I spoke with New Scientist about a handful of clauses in the Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Bill, which is currently reaching the finish line of the Parliamentary process.
Some links don’t call for a full blog post, but sometimes I still want to share the good stuff I encounter on the web. World’s largest spider web – Be warned — especially if spiders make you uncomfortable — because you won’t be able to forget this video if you decide to watch it. You’ll learn something, sure, but you may end up having nightmares. LLMs and Software Development Roundup (Michael Tsai) – Fascinating collection of thoughts and reactions (as always with Michael Tsai’s blog) on how A.I. can be as useful as frustrating. Something tells me that this post, updated regularly, will age like good wine. Pure Blog – Kev has built his own CMS for his blog, and made it a brilliant tool available to everyone. If I were starting a blog today, this is the CMS I would use, as it’s just about pitch perfect as to what is needed for a proper blog. If you are reading this and don’t have a blog of your own yet, you know what to do. News Tower – “ Step into the bustling world of 1930s New York as an ambitious publisher. In News Tower, you’ll manage a growing newsroom during the Great Depression, Prohibition, and beyond. Send your reporters across the globe chasing breaking stories, hard-hitting news or scandalous gossip, it’s up to you. But beware: the mafia, the mayor, and other factions are ready to sway your headlines for their gain. ” (via Nieman Journalism Lab ) Life before social media – Precious perspective from Loren in this post, with which it’s difficult to not agree wholeheartedly. I don’t think I have lost much of my beloved online experience when I deleted my social media accounts: Facebook, then Instagram, then Twitter , and finally LinkedIn. I may miss the occasional “moment” and the ability to answer directly to posts, but I still follow most of my favourite accounts via RSS. I still catch myself doomscrolling from time to time, but nothing I can’t escape. Only using an RSS reader on my Mac also helps. Pandoc in the browser – The power of Pandoc without the hassle of having to operate it via the Terminal. Bookmarked. Shared. Praised. (via Rodrigo Ghedin ) AI Chatbot That Only Responds ‘Huh’ Valued At $200 Billion – “ … if you don’t incorporate HmmAI into your company’s workflow right now, you’re going to be left behind. ” Ferrari Luce – I’m not sure if I’m a big fan of the whole aluminium and glass finish for the inside of a car; I’d think that warmer materials like carbon fibre, leather, or even wood would feel better, but I do love the retro and functional layout of commands. This Jony Ive guy looks like an adequate designer, doesn’t he? The webpage itself is very well-made too, and not something I would have expected from a car company like Ferrari. São Paulo names new law after dog that stayed by owner’s grave for 10 years – “ Bob’s former owner died in 2011. After her burial, the brown long-haired mixed-breed dog reportedly refused to leave her side at a cemetery in Taboão da Serra […] Relatives are said to have tried several times to take the dog away, but he always returned and was eventually adopted by cemetery staff. ” Peter Falk and Lee Grant in The Prisoner of Second Avenue, 1971 – One of my grandmothers was in love with Peter Falk, and I must have inherited these genes from her. This picture must be framed somewhere in my flat. (via Daniel Benneworth-Gray ) More “Blend of links” posts
At a shooting on a high school in Tumbler Ridge, Canada, 10 people were shot, as reported at 03:30 in Dutch national media. There are two suspect names going around, however. For example, on Feb 11, 2026, 7:25 PM IST the _Hindustan Times_ reported the name Jesse Strang. A few hours later, however, the name was suddenly reported as Jesse Van Rootselaar without mention of the previous name. For Jesse Strang, there is the following YouTube video posted on the 18th of March 2019. Screensh...
Our present-day realm of state terror operates through abductions, murders, and content farms. ICE workers raise their cameras as often as they raise their guns, decked out in military gear like a kid trying on mom’s heels, camo stark against the snow, while their bosses confuse retweets for votes, likes for being liked. Don Moynihan dubs this a “ clicktatorship ,” a cursed word if there ever was one, no less for being accurate. André Gorz, writing more than half a century earlier, terms this “pseudo-culture,” a counterfeit culture that does not arise out of ways of living but seeks to impose itself upon it. Mass pseudo-culture, while producing passive and stupefying entertainments, amusements, and pastimes, does not and cannot satisfy the needs arising out of dispersion, solitude, and boredom. This pseudo-culture is less a consequence than a cause of the passivity and the impotence of the individual in a mass society. It is a device invented by monopoly capital to facilitate dictatorship over a mystified, docile, debased humanity, whose impulse of real violence must be redirected into imaginary channels. That is, the tractable audience does not give rise to the clictatorshop so much as the reverse; The Apprentice precedes the presidency. The programming creates a subject whose anger at billionaires who dominate and oppress is redirected towards immigrants who do neither. Fantastical stories are projected onto real bodies as they are dragged out of their homes. The placated, brainrotted viewer is expected to see only the projection, to imagine themselves into the role of kevlar-swaddled goon, even as they flop onto the couch in cheap sweats, furiously tapping buttons, the only muscles getting exercised the ones in their thumbs. Mass culture, a byproduct of commercial propaganda, has as implicit content a mass ethic: playing on, maintaining, and flattering ignorance, it encourages the ignorant to resent those who “know,” persuades them that the latter despises them, and encourages or provokes their contempt. This abject demagogy, one of whose elements—contempt for “intellectuals,” (a term which has become an insult not only in the US) and for culture—can be found in all fascist movements, professes no respect for exceptional individuals except insofar as their superiority can be accounted for by what they are, not by what they do : athletes, beauty queens, princely personages. This is because the superiority of being, physical or hereditary, can be taken as a product of the nature—of the soil, the race, the people, the nation—from which all individuals derive, and can thus reflect to them a natural bond of community with the hero, their own vicarious aristocracy, their original identity, reproclaimed in chauvinism. Into this model is planted the vacuous chatbot, which both further denigrates knowing (why bother knowing anything when it can know things for you) and pumps out nonsense on the regular and at such a scale that both knowledge and the skill of knowing are drowned out. What’s left are the signals of superiority, cast in both skin and hip, recast with fillers and leg-lengthening surgeries, because nature can’t be trusted either (she’s a woman, after all). All in service to chauvinism, a word whose original meaning was an absurd devotion to a fallen leader. The observers who bravely record a different perspective, not only a different camera angle, but a different intention and context, show us that there are other ways of seeing, other ways of being. They dash through the fourth wall, make plain that we are not merely audience but actor, as much able to take up space on stage as the masked extras parading before them. It’s not their cameras that do this work, although those are useful, but their minds, their spirits, their fierce hearts. Their belief that they can see and know what is before them, that they don’t need to be told what is happening but—when they lift their gaze away from their screens—can trust their own eyes. View this post on the web , subscribe to the newsletter , or reply via email .
