reporter, Lance Ulanoff, former Editor in Chief at PCMag-dot-com:

Can Google+ Survive the Hype?

Google+, the presumptive Facebook killer, shows tremendous potential. As someone who warms up to any social network with the alacrity of a Galápagos tortoise, this, for me, is saying something.

Six reasons Mastodon won’t survive

William Shatner couldn’t find me on Mastodon.
This was a problem.
(…)
And, no, Mastodon cannot live on hype alone.

There are a few important differences between the two social networks, and between how each is covered. Google+ was an eyeball silo, Mastodon is standards based, with thousands of providers. Google+ got plenty of positive press, Mastodon (and more broadly, the Fediverse) is still today being treated as a butt of a joke. Google+ had corporate backing and infinte money, Mastodon is a tiny project run by an NGO.

Google+ got killed years ago. Mastodon stubbornly survives, already years longer than Google+ had existed.

Media had the power to tell people where to look for information, and exercised that power. Is it at all surprising that eyeballs went where it pointed them to?

Trust

The reason why click-throughs from Google Search are drying out is because Google largely replaced search with a slop generator. I don’t think that’s news to anyone at this stage. It is no longer a tool to find reliable sources of information on a topic, it is a tool to get some extruded text that sounds human-like and authoritative even though it might be complete, sometimes outright life-threatening, bullshit.

It is mathmatically impossible for language models not to hallucinate. Text they generate cannot be trustworthy in any meaningful sense, full stop. This is a huge advantage media organizations have over Big Tech’s slop generators, which are being weaponized against them. Where chatbots extrude untrustworthy slop, journalists meticulously investigate and fact check.

This is something to build on. A foundation for a strategy to push back and reclaim some eyeballs, and thus power, from Big Tech.

Instead, media organizations keep promoting Google – the company that so eloquently explained how news sites are irrelevant – while helping train the very slop generators that are eating their cake, through Google Preferred Sources. The “Add as preferred source on Google” buttons are showing up on plenty of media sites. Yet again media is pointing eyeballs towards a tech silo.

But it gets worse. A lot of media sites directly provide slop summaries! For example Yahoo! News, with this added warning:

✨ Key takeaways

Powered by Yahoo Scout. Yahoo is using AI to generate key points from this article. This means the info may not always match what’s in the article. (…)

Consider what this signals to the reader: instead of differentiating trustworthy media from untrustworthy Big Tech chatbots, it does the exact opposite. It puts the untrustworthy slop right there in front of the reader on the very news website the reader is already on, and even calls that slop out for being untrustworthy!

A reader might ask: are chatbots as trustworthy as the media organizations, then? If they are, why wouldn’t the reader limit themself to whatever chatbot they are already most used to? No need to visit your site anymore! And no need for Google to even link to it.

Media thus dilute their own trustworthiness, while at the same time improving the perceived trustworthiness of slop generators. Another type of silo emerges, one that even more completely locks the reader in.

And finally, between SEO-optimized clickbait headlines and distracting auto-play videos that are unrelated to the article content, many media websites signal outright hostility – if not contempt – towards the reader and their preferences. The relatively recent (and likely illegal) forced-consent banners only strengthen that feeling. And again, these consent banners are a choice, stemming from other choices – using Google Analytics, showing creepy tracking ads, and so on.

In fact, trust itself has been outsourced to the gatekeepers.

X/Twitter’s checkmarks, formerly highly-coveted by journalists and a point of pride as a sign of clout, turned into a meaningless rent extraction scheme. Journalists gave a corporate platform the power to decide who’s trustworthy and who is not, and now they literally and figuratively pay the price.

And yet you persist there. After Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency killed your funding, after the hand gesture, after Grok-generated child sexual abuse materials scandal, after Musk called an interviewer “a traitor to the west” for pointed questions, and fantasized about killing other journalists.

Can it be any more clear that Musk and his platfom sees you, the media, as his enemy? How can people trust you if you stay there? What would it take for you to leave? Is there anything at all?

✨ Key Takeaways

I know you’re still there because “everyone else is”. But this works both ways: for how many of your readers you being there is the reason they stay? For how many fellow journalists? For how many politicians?

Your very existence on these toxic platforms lends them credibility and builds their importance. You bear responsibility for where you point the eyeballs.

Here’s the good news: you helped push people into these toxic places, so you can lead them out of there. You can close your accounts, or at least you can limit your posting there. You can point the eyeballs elsewhere.

Even if you stay in some of the silos, the way you use them matters. Are you pulling more people into them? Or are you crafting your use such that it pulls people out of them?

But remember there are no silver bullets. Interrogate the power dynamics of new tools you use and promote. Do they lend themselves to gatekeeping? Are the companies or organizations behind them trustworthy? Is switching a provider easy in case your current one becomes problematic?

Newsletters are making a comeback. That’s great, as long as we’re not talking about wannabe silos like Substack.

You wouldn’t publish an article without thoroughly investigating and fact-checking it. Why not apply the same standard to tech companies and services you use and promote?

The Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project, an investigative outlet I had worked at during Panama Papers, recently announced a “strategic partnership” with W Social. If they did apply the same standard of investigation and fact-checking as I know they do to their stories, they would perhaps learn that W Social is basically a fork of Bluesky, a US-based social media platform. I don’t want to bore you with technicalities but this basically means W Social is dependent on some of Bluesky’s infrastructure. While branding themselves as a “European” social network.

They also use misleading messaging to pretend Eurosky – another Bluesky fork – does not exist. Not to mention the Fediverse.

OCCRP would also learn that the company artificially manipulates comment counts to make it look more active – which does not exactly sit well with W Social’s tagline, “trust your feed”. We know this, again, because W Social is a fork of Bluesky and so you can get access to the same data via Bluesky.

Finally, speaking of Bluesky… if one were to in turn do some due diligence on them, one would learn it’s another VC-funded company, whose main investor is Blockchain Capital. Technologically, Bluesky is really trying to create a silo that doesn’t immediately look like a silo, but will inevitably end up being one.

After all, venture capital expects massive return on investment. And competition is for losers. So, silos are the name of the game.

Thirteen years ago I was warning against silos, specifically calling out Facebook and Twitter. And Google+, which is pretty quaint today. Today I am warning you about Bluesky and its forks, like W Social. I am warning you about Substack. I am warning you about LLMs.

I am begging you to pay attention to the red flags, critically scrutinize tech companies and services they offer, and make the difficult decisions that might be required to not fall into the same traps again.

You are spending your time, energy, money and trust capital to get people from one silo to another. You are promoting the very systems whose purpose is to make journalism irrelevant. The way this ends is very predictable. As it was with everything else I talked today about.

How do you know if a tech service is a potential silo? If the question of “I need to be there because others are there” makes any sense in the context of a single provider, it is one. What are the power dynamics? Are there other providers? What happens if the owner pulls a Musk? Can it be owned at all? Who is the owner? What is their track record? Follow the money!

Also, can we have RSS/Atom feeds, please? There is no reason why feed readers can’t make a comeback and become first-class citizens on our devices. You can help make that world happen, and you will regain another direct channel without a gatekeeper, and without having to roll (and then maintain) your own mobile app.

Incidentally, podcasts are based around RSS/Atom feeds. “Wherever you get your podcasts” is a revolutionary statement.

Talk about protocols, not platforms. Public debate needs public spaces, not private shopping malls. Regain trust, reclaim eyeballs, and hopefully money will follow.

We need strong, independent, resilient journalism. That is not going to happen as long as techbros are in the driver’s seat. The sooner media organizations understand that and start acting on that, the better.

We can’t afford another decade of this.

Graze's election night dashboard demonstrates the power of open algorithms - Werd I/O

2026-10-07T17:25:52.000Z

Link: Election Night 2026, by Graze Social

This prototype from Graze is remarkable.

Graze, of course, allows you to create new Bluesky feeds. People have created feeds for news, sports, politics — anything you like. But they’ve mostly been consumed within the Bluesky experience itself.

Its midterms dashboard is something different. Here, you can view discussion of candidate races based on the races you care about, determined by who you’re already following. Because newsrooms, pundits, and politically active individuals are posting across the network, and because the network itself is based on a permissionless protocol that is open to analysis, Graze can show you what’s happening as well as the mood of the conversation in real time.

It’s all cited, so links point to newsrooms’s own accounts and websites. And it’s genuinely live.

For someone who’s interested in the election, this is a fascinating tool. It may also be genuinely useful for newsrooms and other organizations that want to more easily have their finger on the pulse. And the fact that it’s all available openly, and built on a protocol that doesn’t require payment or permission, is huge. If this dashboard doesn’t quite meet your needs, you can build your own.

The space to breathe - Werd I/O

2026-10-07T17:11:56.000Z

This January, I wrote a hypothetical story about how to keep newsrooms safe from raids the day before federal agents raided Washington Post engagement reporter Hannah Natanson’s home. More than one industry person called me prescient, but I wasn’t. It was completely obvious this was going to happen.

The environment for newsrooms during the second Trump administration is unprecedented: an increase in secret subpoenas, raids on journalists and newsrooms, ratcheted-up surveillance, new restrictions, and an overwhelming message that we should fall in line or face the consequences. In January, not every newsroom leader had accepted that the norms of American democracy were being so thoroughly undermined. Wouldn’t our Constitutional protections — and the principles we tell ourselves are American norms — hold up?

I didn’t think so. For some Americans, those things had never been true; many newsroom leaders were simply too privileged to see it clearly, and therefore had a harder time believing it could happen. The gap between what America says it is and what it does was only going to become more obvious; I was firm in my intuition that the situation was going to be bad and get much worse. I didn’t make it up: my position was based on accounts from people inside government, stated intentions from administration politicians, and analysis from experts I trusted. It was also informed by the stories I grew up with, which in turn shaped how I see the world.

Some of my father’s first memories are of the Ambarawa 6 concentration camp in Indonesia, run by Japanese forces to imprison around four thousand women and children. Torture and malnutrition were an ordinary part of life. My Oma gathered and cooked snails to provide extra protein for her children; my aunt escaped through the sewers to gather extra food. When they were finally liberated, they were on the brink of death.

He later became an activist in Berkeley, protesting the Vietnam War and fighting for affirmative action. He experienced the betrayal of COINTELPRO and police overreach first hand. Years after Indonesia regained its independence after the war, the US underwrote the killing of left-wing activists there; simultaneously, it actively oppressed activists at home.

I grew up with those stories. And I grew up hearing my Oma wailing as she suffered through nightmares every single night. As the Project 2025 plans began to play out, my limbic system was working overtime. If the things that were happening were not exactly the same as the stories I was raised on, they certainly rhymed.

A lot of people feel this perception gap more than I do. I’ve usually worked in the C-suite, and although I have an immigrant background, I present as a straight, white man. Individual contributors in the newsroom are much more likely to be women and/or people of color than upper managers. They have been sounding the alarm, but haven’t always been listened to. Not only does that leave the newsroom unprepared, it leaves the people who are on the ground actively doing the work burned out. Many reporters, particularly people of color, wind up leaving the industry, even though we arguably need their voices the most.

I was not a reporter, although I was proud to work with people who were telling such important stories about our new reality. My role was to lead product engineering, IT, and security; the technology behind our publishing platforms, the systems that enabled the journalism to be done every day, and the digital policies that kept our newsroom safe. The day-to-day rhythm of those things is never boring in a good year.

It was not a good year.

One of the purposes of the relentless dystopia of the second Trump administration is to “flood the zone”: provide an ongoing distraction that prevents real analysis of substantive policies, and keep the media in a reactive mode rather than one where they can take a step back and strategize. Even if you’re not reporting on each new development, you’re reading and internalizing it; the environment of non-stop cruelty has a real cognitive effect.

As someone who worked in a newsroom, I couldn’t look away: there was no respite. That was particularly true when right-wing activists doxxed me in the aftermath of ProPublica’s identification of the CBP agents who killed Alex Pretti. ProPublica’s reporting is consistently high quality, thoroughly fact checked, and visceral.

An industry that has not had the foresight to be prepared, and is then hit in the face by an unstoppable firehose, can only be in reactive mode. But journalism can’t afford to be. As an industry, it’s been in decline for years: first through a failure to adapt to the web, then through loss of its incumbent business models, and finally because the administration and its allies are actively trying to harm it.