A prolific data ransom gang that calls itself Scattered Lapsus ShinyHunters (SLSH) has a distinctive playbook when it seeks to extort payment from victim firms: Harassing, threatening and even swatting executives and their families, all while notifying journalists and regulators about the extent of the intrusion. Some victims reportedly are paying — perhaps as much to contain the stolen data as to stop the escalating personal attacks. But a top SLSH expert warns that engaging at all beyond a “We’re not paying” response only encourages further harassment, noting that the group’s fractious and unreliable history means the only winning move is not to pay. Image: Shutterstock.com, @Mungujakisa Unlike traditional, highly regimented Russia-based ransomware affiliate groups, SLSH is an unruly and somewhat fluid English-language extortion gang that appears uninterested in building a reputation of consistent behavior whereby victims might have some measure of confidence that the criminals will keep their word if paid. That’s according to Allison Nixon , director of research at the New York City based security consultancy Unit 221 . Nixon has been closely tracking the criminal group and individual members as they bounce between various Telegram channels used to extort and harass victims, and she said SLSH differs from traditional data ransom groups in other important ways that argue against trusting them to do anything they say they’ll do — such as destroying stolen data. Like SLSH, many traditional Russian ransomware groups have employed high-pressure tactics to force payment in exchange for a decryption key and/or a promise to delete stolen data, such as publishing a dark web shaming blog with samples of stolen data next to a countdown clock, or notifying journalists and board members of the victim company. But Nixon said the extortion from SLSH quickly escalates way beyond that — to threats of physical violence against executives and their families, DDoS attacks on the victim’s website, and repeated email-flooding campaigns. SLSH is known for breaking into companies by phishing employees over the phone, and using the purloined access to steal sensitive internal data. In a January 30 blog post , Google’s security forensics firm Mandiant said SLSH’s most recent extortion attacks stem from incidents spanning early to mid-January 2026, when SLSH members pretended to be IT staff and called employees at targeted victim organizations claiming that the company was updating MFA settings. “The threat actor directed the employees to victim-branded credential harvesting sites to capture their SSO credentials and MFA codes, and then registered their own device for MFA,” the blog post explained. Victims often first learn of the breach when their brand name is uttered on whatever ephemeral new public Telegram group chat SLSH is using to threaten, extort and harass their prey. According to Nixon, the coordinated harassment on the SLSH Telegram channels is part of a well-orchestrated strategy to overwhelm the victim organization by manufacturing humiliation that pushes them over the threshold to pay. Nixon said multiple executives at targeted organizations have been subject to “swatting” attacks, wherein SLSH communicated a phony bomb threat or hostage situation at the target’s address in the hopes of eliciting a heavily armed police response at their home or place of work. “A big part of what they’re doing to victims is the psychological aspect of it, like harassing executives’ kids and threatening the board of the company,” Nixon told KrebsOnSecurity. “And while these victims are getting extortion demands, they’re simultaneously getting outreach from media outlets saying, ‘Hey, do you have any comments on the bad things we’re going to write about you.” Nixon argues that no one should negotiate with SLSH because the group has demonstrated a willingness to extort victims based on promises that it has no intention to keep. Nixon points out that all of SLSH’s known members hail from The Com , shorthand for a constellation of cybercrime-focused Discord and Telegram communities which serve as a kind of distributed social network that facilitates instant collaboration . Nixon said Com-based extortion groups tend to instigate feuds and drama between group members, leading to lying, betrayals, credibility destroying behavior, backstabbing, and sabotaging each other. “With this type of ongoing dysfunction, often compounding by substance abuse, these threat actors often aren’t able to act with the core goal in mind of completing a successful, strategic ransom operation,” Nixon said. “They continually lose control with outbursts that put their strategy and operational security at risk, which severely limits their ability to build a professional, scalable, and sophisticated criminal organization network for continued successful ransoms – unlike other, more tenured and professional criminal organizations focused on ransomware alone.” Intrusions from established ransomware groups typically center around encryption/decryption malware that mostly stays on the affected machine. In contrast, Nixon said, ransom from a Com group is often structured the same as violent sextortion schemes against minors, wherein members of The Com will steal damaging information, threaten to release it, and “promise” to delete it if the victim complies without any guarantee or technical proof point that they will keep their word. She writes: The SLSH group steals a significant amount of corporate data, and on the day of issuing the ransom notification, they line up a number of harassment attacks to be delivered simultaneously with the ransom. This can include swatting, DDOS, email/SMS/call floods, negative PR, complaints sent to authority figures in and above the company, and so on. Then, during the negotiation process, they lay on the pressure with more harassment- never allowing too much time to pass before a new harassment attack. What they negotiate for is the promise to not leak the data if you pay the ransom. This promise places a lot of trust in the extorter, because they cannot prove they deleted the data, and we believe they don’t intend to delete the data. Paying provides them vital information about the value of the stolen dataset which we believe will be useful for fraud operations after this wave is complete. A key component of SLSH’s efforts to convince victims to pay, Nixon said, involves manipulating the media into hyping the threat posed by this group. This approach also borrows a page from the playbook of sextortion attacks, she said, which encourages predators to keep targets continuously engaged and worrying about the consequences of non-compliance. “On days where SLSH had no substantial criminal ‘win’ to announce, they focused on announcing death threats and harassment to keep law enforcement, journalists, and cybercrime industry professionals focused on this group,” she said. An excerpt from a sextortion tutorial from a Com-based Telegram channel. Image: Unit 221B. Nixon knows a thing or two about being threatened by SLSH: For the past several months, the group’s Telegram channels have been replete with threats of physical violence against her, against Yours Truly, and against other security researchers. These threats, she said, are just another way the group seeks to generate media attention and achieve a veneer of credibility, but they are useful as indicators of compromise because SLSH members tend to name drop and malign security researchers even in their communications with victims. “Watch for the following behaviors in their communications to you or their public statements,” Nixon said. “Repeated abusive mentions of Allison Nixon (or “A.N”), Unit 221B, or cybersecurity journalists—especially Brian Krebs—or any other cybersecurity employee, or cybersecurity company. Any threats to kill, or commit terrorism, or violence against internal employees, cybersecurity employees, investigators, and journalists.” Unit 221B says that while the pressure campaign during an extortion attempt may be traumatizing to employees, executives, and their family members, entering into drawn-out negotiations with SLSH incentivizes the group to increase the level of harm and risk, which could include the physical safety of employees and their families. “The breached data will never go back to the way it was, but we can assure you that the harassment will end,” Nixon said. “So, your decision to pay should be a separate issue from the harassment. We believe that when you separate these issues, you will objectively see that the best course of action to protect your interests, in both the short and long term, is to refuse payment.”
This week on the People and Blogs series we have an interview with Yancey Strickler, whose blog can be found at ystrickler.com . Tired of RSS? Read this in your browser or sign up for the newsletter . The People and Blogs series is supported by Silvano Stralla and the other 130 members of my "One a Month" club. If you enjoy P&B, consider becoming one for as little as 1 dollar a month. My name is Yancey Strickler. I'm a writer and entrepreneur who lives in New York City. I write about the internet, creativity, and my creative practice. My projects— cofounding Kickstarter , The Creative Independent , Metalabel , Dark Forest Collective , Artist Corporations , and Dark Forest Operating System — bridge those worlds. I started blogging in 2003. Just before the "MP3 Blogs" era. I was a music journalist and had more opinions to share than places that would print them, so I started an online space as an outlet. The blogging community was very small then. You felt like you knew everyone else who had one. I kept that going until Kickstarter took over my life in 2009. I no longer had the excess energy to publish — everything went into the project. When I stepped down as Kickstarter's CEO in 2017, I started blogging again. For the first five months I did it without telling anyone. No one had the URL but me. I wanted the feeling of a public writing practice with no one else looking. Eventually I started to share, and that space evolved into my blog and homepage where I've expressed thoughts ever since. The blog in 2003 was called Get Up Stand Up. I chose The Ideaspace when it returned. This is a phrase Alan Moore uses to talk about the dimension where ideas come from that I learned about in John Higgs' amazing KLF book. I've used pretty much every platform: Blogspot, Wordpress, Tumblr, TinyLetter, Mailchimp, Substack, and now Ghost. I'm thankful of the import/export norms that developed around blogging from the very beginning. That's what makes portability between writing homes possible. Calling what I do a "process" gives it too much credit. All of my writing tends to start with a feeling inside of me. That feeling is often one of agitation combined with curiosity. Something I can't quite figure out or I'm having a hard time putting my finger on. Writing is how I work through that. The first drafts of what I write come out quickly. A mix of prose, outline, even poetry. I let the wider consciousness flow through the scope of the idea before filling things out too precisely. The more you let yourself detach while doing this, the more appears that you didn't expect. Many of my most "successful" posts, in that people gravitate towards them, are what I think of as "idea sandwiches." You bring together two ideas that are unrelated and smoosh them together. This can lead you to discover something new that people will immediately understand. " The Dark Forest Theory of the Internet ", my most-read piece to date, is an example. It came from putting two separate thoughts together: my own feelings of alienation and anxiety online, combined with the Dark Forest Theory that I was reading about in Cixin Liu's "The Dark Forest" book (part of "The Three Body Problem" trilogy) on how and why societies might hide from one another. I smushed together that feeling with that idea and something new popped out. In terms of tools, I use a variety of things. When I'm working on a book I use Scrivener. I love the folder/doc structure of the program, the way you can compile your writing into a cohesive whole. If I need to get an idea down quickly I default to opening a Google Doc. I journal every morning in a notebook or in Obsidian. At Metalabel we created our own blogging tool/culture using Notion. We call it " metablogging ": internally public blogs where we think through things together. Our collective brain built organically over time. If I'm writing something that goes deep into a specific subject matter, I'll seek out people I respect and get their perspective. Some of my most impactful work from the past few years came when I wrote something and chose not to publicly publish it. Instead I shared a private Google Doc with specific people who I was thinking of. The results from this form of non-publishing have been remarkable. The ideas behind Metalabel, Artist Corporations, the Dark Forest OS, the Bento, and other projects happened this way. By not rushing to publish an idea in seek of validation, and instead thinking more precisely about who I was most interested in hearing from, those seeds manifested as actual projects and collaborations in the wider world rather than just ideas of them. I like blank spaces. Empty rooms. White walls. Metalabel has a studio where I go everyday. Mostly empty. Lots of plants. Always some sort of meditative music. A very womb-like vibe. A de-dopamined zone. This isn't 100% necessary. I wrote " What's the difference between an artist and a creator " on two Amtrak trips between NYC and DC. You don't need perfection. But having a place where I feel comfortable to explore and know I won't be interrupted is my favorite luxury as a creative person. While writing my first book, " This Could Be Our Future ", I wrote in several different spaces that were hugely helpful. At the beginning I got a Craigslist sublet for an empty apartment with no internet. I took it for a few months and covered all the walls with post-its and index cards outlining the book. A year later when I was deep in the writing mode, I borrowed a spare bedroom from an 89-year-old friend in LA and wrote there each day while hanging out with her and watching her fix up her house (true story). During another period I took a few 48 hour trips out to 29 Palms, near Joshua Tree, where I spent days doing nothing but alternating between writing and jumping in the motel pool to cool off. Being able to immerse yourself in a project like that, even if just for an afternoon, is always a gift. These were not always easy times at all. That's part of the reason for the separation. You really have to put all of yourself into the thing to get to the layers of clarity where real wisdom lives. But to have those challenges and eventual breakthroughs so closely associated with specific places that are not your normal everyday creates a very rich, contextual memory of the process. The blog is hosted on Ghost. Have tried lots of other places, but ultimately like the decentralized nature of Ghost combined with a strong toolkit. I use Umami for analytics, which is free and excellent. I still use Substack as another front page, and often alternate between which service I send emails from. My own personal website and blog are most important to me, but I'll sometimes find myself thirsty for network effects. Ugh. We're getting too close to my anxiety zones. Let's move on :) Funny, but my first instinct is I wouldn't want to have readers. Of course that's not actually true, but when I think about the things that limit my sense of freedom or play from writing and publishing, asking for the audience's time most holds me back. Because of my own relationship with email and newsletters, I've come to think of posting something (that also sends an email) as an ask or imposition on someone else's time. I'm saying to them, "Hey pay attention to me. Stop what you're doing and look at me." Which in no way is what my writing or output are about. This is my own internal non-logic, I realize. People did sign-up. People tell me that my writing is meaningful to them. But this is something I've long carried. We even got pencils made at Metalabel that say: "Love to write. Hate to publish." I have one sitting in front of me right now. Now this is not my advice to others, but it is where my first thought went. Because when I think about the goals of writing and blogging, it's to be free, it's to explore without limits. Audiences can be affirming for that. And it's generous and important to share whatever wisdom you experience in life. Blogging to me is a specific kind of writing — a personal practice and discipline that makes what's inward outward. Whatever it is that's in you, blogs are what comes out. My personal feeling is that I don't like doing that if I know people are watching. I get self-conscious. I worry about bothering people. A place and attitude where I know I need to grow. Trying to do a better job of thinking about all the people that do want to hear from me rather than the people who don't. It does cost. I have about 10,000 subscribers, which means I'm paying Ghost about $1,000 a year to maintain a site with them. There are cheaper ways to do this. I could make a site with Wordpress or Squarespace. I could use Substack. I could go the whole Craig Mod/Robin Sloan routes and make my own universes. Probably one day when I have time I'll do this and go all the way. But I like the combo of things Ghost gives (and that they started on Kickstarter). I don't have paid subscriptions for my writing, but in the past 18 months I did experiment with releasing my work as collectible .zip files that people could pay what they wanted for. First was a long essay called " The Post Individual " that I'd spent several years working on. I published it on my blog and released a limited edition Director's Cut zip file containing a PDF, video file, audio file, and all my research notes on Metalabel at the same time. There have now been 750 editions of these collected, with 400 people doing it for free, and another 350 contributing more than $1,000 for the work. That has felt like a very successful experiment. I pay for a few people's Substacks and buy lots of zines, both on Metalabel and off. I enjoy directly supporting people whose work is meaningful to me. These days most of my attention goes to my projects, my family, or to books. But I'm always interested in Nadia Asparhouva , Jason Kottke , Ben Davis , Toby Shorin ( read Toby's interview ), Reggie James . People who I think could be good to talk to: Laurel Schwulst , Kimberly Drew . Sure here's my Soundcloud :) This book that Josh Citarella and I made together on our creative practices is something people might like: On the Creative Life . Antimemetics by Nadia Asparhouva, a book I edited and published with the Dark Forest Collective, is highly recommended. A video I made that shares nine reflections from my creative career. Now that you're done reading the interview, go check the blog and subscribe to the RSS feed . If you're looking for more content, go read one of the previous 124 interviews . Make sure to also say thank you to Piet Terheyden and the other 130 supporters for making this series possible.