These problems are urgent. We need trustworthy information and context to make good democratic decisions. We need sustained sunlight to fight political corruption and abuse. Even if we don’t care about the journalism industry itself, we should care about having a high-functioning democratic society.

But if everybody is burned out from everything that’s happening outside their workplaces and from the disconnect with the people they work for, nobody is mentally present enough to do the work to fix it.

Research consistently finds that stressors people cannot control significantly reduce creativity. Uncontrollable stress impairs the prefrontal cortex, the brain’s seat of flexible, reflective thought, and pushes cognition into a reactive mode. Unfortunately, that describes newsrooms in 2026 exactly. Flooding the zone doesn’t just work on institutions; it works on all of our brains. And in this era, the less power we have, the more uncontrollable stress we experience.

I previously wrote about looking for a “yes, and” space, and how I found it in my JSK Fellowship. To that, I would add: to innovate, you need to be able to breathe and play. More than anything, you need to give yourself the time and space to let your brain unclench. You need a space to breathe.

Those spaces are disproportionately available to the privileged. If you come from privilege, you have more ability to take time out, reflect, be healthy, and look at the bigger picture. But at the same time, people who don’t come from privilege — who are more likely to have more diverse backgrounds, cut across race, class, gender, and geography — have more value to add. In news, people trust journalism less when they aren’t represented in the newsrooms that serve them, because they’re less likely to be covered accurately and fairly.

Consider Kensington, one of the most complex neighborhoods in Philadelphia, which the New York Times called “the Walmart of Heroin”. Kensington Voice sprang up to accurately cover it, giving a more representative voice to that community. Of the two newsrooms, Kensington Voice could see the challenges its communities faced with much greater fidelity. But at the end of September, it announced it no longer has the funding to publish new stories. Finding that breathing space to do something different is hard.

The people who can see America most clearly, and therefore have the best chance to solve its problems, are the people who have the least time and space to think.

The JSK fellowships provide one way for a broader set of insightful people to find space to think. (My imposter syndrome still looms very large.) But we also need to think about how to create these spaces inside newsrooms.

We can’t turn the firehose off: news is news, and everything is happening all of the time. But we can intentionally design our cultures to provide more room for breathing and innovation. We can build cultures that give everyone not just a voice but equity and say in the decisions a newsroom makes. The creativity-killer is uncontrollable stress; the more control and ownership everyone in a newsroom has, the more cognitive freedom they have to innovate.

It’s also about time. We need to make space in our organizations to step away from the firehose, experiment, and build prototypes. We need “yes, and” spaces, but we also just need the permission to spend some time doing something else, get feedback, and iterate, without the pressures that put us in a reactive mode. Those protected spaces can’t just be for upper managers and people with official strategy responsibilities; to be effective, they should be available to everyone, coupled with real design guidance and training.

Ideally, we would build this inside the newsrooms we already have; if we need to build new ones to give people the space they need to better serve their communities, so be it.

I came here thinking I’d focus on platforms. I think the bigger problem is culture. It’s a harder problem, but it all starts from there.

St Jude 2026 Recap - Robb Knight • Posts • Atom Feed

2026-10-07T14:11:22.000Z

Here we are, a week into extended September and Relay's annual fundraiser has come to a close with over $750k raised — and nearly $9k of that came from mine and Adam's campaign.

This is short of our goal of $15k that I set without really thinking much about it and it is lower than previous years. A couple of people reached out privately to apologise that they couldn't donate this year — it's rough out there. I haven't donated as much as previous years either for various reasons but to raise nearly $9k is nothing short of amazing. Everyone who shared the campaign or donated, even a small amount, thank you.

We did our usual offering of stickers this year, which expanded from a two pack into a four pack, then we added Jimothy. I offered my drawings again and once I have them all complete I will have done 32 of them, five more than last year. I'll put up a post once they've all arrived because I remembered to scan them all this year. Finally Adam decided to make his life difficult and offer friendship bracelets — he has 20 or so of these to make. Good luck.

I've started my note of ideas for next year — it's basically September already.

My Hobby Is Learning - Kev Quirk

2026-10-07T12:42:00.000Z

I've had lots of hobbies over the years. To name a few off the top of my head, there's been fish keeping, guitar, harmonica, fountain pens, watches, motorbikes, this blog, web development, 3D printing, tattoos, digital minimalism, table tennis, and many more.

Some of my hobbies have stuck, but I've never gotten so enthralled into a hobby that I become obsessed. Instead, there's generally 4 steps in the process:

I decide I want to take up a hobby.
I read, watch videos, and obsessively learn about the topic.
Invest lots of time and/or money into the hobby.
Decide I've learned enough and move on.

I don't always get to step 4. For some hobbies, like watch collecting and motorbikes, I continue to invest some time and money into them, and they continue to bring me joy. But I'm not obsessed. I see someone wearing an interesting watch; it piques my interest and we can have a conversation about it. But I'm not the type of person who can tell a watch brand from across a room (unless it's a Casio).

Similarly, I love riding and working on my motorbikes - both bring me genuine joy. But I'm not the kind of biker who has to get out on their bike as much as possible, where driving the car is some kind of punishment. I enjoy driving too.

While walking the dogs this morning I was idly thinking about all the random possessions I have scattered around the house that are the culmination of many abandoned hobbies. I started to think about why that is, and it dawned on me…

It's not guitars, or harmonicas, or fish, or motorbikes, or watches, or anything else. It's learning about those thing that I find so enjoyable. It's the nitrogen cycle of an aquarium. It's learning to place your fingers at the right part of the fretboard on a guitar. It's learning to ride a motorbike safely and smoothly through some technical twisty roads, or learning how a clutch works and how to strip it down.

It's learning. Learning is my hobby.

And once I've decided I've learned enough about a topic, I'm good. I don't want to be the next Eric Clapton, Valentino Rossi, King of DIY, or Teddy Baldassarre. I want to be good enough at those hobbies, then move on to the next thing I can learn about.

I think that's why computers have always interested me, because there's always something new to learn with them.

So in future, instead of going neck deep and spending money on the next frivolous hobby, maybe I'll just spend some time learning about the thing to see if that satisfies my learning hobby. It probably won't though, as I'm something of a magpie when it comes to shiny things.

But hey, at least I'm having fun and I'm not hurting anyone, right?

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FASP-tracked - destructured

2026-10-07T04:00:00.000Z

Lately, in fediverse development circles, a certain amount of hype has built around Fediverse Auxiliary Service Providers, or FASPs. For anyone familiar with the challenges of instance administration, the reason should be fairly obvious: The ability to plug into independent services promises to reduce the load on home servers. For example, one of the buzzier fediverse projects in recent years, Bonfire, recently discussed their work on remote media storage and automated content detection, both of which build on the FASP concept to create shared services.

At the same time, we’re talking about interjecting third parties into relationships that have previously been much more direct, and it’s reasonable to be concerned about what that might entail. That demands a big, serious conversation about what limits and best practices should attend the deployment of FASPs. There needs to be serious consideration of the trade-offs of adding third parties to not just the technical, but also the social functions of the fediverse — one that extends beyond conversations between FASP developers at Mastodon and its partners. Specifically, it should include instance admins and fediverse account-holders, since they’re the ones who will ultimately have to live with the material realities FASPs create.

For example: I’m generally wary of talk about “data sovereignty,” but for those who are serious about the concerns addressed by that notion, FASPs create a potential wrinkly. Choosing a host instance in your home region only matters if they’re not routing moderation through a FASP in some other country operating under another legal paradigm. At the very least, anyone concerned about data handling should want clear, automated signals when an instance connects with an outside FASP so they can make informed decisions about account hosting.

Another example: One proposed use for FASPs is shared media storage, which seems like a convenient way to reduce storage needs for host instances. But a remote media host will also need to pay storage costs, which raises the question of how. One possibility is that they could lease their stored media as AI training data. Would you be okay with that? Would you even know if that’s how your server’s media storage was paid for? The problem here is not just that FASP operators could put shared data to unsanctioned use — that’s a risk any time we pass posts from one server to another — but that the operation of an additional, unfunded service incentivizes monetizing the one resource it has at its disposal.

The more basic risk, though, is that FASP deployment could serve instances with hundreds of thousand of users better than it will serve the majority of small to medium sized instances. In some ways, in fact, FASPs look like a solution to problems that are exacerbated by overcrowding in the largest servers. Smaller instances could end up shouldering a disproportionate amount of the burden embodied in shared resources. On the whole, our networks might be better served by simply not crowding so many people into relatively few servers.

Consider the case of FASP that operates as a moderation co-operative, pooling reports for all of its member instances to reduce redundant reports and lower the overall number of moderation actions needed. If a server with 200,000 active accounts adds a dozen mods, and a server with 200 accounts adds two, guess which mod team is picking up the most slack? Sharing moderation duties sounds like a smart way to distribute one of the fediverse’s most essential and thankless tasks, but distributing it to whom?

If such systems are not implemented with an eye toward those social imbalances, a greater share of the benefits may accrue to the servers that have the highest concentration of accounts. The ultimate result could be a minor increase in the sustainability of the fediverse’s few superhosts, with little benefit, and potentially great detriment, to smaller servers who share those resources. In other words: the big challenges to implementing FASPs equitably are social and political, not technical.

One advantage to the FASP structure is that it is more optional than similar services on ATproto. In principle, at least, instances can simply decline to use FASPs if they have concerns. The risk to avoid is that of FASP services becoming de facto standards, such that it becomes difficult to operate a server without them, either because expected features become virtually impossible without them, or because instances won’t (or can’t) federate with instances that don’t use some particular FASP.

These are problems that need to be addressed before we start restructuring our networks around FASPs. Hence the need for a broader discussion than is currently taking place. We need public clarity about which trade-offs are worth it, and which are not, in advance of anyone getting burned by unwary adoption. Everyone — developers, admins and fedizens alike — should go slow and think through the possibilities.

My router is not a calculator - Posts feed

2026-10-06T20:46:00.000Z

I run my own analytics on this site. It's straightforward, collects as little as possible and gives me some basic counts, referral info and a list of 404s to (potentially) fix. Server-side analytics are noisy, so most of this is reported from a simple client-side script. What is surfaced from the server requests are 404s. I use these to find links I've broken, near-miss paths and anything else I might want to tidy up.

The annoying part of tracking 404s this way is that the panel fills up with fuzzers doing stupid fuzzer things. This was, for a time, manageable by manually excluding these URLs. That worked until recently, when someone flooded it with SQL injection attempts. None worked, but there were a lot of them. The person driving them may benefit from a hobby. Read a book, go to the park, get into pickleball—I'm sure there are plenty of options.

This site is served using Caddy, so I've added a path_regexp to match SQL syntax and drop those connections. Some requests were dumping multiplication into URLs and waiting to see if the answer came back. As best I can tell this is a thing Acunetix or Invicti Web + API or who the hell cares does. My router is not a calculator.

In addition to the Caddy change, I'm 429ing IPs that sit around guessing at 404s. Go directly to jail. Do not pass Go, do not collect $200. Stop enumerating routes that don't exist. For my analytics, anyone with 10 or more 404s is treated as a scanner and ignored.

I'm still manually excluding nonsense, but there's a lot less of it.

Una Watch - SDK and Writing Your First App - Terence Eden’s Blog

2026-10-06T11:34:25.000Z

I don't know why hardware manufacturers find it so hard to write decent documentation. As I've said before you need to actually test your readme. The Una Watch development instructions are scattered across a bunch of different files.

So here's how to go from zero to your first "Hello, World!" Glance app with the minimum of fuss.

This all assumes a fairly modern Debian / Ubuntu / Pop OS Linux.

Prerequisites

This installs most of the tools you will need:

sudo apt update
sudo apt install -y git python3 python3-pip cmake build-essential

STM32CubeCLT

Visit https://www.st.com/en/development-tools/stm32cubeclt.html and download the Linux version of the tool. Inexplicably, you need to give your email address. I recommend giving a disposable one from https://10minutemail.com/

After downloading, unzip the file.

On the command line, cd into the directory containing the unzipped file.

chmod +x stm32cubeclt_*.sh
sudo ./stm32cubeclt_*.sh

You will need to agree to their licence. Just hit y.