Young people, using smartphones, film journalistic content in the public interest. Anti-social media and anti-smartphone regulations threaten that.
bell hooks explores notions of self-care among communities of Black women, locating it alongside the work of grief, testimony, and reconciliation. Where so much of the self-care discourse is oriented around personal solutions to personal problems, hooks looks instead to practices of collective care and truth-telling that work to dismantle systems of oppression and domination. This is a communal, political, and radical approach to self-care, a corrective to the consumerized discourse of self-care that brings little relief and leaves the world unchanged. View this post on the web , subscribe to the newsletter , or reply via email .
Author: Steve Coll Genre: Non-fiction Verdict: What an amazing book. This is the sequel to Coll's 2005 Pulitzer Prize-winning book Ghost Wars. Author: Ruth Ware Genre: Fiction Verdict: This book was sitting on the bookshelf at our post-Christmas Airbnb. I had heard of the author referenced as being the next Agatha Christie. Very happy to have serendipitiously found the book, read it in like 24 hours. Author: Ben H. Winters Genre: Science Fiction Verdict: This book fits nicely into one of my favorite genres which is science fiction meets noir detective meets apocalypse. Loved it, but lost interest reading the sequels. Author: Ernest Hemingway Genre: Fiction Verdict: Love Hemingway and the Sun Also Rises is unquestionably my favorite book of all time. I've even read it in multiple languages (Italian title is Fiesta). But this particular compendium was boring. Author: Ben H. Winters Genre: Science Fiction Verdict: The sequel to the Last Policeman (above). Good but not as good as the first. Author: Alexander C. Karp Genre: Non-fiction Verdict: Great, great book. Author: Blake Mycoskie Genre: Business Verdict: Great book written by somebody who seems to have figured out life. Author: Henry Kissinger Genre: Non-fiction Verdict: Good book but a few chapters too long. Author: Sylvain Neuvel Genre: Science Fiction Verdict: Really loved this book, wildly creative. Author: Anupreeta Das Genre: Biography Verdict: This was a wildly repetitive hit piece. Is Bill Gates an opportunistic genius? Yes. Did Bill Gates change the world? Yes. Is he human and did he sometimes do human things? Also yes. I'm really not sure why people grind axes to the extent this author does. Author: Andrew Cockburn Genre: Non-fiction Verdict: Interesting book about the future of warfare. Author: Ronan Farrow Genre: Crime / Non-fiction Verdict: Had heard of Ronan Farrow before, so picked up this book on a whim at local bookstore. He's one hell of a writer and journalist. Author: Raj Shah Genre: Non-fiction Verdict: Akin to Kill Chain, a great book if you want to understand where the whole war thing is going. Author: Mary Elise Sarotte Genre: Non-fiction Verdict: If I wasn't so into software I'd probably have been a history professor. One related question I've often wondered about lately is why is Russia so obsessed with Ukraine? This book answers that question. Author: Tess Gerritsen Genre: Thriller Verdict: A fun book along the lines of the aforementioned One Perfect Couple . Author: William Gibson Genre: Science Fiction Verdict: Neuromancer will forever be my favorite science fiction book of all time. It also happens to be, by far, his pinnacle of achievement because everything else he's written since has been practically incoherent. Not sure I can add anything more to this summary. Author: David Downing Genre: Fiction Verdict: Amazing historical fiction book! Loved it. Author: George Orwell Genre: Fiction Verdict: The only reason this book is on this list is because I finally finished it after reading it for several years. A terrible slog and I'm sorry I ever started it. That said I love everything else Orwell has written. Author: Chris Nashawaty Genre: Non-fiction Verdict: If you grew up in the 80's you will love this book! Chronicles the making of Tron, E.T., Poltergeist, The Thing, Road Warrior, Blade Runner, Star Trek II, and Conan the Barbarian, all classic movies which came in within a few months of each other in 1982. Author: Reed Albergotti Genre: Non-fiction Verdict: I've always followed the Tour, particularly when guys like Armstrong were competing. This book explains just how deep the rabbithole went with regards to doping. Wow. Author: Will McGough Genre: Non-fiction Verdict: As my 10,000 pushups post explains, in 2025 I got really interested in becoming physically fit and as part of the process read this book. Very funny and informative. Author: James S.A. Corey Genre: Science Fiction Verdict: Wonderful science fiction book. Author: Benjamin Wallace Genre: Non-fiction Verdict: I feel like I've read everything that can be read about attempts to figure out who created Bitcoin and after reading this book have concluded I should stop wasting my time. There is nothing else to be said about the topic; nobody can figure it out and I'm not sure they ever will. Author: Joe Girard Genre: Business Verdict: Picked up this book at some used book store and it is now my favorite business book. I love it because despite what the title says it has very little to do with sales and everything to do with organizing a professional network. The author died a few years ago and for that reason I regret not having read this book earlier because I would have loved to have met him. Author: Arkady Strugatsky Genre: Science Fiction Verdict: This is a famous science fiction book which is little known to Westerners. Written by a citizen of the Soviet Union. I loved it! Author: Ramez Naam Genre: Science Fiction Verdict: Good book, enjoyed it. Author: Blake Crouch Genre: Science Fiction / Apocalyptic Verdict: WOW! One of my favorite books of the year. Terrifying. Read it over Thanksgiving in maybe 48 hours. Author: Robert Harris Genre: Science Fiction Verdict: Great book, I'm surprised this wasn't turned into a TV show. Author: Blake Crouch Genre: Science Fiction Verdict: Another terrifying book by Blake Crouch, who also write Run (above). Loved it! Author: Atul Gawande Genre: Non-fiction Verdict: Interesting book, I've applied some of what I learned from it to my own life in the weeks since. Let's see if it sticks. Author: Lincoln Child Genre: Science Fiction Verdict: Fun book about a deep sea discovery gone wrong. I will have to check out what else Lincoln Child has written.