That installs everything in /opt/st/stm32cubeclt_1.22.0/

You will need to make that available to your PATH.

export PATH="/opt/st/stm32cubeclt_1.22.0/GNU-tools-for-STM32/bin:$PATH"

Clone the repo

You will need to copy the Una SDK. I keep my git repos in ~/git/ - you will need the location of the directory later.

cd ~/git/
git clone git@github.com:UNAWatch/una-sdk.git
cd una-sdk/
git submodule update --init ThirdParty/lvgl

Then update all the Python dependencies.

export UNA_SDK="$PWD"
python3 -m pip install --upgrade pip
python3 -m pip install -r "$UNA_SDK/Utilities/Scripts/app_packer/requirements.txt"

Check it has all worked

Paste this into your terminal. Check for any errors.

which arm-none-eabi-gcc || true
which cmake || true
which make || true
which python3 || true
python3 -m pip --version
arm-none-eabi-gcc --version || true
cmake --version || true
make --version || true

Build the demo app

If all of the above has worked, you should be able to build the demo app with:

cd /tmp
mkdir -p MyAlarm
cp -r "$UNA_SDK/Examples/Apps/Alarm/"* MyAlarm
mkdir -p MyAlarm/build
cmake -G "Unix Makefiles" -S MyAlarm/Software/Apps/Alarm-CMake -B MyAlarm/build
cmake --build MyAlarm/build

Make it permanent

Store the paths permanently. If you put cloned the Una SDK to somewhere other than ~/git/ you'll need to edit this next bit of code:

echo 'export UNA_SDK="$HOME/git/una-sdk"' >> ~/.bashrc
echo 'export PATH="/opt/st/stm32cubeclt_1.22.0/GNU-tools-for-STM32/bin:$PATH"' >> ~/.bashrc
source ~/.bashrc

Build a Glance app

At the moment, the only way to build a GUI app is using the Windows only (Booooo!) TouchGFX⁰. So, instead, we'll make a "Hello World" glance. All it will do is draw some text.

The GlanceFloors demo app is the simplest one to copy.

cd $UNA_SDK/Examples/Apps/
cp -r  GlanceFloors/ GlanceHello

Use an IDE or a text editor to open up the new GlanceHello directory.

Rename the directory GlanceHello/Software/App/GlanceFloors-CMake/ to GlanceHello/Software/App/GlanceHello-CMake/
Edit the file GlanceHello/Software/App/GlanceFloors-CMake/CMakeLists.txt - specifically the # App configuration section.
Change the APP_NAME to GlanceHello
Change the APP_USER_NAME to Hello

For a demo, you can leave the DEV_ID and APP_ID as their default values.

Minimum viable app

You will need to edit two more files.

In GlanceHello/Software/Libs/Header/Service.hpp remove the following lines:

SDK::Sensor::Connection mSensorFloors;
uint32_t                mFloorsValue;
bool                    mDataReceived;

Then save the file.

Edit GlanceHello/Software/Libs/Source/Service.cpp and replace its entire contents with this:

#include "Service.hpp"
#include "SDK/Messages/CommandMessages.hpp"
#include "SDK/Messages/MessageGuard.hpp"

Service::Service(SDK::Kernel &kernel)
    : mKernel(kernel)
    , mGlanceUI()
    , mGlanceTitle()
    , mGlanceValue()
{}

Service::~Service(){}

void Service::run()
{
    while (true) {
        SDK::MessageBase *msg;
        if(!mKernel.comm.getMessage(msg)) {
            continue;
        }

        switch (msg->getType()) {

            case SDK::MessageType::EVENT_GLANCE_START:
                if (configGui()) {
                    createGuiControls();
                } else {
                    mKernel.comm.releaseMessage(msg);
                    mKernel.sys.exit(0);
                }
                break;

            case SDK::MessageType::COMMAND_APP_STOP:
            case SDK::MessageType::EVENT_GLANCE_STOP:
                mKernel.comm.releaseMessage(msg);
                return;
                break;

            case SDK::MessageType::EVENT_GLANCE_TICK:
                onGlanceTick();
                break;

            default:
                break;
        }

        mKernel.comm.releaseMessage(msg);
    }
}

void Service::onGlanceTick()
{
    if (mGlanceUI.isInvalid()) {
        if (auto upd = SDK::make_msg(mKernel)) {
            upd->name           = APP_NAME;
            upd->controls       = mGlanceUI.data();
            upd->controlsNumber = static_cast(mGlanceUI.size());
            upd.send(100);
        }

        mGlanceUI.setValid();
}
}

bool Service::configGui()
{
    bool status = false;
    if (auto gc = SDK::make_msg(mKernel)) {
        if (gc.send(100) && gc.ok()) {
            if (gc->maxControls >= 3) {
                mGlanceUI.setWidth(gc->width);
                mGlanceUI.setHeight(gc->height);
                status = true;
            }
        }
    }
    return status;
}

void Service::createGuiControls()
{
    mGlanceTitle = mGlanceUI.createText();
    mGlanceTitle.pos({ kTitleX, kTitleY }, { kTitleW, kTitleH })
        .font(GlanceFont_t::GLANCE_FONT_POPPINS_SEMIBOLD_20)
        .color(GlanceColor_t::GLANCE_COLOR_TEAL)
        .setText("Hello, World!")
        .alignment(GlanceAlignH_t::GLANCE_ALIGN_H_CENTER);
    mGlanceValue = mGlanceUI.createText();
    mGlanceValue.pos({ 0, kValueY }, { 200, kValueH })
        .font(GlanceFont_t::GLANCE_FONT_POPPINS_SEMIBOLD_20)
        .color(GlanceColor_t::GLANCE_COLOR_WHITE)
        .setText("I know C++")
        .alignment(GlanceAlignH_t::GLANCE_ALIGN_H_CENTER);
}

Save the file.

Compile it

On the command line

cd $UNA_SDK/Examples/Apps/GlanceHello/Software/App/GlanceHello-CMake
cmake -G "Unix Makefiles" -S . -B build
cmake --build build

It should finish with a success message of [100%] Built target GlanceHelloApp

Copying it to your watch

Plug your watch into your computer with a USB-C cable.
On your computer, open the watch's filesystem.
Open the Apps directory.
Create a new directory.
Name the new directory with the string of characters from the APP_ID which is set in CMakeLists.txt
The app is stored in GlanceHello/Output/ and will be called Hello_1.5.0-rc5.uapp or similar.
Copy the .uapp file from your computer to the directory you just created on the watch.
Eject the watch.
Unplug the cable.
Restart the watch by pressing the "Up" button until you get to "Power Off", then press "Select", then press "Select" again.
Turn the watch on by holding down "Select".
Once the watch has fully restarted, press the "Down" button until you see the "Hello" glance.

If it has worked, you should see this:

Hurrah! Treat yourself to a beer 🍻

Just after I wrote this, the SDK was updated to allow LVGL which should work on Linux. There's no documentation for it yet that I could find. ↩︎

2026-10-06 09:47: Been trying a new email client, Hylki, after reading about it on OMG! Ubuntu! Really... - Kev Quirk

2026-10-06T08:47:00.000Z

Been trying a new email client, Hylki, after reading about it on OMG! Ubuntu! Really enjoying it. It's modern and has a tonne of features.

https://hylki.app/

Thanks for reading this post via RSS. RSS is ace, and so are you. ❤️

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Christmas movie, Fool Us rabbit hole, UNO - W40 - Joel's Log Files

2026-10-06T04:34:33.000Z

This was a very crazy week I have to say, full of unexpected surprises and the like, as such, the things that happened kind of have to be more than listicles this time around, we will resume the usual style for future weeknotes, probably, or not!

In any case, here are some events of note that happened from September 29 to October 5, 2026.

🎩 I fell on a Fool Us rabbit hole. It’s a show where magicians all over the world try to fool Penn & Teller—one of the best magicians with a long history and experience in the art. If you’ve never been exposed to it, I have some recommendations with some top performers! Grab a snack and a drink, and have a blast! These are not ranked, but DaOrtiz is my favorite.

🚌 The bus route for work has finally altered the time of departure on my stop, and I have good news! I now have ten whole minutes more to stay at home in the early morning, less pressure to wake up early and the like, which I actually appreciate. Less time for hobbies during the commute, but whatever.

🦐 For the first time in years, I went out to get some seafood with my parents! My mom found this place nearby and she wanted to check it out, so I decided to invite her and dad to have some for ourselves. I got some shrimp! I forgot what they got, I just ate stuff and enjoyed myself!

🎲 We were so close to playing Land of Eem out of nowhere, but my friends chose simpler card games instead, I even brought my books and all—though I forgot my GM screen too.

We did a few rounds of Phase 10, but we also did UNO K-Pop Demon Hunters edition (while letting the soundtrack of that movie play the whole time) which was fun enough—though I didn’t understand the extra rule it adds at all.

Speaking of UNO, I did buy myself the edition themed after The Legend of Zelda series…

🙈 In an absolutely wild moment, my mom ~~decided to play cupid~~ invited the girl I kinda like (the one I invited to the movies, twice) to visit us. I was not told about this critical information at any point in time, until she literally messaged me asking for my address. So I ended up going outwith her—impromptu and against my will (not really)—downtown, we had an ice cream looked at cool old buildings and the like.

We also had dinnner, played some card games, watched a christmas movie (in October?) and had a relatively good time. I genuinely felt like I was put into a rom-com manga all of a sudden against my will. I feel that I did everything wrong and fumbled many things badly—yes I’m not going into why here—but it turned out ok and she had fun which is good enough for me and she said I owe her another one.

UNO K-Pop Demon Hunters, some sea food, a UNO Zelda edition, my PSP with FFIV on it, and some pretty lights in some street downtown

Watching

Klaus is an incredible work on animation that works as a retelling of the origin of Santa Claus! It features a mailman who meets an old toy maker, who help bring a very toxic and divided city together for the first time, with the power of acts of kindness! It was a genuinely lovely film with excellent art design and story. A bit weird for October, but it doesn’t matter.

Reading

The Left Hand of Darkness. Chapters 6-7. I got a bit slow on this one as I decided to focus on my gaming and was carried away by some manga too! Still, the chapters were also very long and focused on some pretty interesting themes this time around.

Alita Battle Angel. Chapters 45-46. After probably more than a year without reading this classic manga of the cyberpunk genre, I finally decided to return to this, with only ten or so chapters, it took me a while to get back into the gist of it. I am having fun nonetheless!

Blue Lock. Chapters 360-361. I remember saying I’d stop reading this until the England match was over, but I decided to read some more anyway and ended up getting to a perspective switch outside the match, welp.

Centuria. Chapter 80. Not a lot of reading this one this time around! Just some intersting villain backstory stuff.

Gaming

Completed

Final Fantasy IV has been ongoing for me, for about four years, I have finally completed one of the quintessential entires of the JRPG genre! One of the first with an actual plotline, accompanied by a wonderful soundtrack and turn based combat implementing the ATB system. The PSP version was a joy to go through, I played around 14 hours total since I last touched it last year, just doing endgame dungeons, unlocking ultimate weapons, grinding for levels, and finally beating the last boss, to reach credits and end this story once and for all!

Ongoing

Nintendo Switch Sports was played during the weekent. It was an excellent source of multiplayer fun that I tried with multiple people this week. Both 2-player and 4-player modes! The favorite was volleyball and tennis, as usual.

Guncho is a roguelike that I think I’ve mentioned before. It’s a game where you deal with many enemies in a hex grid, with only six bullets and the environment to help you. You can unlock abilities to swap positions, position yourself, or ricochet bullets, and it’s awesome!

Around the Web

Not a lot of posts this time around, and no descriptions. It’s late!

Fire Emblem is Timeless by Kyle Labriola
[Music over podcasts] by Rubenerd
October Is Spooky Video Game Month by Wouter Groeneveld
Your Phone Is Not Your Computer by Simon Safar

This is day 47 of #100DaysToOffload

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Sunset - James' Coffee Blog

2026-10-06T00:00:00.000Z

Frozen light yellow clouds hover under a grey sky, illuminated by the horizon sun.