Journos: if you are advising your readers on counter-surveillance measures but not dropping the adtech, you are not helping your readers. You are building a honeypot to trap them.
In an effort to understand the then-present state of women in the workplace, Virginia Woolf goes looking to the newspapers, where she finds a number of letters and articles declaiming that women have too much liberty, that they are taking jobs that men could do, and that they are neglecting their domestic duties in the process. She finds an immediate parallel to those complaints in other events of the day: There, in those quotations, is the egg of the very same work that we know under other names in other countries. There we have in embryo the creature, Dictator as we call him when he is Italian or German, who believes that he has the right whether given by God, Nature, sex or race is immaterial, to dictate to other human beings how they shall live; what they shall do. Let us quote again: “Homes are the real places of the women who are now compelling men to be idle. It is time the Government insisted upon giving work to more men, thus enabling them to marry the women they cannot now approach.” Place it beside another quotation: “There are two worlds in the life of the nation, the world of men and the world of women. Nature has done well to entrust the man with the care of his family and the nation. The woman’s world is her family, her husband, her children, and her home.” One is written in English, the other German. But where is the difference? Are they not both saying the same thing? Are they not both the voices of Dictators, whether they speak English or German, and are we not all agreed that the dictator when we meet him abroad is a very dangerous as well as a very ugly animal? And he is here among us, raising his ugly head, spitting his poison, small still, curled up like a caterpillar on a leaf, but in the heart of England. Is it not from this egg, to quote Mr Wells again, that “the practical obliteration of [our] freedom by Fascists or Nazis” will spring? The first quotation is from the Daily Telegraph ; the second is Hitler. (I would draw comparisons to the present moment, but they seem to draw themselves.) Woolf later concludes: It suggests that the public and the private worlds are inseparably connected; that the tyrannies and servilities of the one are the tyrannies and servilities of the other. That is, the tyranny of government is the tyranny of the workplace is the tyranny of the home. Each begets and creates the other. But perhaps that also suggests the reverse: pull the thread on one, and watch as they all come undone. View this post on the web , subscribe to the newsletter , or reply via email .
I'm not dropping this on the actual newsletter feed because it's a little self-indulgent and I'm not sure 88,000 or so people want an email about it. I have a lot of trouble giving myself credit for anything, and genuinely think I could be doing more or that I "didn't do that much" because I'm at a computer or on a microphone versus serving customers in person or something or rather. To try and give some sort of scale to the work from the last year, I've written down the highlights. It appears that 2025 was an insane year for me. Here's the rundown: I also did no less than 50 different interviews, with highlights including: Next year I will be finishing up my book Why Everything Stopped Working (due out in 2027), and continuing to dig into the nightmare of corporate finance I've found myself in the center of. I have no idea what happens next. My fear - and expectation - is that many people still do not realize that there is an AI bubble or will not accept how significant and dangerous the bubble is, meaning that everybody is going to act like AI is the biggest most hugest and most special thing in the world right up until they accept that it isn't. I will always cover tech, but I get the sense I'll be looking into other things next year - private equity, for one - that have caught my eye toward the end of the year. I realize right now everything feels a little intense and bleak, but at this time of year it's always worth remembering to be kinder and more thoughtful toward those close to us. It's cheesy, but it's the best thing you can possibly do. It's easy to feel isolated by the amount of hogs oinking at the prospect of laying you off or replacing you - and it turns out there are far more people that are afraid or outraged than there are executives or AI boosters. Never forget (or forgive them for) what they've done to the computer, and never forget that those scorned by the AI bubble are legion. Join me on r/Betteroffline , you are far from alone. I intend to spend the next year becoming a better writer, analyst, broadcaster, entertainer and person. I appreciate every single one of you that reads my work, and hope you'll continue to do so in the future. See you in 2026, [email protected] Cory Doctorow quoted me at the very front of his new book . I recorded over 110 episodes of my tech podcast Better Offline , starting with a 13.5 hour-long pop-up radio show at CES 2025. And yes, it's back next week, featuring David Roth, Adam Conover, Ed Ongweso Jr., Chloe Radcliffe, Robert Evans, Gare Davis, Cory Doctorow and a host of other great guests. Better Offline also won the Webby for best business podcast episode for last year's episode The Man That Destroyed Google Search . I also had some fantastic interviews, like when I went out to North Carolina to interview Steve Burke of GamersNexus , chatted to author Adam Becker about the technoligarchs , Pablo Torres and David Roth about independent media , and even comedian Andy Richter . I wrote over 440,000 words, not including the work I've done on the book or any notes I took to prepare for my show or newsletter. The newsletter also grew from 47,000~ish people at the end of last year to around 88,500 people. I want to be at 150,000 this time next year. I wrote some of my favourite free newsletters (many of which were turned into episodes of the show): Deep Impact , my analysis of the DeepSeek situation and why it scared the American AI industry (clue: it's cost-related and nothing to do with "national security"). Power Cut , an early warning sign that the bubble was bursting as Microsoft pulled out of gigawatts of data center deals. CoreWeave Is A Time Bomb , published March 17 2025, way before most had even bothered to think about this company deeply, a savage analysis of a "neocloud" - a company that only sells AI compute - backed by NVIDIA, who is also a customer, who CoreWeave also buys billions of GPUs from. The Era of the Business Idiot , probably my favourite piece I wrote this year, the story of how middle management has seized power, breeding out true meritocracy and value-creation in favor of symbolic growth and superficial intelligence. It ties together everything I've ever written. Make Fun Of Them , the piece that restarted my fire after a bit of a low point, where I call for a radical new approach to tech CEOs: mocking them, because they talk like idiots and provide little value to society outside of their dedication to shareholder value. The Hater's Guide To The AI Bubble , a piece that elevated me in a way that I never expected, a thorough and brutal broadside against an industry that has no profits and terrible costs, discussing how generative AI is nothing like Uber or Amazon Web Services, there are no profitable generative AI companies, agents do not and cannot exist, there is no AI SaaS story, and everything rides - and