⁂ ⁂ ⁂

“I have never seen the sky like that before”, I thought to myself while gazing with my whole mind and body in wonder. The colour of the sky has a certain magnetism. When I first notice the colours change for morning or night, I love to stop and look out the window, to appreciate everything that I can see: the gradient from the blue above through the grey clouds to the yellow, and then gold, clouds behind which the sun wavers between awareness and slumber; the yellow from the sun glows through to the peripheries of the clouds; skies, Heavens.

Looking to my right, I see that not all of the horizon is coated in golden clouds; some parts of the sky are blue. This is a sunrise of contrasting colours right next to each other on the horizon line. I will probably have seen a sunset like this before, but I can’t remember the moment when I have. The sunset reminds me that there is new in the old; that there will always be something new to see at sunrise and sunset; that, the more I look, the more I see.

The sun has the power to transform grey clouds into a painting of vivid colours that graces the sky at both morning and night. As I write, sitting comfortably with my keyboard and room illuminated by the soft remaining light of day, I notice the change in colours: the gold are now red; the yellow clouds are now again grey. The blue is still on the horizon. The ephemeral colours are forever awe-some, glowing into the future like an Impressionist painting.

AI companies are parasites - Posts feed

2026-10-05T19:29:00.000Z

Merriam-Webster:

An organism living in, on, or with another organism in order to obtain nutrients, grow, or multiply often in a state that directly or indirectly harms the host.

That's it, right? The whole thing, their entire business model.

Scrape the whole of the internet, destroy books, siphon everything they can from whoever they can without compensation, and call it fair use.
Train models on said stolen data.
Sell metered access to the models.
Repeat until you've killed the host.
Hope you can head off the effects of AI inbreeding.

The old bargain of traffic for indexing is gone. Scrapers overload infrastructure. Clickthroughs collapse. Communities collapse.¹

Yes, licensing deals exist. Reddit is selling access to its data, but that data is human-generated and depends on a flagging community the company seems, at best, indifferent to.

They'll even show up in your community and set up a data center that nobody (well, except for the people profiting from it) wants. Maybe they'll spin up gas generators and send pollution your way. Or they'll drive up your electricity and water rates. But what about jobs? Most of those only exist during construction and, who knows, they might just hire folks from outside your area for that.

They never should've attached themselves to society, and it may be too late to dislodge them. At least we get stilted prose, images that look like Pixar rehashes, and code nobody understands.

How's Stack Overflow doing lately? ↩︎

[RSS Club] Changes to the RSS and Atom feeds - Terence Eden’s Blog

2026-10-05T11:34:03.000Z

This content is exclusive to RSS and Atom subscribers. It is not on the web. Shhhhh!

A few weeks ago I accidentally broke some of your feed readers. I was using blocks in the feed. That allows me to put in raw HTML without the need for escaping. Unfortunately, some feed readers unescaped text which should have remained escaped. Confusing, innit?

Anyway, if you've a mind to, I'd be grateful if you let me know if this post does anything "weird" with your reader⁰.

This text should be bold but this text should not.