dies - on selling GPUs. AI Is A Money Trap , a piece about how AI companies' ridiculous valuations and unsustainable businesses make exits or IPOs impossible, how data center developers have no exit route, and US economic growth has become shouldered entirely by big tech. How To Argue With An AI Booster , a comprehensive guide to arguing with AI boosters, addressing both their bad faith debate style and their specific (and flimsy) arguments as to why generative AI is the future. The Case Against Generative AI , a comprehensive analysis of a financial collapse built on myths, the markets’ unhealthy obsession with NVIDIA's growth, and the fact that there is not enough money in the world to fund OpenAI. NVIDIA Isn't Enron, So What Is It? - A lighthearted and indepth analysis of NVIDIA as a company, a historic rundown of what happened with Lucent, WorldCom and Enron, as well as a guide to how it makes money, how its future relies on endless debt, how millions of GPUs are sitting waiting to be installed, and why it no longer makes sense to buy more GPUs. The Enshittifinancial Crisis , a piece about The Enshittifinancial Crisis, the fourth stage of enshittification, where companies turn on their shareholders. Unprofitable, unsustainable AI threatens future of venture capital, private equity and the markets themselves. I published two massive exclusives: How Much Anthropic and Cursor Spend On Amazon Web Services , which is exactly what it sounds like. How Much OpenAI Spends On Inference and Its Revenue Share With Microsoft , which also includes evidence that OpenAI's revenues were at around $4.5 billion by the end of September, a vast difference from the $4.3 billion for the first half of the year published by other outlets. The Financial Times , The Register and TechCrunch covered, while others aggressively ignored it. I launched the premium edition of my newsletter, and published multiple deeply important pieces of research: The Hater's Guide to NVIDIA , the single-most exhaustive rundown of the rickety nature of the company sitting at the top of the stock market – how its future is dependent on massive debt, how AI revenues will never pay back the cost of these GPUs, and how there are likely millions of GPUs sitting in warehouses, as there's no chance that 6 million Blackwell GPUs have actually been installed and turned on. Published November 24 2025, I made this call several weeks before famed short seller Michael Burry would do the same . How Does GPT-5 Work? - an exclusive piece (reported using internal documents from an infrastructure provider) on how GPT-5's router mode actually costs OpenAI more money to run. OpenAI Burned $4.1 Billion More Than We Knew - Where Is Its Money Going? - an analysis of reported cash burn and investments in OpenAI that proved the company burned more than $4 billion more than we know. OpenAI and Oracle Are Full of Crap - on September 12 2025, months before anybody started worrying about it, I published proof that OpenAI couldn't afford to pay Oracle and Oracle didn't have the capacity to service their farcical $300 billion, 5-year-long deal . OpenAI Needs A Trillion Dollars In The Next Four Years - on September 26 2025, I published a thorough review and analysis of OpenAI's agreed-upon compute and data center deals, and proved that it needed at least $1 trillion in the next four years to pull any of it off, several weeks before anyone else did . The Hater's Guide To The AI Bubble Volume 2 : a massive omnibus summary of every major AI company's weaknesses - the pathetic revenues, terrible margins and horrifying costs, and how hopeless everything feels. My own interview in the New Yorker's legendary "Talk Of The Town" section . Profiles with Slate , the Financial Times and FastCompany . An interview with MarketWatch about The Hater's Guide to the AI Bubble . A panel in Seattle with Cory Doctorow about Enshittification and The Rot Economy . A chat with Brooke Gladstone on NPR about the AI bubble . Two interviews with the BBC. An interview with Van Lathan and Rachel Lindsay on The Ringer's Higher Learning . Two episodes of Chapo Trap House. Interviews with The Lever , Parker Molloy's The Present Age , Bloomberg's Everybody's Business , The Majority Report , Newsweek's 1600 Podcast , TechCrunch , Defector , the New Yorker (by the legendary Cal Newport) , Guy Kawasaki's Remarkable People , both Slate's Death, Sex & Money and the excellent TBD podcast , TrashFuture multiple times, The Times Radio (I think multiple times?) and NPR Marketplace . Citations in an astonishing amount of major media outlets, with highlights including The Economist , The Guardian , Charlie Brooker (!) in The Hollywood Reporter , ArsTechnica , CNN , Semafor and ZDNet
I almost missed the deadline with this one, didn’t I? At least it gives me a chance to wish every one of you a happy New Year’s Eve, and new year. In 2026, I’ll write less about CSS, fonts, HTML, and text editors, and more about… well, at least I’ll try. Thank you for reading. The Future of Veritasium ▪︎ Precious testimonial on what it really means to depend on the algorithm for revenue, and on how many people actually work in the background of a successful and quality YouTube channel like Veritasium. Mouseless ▪︎ If this app is definitely not for me — I tried — it may be appealing to some of you; I found the concept very intriguing; I can see how effective it could be in some apps that require a lot of hovering and clicking. (via Pierre Carrier ) Everpen ▪︎ I’ve been intrigued by this for a while now, and 2026 may be the year when I try this. I currently love using my fountain pen at my desk, but I prefer to travel with a pencil in my bag, and this may be the perfect companion for me. Predictions for Journalism 2026, Nieman Journalism Lab ▪︎ Every year, I look forward to reading these predictions; I just wish scrolling the page didn’t make my laptop activate its “vacuum cleaner noise” mode (I had to browse the “cards” via my RSS reader: I know, it’s time for me to upgrade ). Nick Heer, People and Blogs ▪︎ “ there is no better spellchecker than the ‘publish’ button. ” If you don’t follow the People and Blogs interview series , you are missing out. Grid Paper ▪︎ An excellent bookmark to add to your collection of utilities, especially interesting if, like me, you waste many high-quality notebook pages trying to do isometric drawings, and failing miserably. The Land of Giants Transmission Towers ▪︎ I love this and I keep thinking about it since I learned about it: Why isn’t it already a thing? Truly mesmerising, and I found that the illustrations used on their website are very tasteful too. (via Kottke ) Norm Architects ▪︎ As a fanboy of Norm Architects, I don’t know whether I like more their work or the photographs of their work. For years now, I’ve had one of an older batch of press pictures as a desktop wallpaper (you’ll know it when you see it) and another as my phone wallpaper. The colours, the lights, the shades, the textures: superb. How To Spot Arial ▪︎ Sorry, I’m writing about typefaces once again , but I think this is an important skill to have. (via Gruber ) Rubio Orders State Department Braille Signage Switch To ‘Times New Roman’ ▪︎ I promise, this is the last time I’ll be sharing something about typography and fonts until the end of the year. More “Blend of links” posts
My pockets are full of yuzu. Thank you for using RSS. I appreciate you. Email me
Pastor Adam Fannin of Law of Liberty church had a good description of the news. He calls it the “bad news” because there is nothing good in it. Source: .
At Bondi Beach, 12 people have been reported dead due to an alledged terrorist attack. While the BBC at the time of writing are still unsure whether it is a terrorist attack or not: "More than two dozen others were injured in the attack, which police say they are treating as a terrorist incident." (archive). Meanwhile, Wikipedia apparently has better sources than the BBC because they write "On 14 December 2025, a terrorist mass shooting occurred at Bondi Beach in Sydney, Australia, during a large Hanukkah celebration hosted by the Chabad of Bondi." More surprisingly, Wikipedia within less tha...
This week on the People and Blogs series we have an interview with Nick Heer, whose blog can be found at pxlnv.com . Tired of RSS? Read this in your browser or sign up for the newsletter . The People and Blogs series is supported by Rhys Wynne and the other 127 members of my "One a Month" club. If you enjoy P&B, consider becoming one for as little as 1 dollar a month. My name is Nick, and I have a blog named Pixel Envy . I live in Calgary, which has repeatedly been rated as one of the world's most liveable cities by people who do not live here. I went to art college and stumbled into a career in web design, front-end development, branding, and (begrudgingly) search optimization. I like to read, learn about music, cook, take photographs, and — occasionally — I enjoy writing, too. I read quickly but write slowly; I can type much faster than I can think. I am glad this is a hobby and not my actual full-time job. I began Pixel Envy by emulating successful writers and formats. Like many people in the mid-to-late 2000s, I created many blogging dead-ends. I overcomplicated past attempts. By simplifying to a text-mostly website without comments or pictures, I was able to focus on what I wanted to do. I cribbed the links-and-articles format from writers like Andy Baio and Jason Kottke; I built more comprehensive narratives with multi-link posts like those on Metafilter and the topical clusters on Techmeme. I fell into writing about Apple because I find the company's unique identity fascinating. I have since grown to think more deeply about privacy and digital ethics; these subjects now represent the bulk of my work. I found my identity and voice by doing a lot of things poorly for a long time. My biggest regrets are in the things I wrote because I thought they were things I needed to do to be taken seriously or remain relevant. For me, the creative process is just a working process — utilitarian from start to finish. I am most often responding to something I see in the news. I check Techmeme throughout the day, I have something like 300-plus feeds in my RSS reader, and I have a Slack-based notification system. This is overkill for a hobby. The way I have it set up is thankfully not as much like drinking from a firehose as it seems in large part because I try to be quite focused in what I will write about. Usually this comes in the form of little link posts — maybe a few per day — that are specific to topical news. I rarely link to something without reading other coverage or perspectives about the same news, and I do my best to verify what I read with primary sources. These posts help me stay aware of unfolding news, and they shape the longer-form articles I write less frequently — perhaps publishing a few per month. I have several articles I have been chipping away at for a while, and a list in Things of subjects I would like to write about one day. I have no separate drafting stage; a post is a draft until it is published or, occasionally, deleted. The process of writing is, itself, a process of thinking, so the organization of arguments reveals itself as I put down more words. My workflow is informed by my dependence on documentary sources, and it looks mostly like reading. While I find writing a mostly utilitarian pursuit and avoid publishing anything that sounds too much like writing, I hope a shred of my personality reveals itself. I proofread everything I write. Still, there is no better spellchecker than the "publish" button. I am not too picky about my creative environment. These words are coming to you from beside a smouldering fire in a cabin in the Rocky Mountains, but I am not a writer who benefits from seclusion. I like to have a reliable internet connection and to be relatively unbothered by the world around me. Depending on what I am writing about, it can take a beat or two to get into the right headspace. I am at my best on my Mac, and when I am a little bit sleep-deprived. Ideally, I am outdoors on a warm day, with a nice beverage and some great music. I am a reluctant WordPress user. It, in the process of transforming into the CMS for the world, has betrayed its name in becoming worse for websites based on the written word. However, it plays extremely well with MarsEdit, which is a truly excellent piece of software. I designed and built my WordPress theme. I am working on a redesigned website; I am always working on a redesigned website. I prefer writing on my 2021 14-inch MacBook Pro, which is the best computer I have ever used. Longer-form articles are shaped in BBEdit and, infrequently, in iA Writer on my iPhone. Shorter-form link posts are written directly in MarsEdit. I have a handful of utility scripts to help me do things like converting quoted text into Markdown and finding duplicate reference links. While I have experimented with various generative A.I. products, I have rarely found they improve what I have written or the process itself. I tried getting ChatGPT to give me headline ideas, but it has been trained on too many bad headlines to produce anything worthwhile. I sometimes paste articles into some generative A.I. tool or another for proofreading and it is occasionally helpful. Generative A.I. circumvents the process of thinking that comes from writing, however, so I find its utility limited, to say nothing of its frightening ethics. How I had originally answered this question is that I would almost certainly have a bunch of changes as I have countless regrets. However — and this is one of my favourite things about this craft, as it encourages the writer to justify a position — I recognize I would probably feel the same regardless of the name I chose, the posts I wrote, or the technology stack I use. I do have posts I regret, and I have gone through different phases of what I believe or am willing to defend. I believe this is a process known as “learning”. Though I have issues with WordPress, I feel certain I made the correct call from day one in using a CMS I control instead of a hosted and managed option. I understand why someone would choose to ease the technical burden. Not me, though. The customization it affords has been instrumental in building the kind of website I want to have. One of the nicest things about using a text-based medium — as opposed to, say, audio or video — is that infrastructure can be inexpensive. I spend around $110 USD per year to host Pixel Envy, plus around $40 per year in related domain names. I do not use many images, so I do not need a delivery network or anything similarly intensive. I offset those costs first with a small, unobtrusive, and non-behavioural ad, and then with Patreon and paid sponsorships. Sometimes I wonder if it is fair to do this for a hobby. It feels trite to recommend Derek "Menswear Guy" Guy now that he has become a media sensation, but Die Workwear is an essential read for me. Guy's passion and ability to describe style as a language make menswear understandable and approachable. I financially support several publications, including Defector , which is one of my favourite websites despite not being a Sports Person. Frustratingly, a lot of good blogs are newsletters, which is just a blog delivered through email. I use Feedbin in part because it allows me to reroute new issues to NetNewsWire and treat them as standard blog posts. Anyway, I like Today in Tabs very much (and financially support it), and Web Curios . Thank you, Manuel, for inviting me to share my thoughts here. Now that you're done reading the interview, go check the blog and subscribe to the RSS feed . If you're looking for more content, go read one of the previous 119 interviews . Make sure to also say thank you to Chris Hannah and the other 127 supporters for making this series possible.