This text should be escaped and should not cause your reader to scroll. This is an image of a mushroom cloud: This is the escaped version This should just be an ampersand: & And this should be ampersand, amp, and semicolon: & Here's a video embed that I like: I'm sure there's all sorts of other odd stuff I could add, but this'll be a good start. With thanks to Suren Enfiajyan's article for the guidance. I mean weirder than my usual stuff! ↩︎ MCP server 'move in' is live - Johnny.Decimal 2026-10-05T05:39:54.000Z Speaking of MCP servers, our server now has a 'move in' service. Just ask it to help you move in to the Life Admin or Small Business systems and it'll do that. You need at least a Pro account. It's hard to test this sort of thing without having a bunch of mess to organise. As you might imagine, my laptop's pretty neat. But testing on a realistic sample data set is kinda mind-blowing. It's really good. Here's a rough-cut video showing the process. This is all in active development, so there's lots more to come. Life Admin MCP access now requires a Pro account - Johnny.Decimal 2026-10-05T04:18:25.000Z I launched the MCP server in August, and it's proved very popular. So popular, it's a problem – because it costs me money to run. It isn't a fortune, but the impact of the extra compute on my hosting bill isn't zero, nor is my time to keep it all working. Previously a Personal account meant you could use the MCP server with your agent to ask it questions about the Life Admin System, and have it download and install your system. Those things now require a Pro account. With a Personal account, you get the Life Admin System and the same free open-source utilities available to anyone. So your AI agent can still read your local files and JDex (augmented by my skills) and help you manage your system. It can still read the site documentation via the MCP server or by appending .md to any URL. With a Pro account, you get this plus full MCP server access, API access, 20+ hours of video at Johnny.Decimal University, and soon the Mac app I'm developing. This is much simpler and easier to explain. JDHQ now means 'software and server features that cost money'. Johnny.Decimal University means 'all our video training'. You get them both with Pro. Clean. A Pro account is how you support us. It's how two people are able to work on this full time. We keep adding value to it: it started out as the Workshop. Then we added the 5-hour Task and Project Management course. Then the MCP server, and soon an app. All provided to existing members, all for no additional cost. I hope that's okay. Thanks for understanding. – j. Song - James' Coffee Blog 2026-10-05T00:00:00.000Z I want to give all my breath to the song, listening to every transcendent, liminal, spooky note, accompanied by intertwined tracks of coded and pure voice. I want to sing out the words I know loudly, and read all those I don’t know so that I may sing as much as I can with all the ardour in my heart and my soul, each vestige of passion entering the air being a sign of life, a sign of feeling, a sign of all that I have learned and all that I do not know. I listen to songs that I have heard dozens of times before, hearing in my partial recall of the lyrics my limits. I cannot sing everything, but I can sing parts of the song, and keep singing until I have learned as much as I can – every word a signal of a feeling that I have transversed and held in my hands or the wells of my eyes. As I sing I know where to pause and when the music will come back again; there are always moments to listen, each a chapter in the story, a story in which I know so few words but with which I feel so much. Therein again, limits. How can a song feel so right even when you do not know what all the words mean? How can such a song invite you to harmonise, in which you become part of a chorus of three voices – two, the artist, one, you? The pauses in the tracks invite a moment to take a breath; to feel your eyes and face lighten with the instrumental before you feel compelled to sing once again to an interplay of sounds and solo transformed only days ago when your reading of the background brought tears. You sing, and then shake your head with closed eyes to the mountain sounds of the conclusion – layers of meaning yet to appreciate; the fade-out before the fade-in gives you pause, and then distance, as a new song plays that holds your heart unlike those that came before. Kodak Charmera Review - Robb Knight • Posts • Atom Feed 2026-10-04T19:43:52.000Z Over a year ago I bought a Kodak Charmera keyring mini camera; it's a tiny little camera that takes photos at 1440x1080 and I was lucky enough to get the best design. It's taken me until now to actually try it out at Alice Holt forest today — we went because they have Gruffalo sculptures and the Knightlings are obsessed. Here it is compared to a Renault 5 and a Sharpie The photos are about as good as I expected which is not good at all but it is a fun camera to use. I think I'll stick with the Camp Snap. A mouse took a stroll though the deep dark wood, The mouse took photos with his Kodak Charmera and they were not good. Would You Like to Write to Me? - Kev Quirk 2026-10-04T15:17:00.000Z I really enjoy writing. Not typing - writing. With a fountain pen on good quality paper. I find the whole process cathartic; putting pen to paper demands far more use of my grey matter than hammering away at a keyboard. I mentioned in a recent post that when I finished an English course many years ago, I was hunting for creative reasons to type. Similarly, over the last 6 months or so I've gotten into fountain pens, and now I'm looking for ways to write creatively. I thought about handwriting some text then scanning/photographing it to publish it here, but that feels too convoluted. Plus, I feel like writing with a pen is more of a personal endeavour. Then it struck me - why not get a few pen pals! So I'm throwing this out into the wild - does anyone fancy exchanging letters with me? The only real requirement is that you can read and write in English (sadly, it's the only language I speak). I'm looking for perhaps 3–5 people to swap letters with. Naturally, we'll need to share postal addresses so we can send our prose back and forth. There’s zero pressure when it comes to frequency, either. Just write back whenever life allows. If a month or so passes without hearing from you, no hard feelings. I'll just assume our correspondence has naturally run its course. If you're interested, please fill out the short form linked below. Since I can only manage 3–5 pen pals, submitting the form doesn't guarantee we'll write, but if we seem like a good match and share common ground, I'll reach out by email to swap details and get things going. I won't be publishing these letters online - these are purely offline, private conversations. I'd ask that you keep them private, too. If you prefer not to use Google Forms, feel free to email me with the following: Your name Preferred email address Which country/city you live in A little bit about yourself and why you want to write to me Some topics you'd like to discuss Sign up to become a Pen Pal Thanks for reading this post via RSS. RSS is ace, and so are you. ❤️ You can reply to this post by email, or leave a comment. My Pitch for the New Season of Doctor Who - Terence Eden’s Blog 2026-10-04T11:34:50.000Z With the news that the BBC are tendering for a new series of Doctor Who, I thought I'd write down what I want from the show. This is, to be fair, pure fan-service wankery with zero chance of being made. I've based it on the oft-made observation that Hollywood is obsessed with remaking successful films rather than trying to remake unsuccessful ones. Do we really need another Spider-Man origin story? No. Do we need the umpteenth remake of "The Italian Job"? Boring! Why don't producers take a film which was nearly a hit and see if a better director, crew, and cast can make it into something magical? Let's apply the same thinking to Doctor Who. My pitch is simple - remake some of the original stories which were let down by shoddy effects, naff music, indifferent direction, and hammy acting. There are loads of great stories which are stretched too thin over six episodes with clunky cliffhangers. So let's give them a fresh lick of paint, trim each story down to two episodes, and give them modern direction⁰. One story from each of the original Doctors' run. But here's the twist - there's a different actor playing The Doctor for each story! The Doctor's companion stays the same throughout. As the ~14 episodes play out, The Doctor gradually becomes aware that some malevolent force is compelling them to relive their previous adventures. Very roughly, this is what I'd do: The Web Planet - with Patrick Stewart as The Doctor. Imagine proper CGI ants! Menoptra floating through the air! It's fair to say I disliked the original version, but it is easy to imagine how it could work. Fury From The Deep - with Miranda Hart. A fine story but with so-so delivery. The environmental angle would resonate well today. Invasion of the Dinosaurs - with Sean Pertwee. Look, who else are you going to get to play him? The original story is probably the epitome of shoddy FX work! Everyone loves dinosaurs and having them rampage around the UK (rather than a spaceship) would be thrilling. The Talons of Weng-Chiang - with Benedict Wong. Is it possible to rewrite this to be less racist? There's a great story to be told, but the original suffers from "yellowface". Earthshock - with Riz Ahmed. Time to get in a "classic baddie" with the Cybermen running rampage on a ship. At this point, The Doctor realises who has been driving him through his past lives. Forcing him to confront his sins. Sending him mad through endless regenerations. Adric. Someone, or something, has resurrected Adric. His "noble sacrifice" was little more than a suicide attempt after the relentless bullying by The Doctor and his companions. Driven to vengeance, he is determined to keep The Doctor trapped in a never-ending cycle of death and destruction. The Twin Dilemma - with Michaela Coel. A hugely problematic and violent story. As The Doctor realises her companion is a villain, can she keep her reactions under control? Should she? Survival - with Alex Horne. The Doctor has to face not The Master but a furious Adric hellbent on purging the Universe of the Time Lords. All the strands of the previous stories come together in an epic climax. Get J. Michael Straczynski to run the thing, a bunch of chiptune/electronica/glitch musicians to give each episode a unique sound, and - crucially - show it in autumn/winter. There's no point having scary sci-fi on when it is bright outside and people want to go out and play. This needs to be hug-your-mum-for-warmth-not-because-you're-scared TV. Right, I'm off to the Beeb to deliver the pitch! TTFN. To be 100% clear, I know this is never going to happen. The BBC's tender document specifically says: Iconic, established villains are a mainstay of the series over 60 years and we invite you to use them, but we will want to begin to get an understanding of the original characters, aliens and themes that producers wish to bring to the show and are keen not to be overly reliant on existing Doctor Who lore. We are looking for a new perspective that ensures Doctor Who remains relevant, surprising, brave and inspiring for both long-standing fans and new audiences. ↩︎