The Dutch Raad van State in 2019 has argued that a nitrogen deposition of 5.09 mol per acre per year is damaging De Heide (Heath) too much. This is the same as putting down about one one grain of fertilizer the size of a sugar grain per two square meters per week. How ridiculous this may sound, this verdict has blocked thousands of farmers and builders from expanding their business or homes, and even caused many farms to close down. Furthermore, many farmers in the Netherlands, which have often been farmers for many generations, are not sure whether they will be allowed to continue farming.
I talked with CL Kao and Dori Wilson for an episode of their new Data Renegades podcast titled Data Journalism Unleashed with Simon Willison . I fed the transcript into Claude Opus 4.5 to extract this list of topics with timestamps and illustrative quotes. It did such a good job I'm using what it produced almost verbatim here - I tidied it up a tiny bit and added a bunch of supporting links. What is data journalism and why it's the most interesting application of data analytics [02:03] "There's this whole field of data journalism, which is using data and databases to try and figure out stories about the world. It's effectively data analytics, but applied to the world of news gathering. And I think it's fascinating. I think it is the single most interesting way to apply this stuff because everything is in scope for a journalist." The origin story of Django at a small Kansas newspaper [02:31] "We had a year's paid internship from university where we went to work for this local newspaper in Kansas with this chap Adrian Holovaty . And at the time we thought we were building a content management system." Building the "Downloads Page" - a dynamic radio player of local bands [03:24] "Adrian built a feature of the site called the Downloads Page . And what it did is it said, okay, who are the bands playing at venues this week? And then we'll construct a little radio player of MP3s of music of bands who are playing in Lawrence in this week." Working at The Guardian on data-driven reporting projects [04:44] "I just love that challenge of building tools that journalists can use to investigate stories and then that you can use to help tell those stories. Like if you give your audience a searchable database to back up the story that you're presenting, I just feel that's a great way of building more credibility in the reporting process." Washington Post's opioid crisis data project and sharing with local newspapers [05:22] "Something the Washington Post did that I thought was extremely forward thinking is that they shared [ the opioid files ] with other newspapers. They said, 'Okay, we're a big national newspaper, but these stories are at a local level. So what can we do so that the local newspaper and different towns can dive into that data for us?'" NICAR conference and the collaborative, non-competitive nature of data journalism [07:00] "It's all about trying to figure out what is the most value we can get out of this technology as an industry as a whole." ProPublica and the Baltimore Banner as examples of nonprofit newsrooms [09:02] "The Baltimore Banner are a nonprofit newsroom. They have a hundred employees now for the city of Baltimore. This is an enormously, it's a very healthy newsroom. They do amazing data reporting... And I believe they're almost breaking even on subscription revenue [correction, not yet ], which is astonishing." The "shower revelation" that led to Datasette - SQLite on serverless hosting [10:31] "It was literally a shower revelation. I was in the shower thinking about serverless and I thought, 'hang on a second. So you can't use Postgres on serverless hosting, but if it's a read-only database, could you use SQLite? Could you just take that data, bake it into a blob of a SQLite file, ship that as part of the application just as another asset, and then serve things on top of that?'" Datasette's plugin ecosystem and the vision of solving data publishing [12:36] "In the past I've thought about it like how Pinterest solved scrapbooking and WordPress solved blogging, who's going to solve data like publishing tables full of data on the internet? So that was my original goal." Unexpected Datasette use cases: Copenhagen electricity grid, Brooklyn Cemetery [13:59] "Somebody was doing research on the Brooklyn Cemetery and they got hold of the original paper files of who was buried in the Brooklyn Cemetery. They digitized those, loaded the results into Datasette and now it tells the story of immigration to New York." Bellingcat using Datasette to investigate leaked Russian food delivery data [14:40] "It turns out the Russian FSB, their secret police, have an office that's not near any restaurants and they order food all the time. And so this database could tell you what nights were the FSB working late and what were the names and phone numbers of the FSB agents who ordered food... And I'm like, 'Wow, that's going to get me thrown out of a window.'" Bellingcat: Food Delivery Leak Unmasks Russian Security Agents The frustration of open source: no feedback on how people use your software [16:14] "An endless frustration in open source is that you really don't get the feedback on what people are actually doing with it." Open office hours on Fridays to learn how people use Datasette [16:49] "I have an open office hours Calendly , where the invitation is, if you use my software or want to use my software, grab 25 minutes to talk to me about it. And that's been a revelation. I've had hundreds of conversations in the past few years with people." Data cleaning as the universal complaint - 95% of time spent cleaning [17:34] "I know every single person I talk to in data complains about the cleaning that everyone says, 'I spend 95% of my time cleaning the data and I hate it.'" Version control problems in data teams - Python scripts on laptops without Git [17:43] "I used to work for a large company that had a whole separate data division and I learned at one point that they weren't using Git for their scripts. They had Python scripts, littering laptops left, right and center and lots of notebooks and very little version control, which upset me greatly." The Carpentries organization teaching scientists Git and software fundamentals [18:12] "There's an organization called The Carpentries . Basically they teach scientists to use Git. Their entire thing is scientists are all writing code these days. Nobody ever sat them down and showed them how to use the UNIX terminal or Git or version control or write tests. We should do that." Data documentation as an API contract problem [21:11] "A coworker of mine said, you do realize that this should be a documented API interface, right? Your data warehouse view of your project is something that you should be responsible for communicating to the rest of the organization and we weren't doing it." The importance of "view source" on business reports [23:21] "If you show somebody a report, you need to have view source on those reports... somebody would say 25% of our users did this thing. And I'm thinking I need to see the query because I knew where all of the skeletons were buried and often that 25% was actually a 50%." Fact-checking process for data reporting [24:16] "Their stories are fact checked, no story goes out the door without someone else fact checking it and without an editor approving it. And it's the same for data. If they do a piece of data reporting, a separate data reporter has to audit those numbers and maybe even produce those numbers themselves in a separate way before they're confident enough to publish them." Queries as first-class citizens with version history and comments [27:16] "I think the queries themselves need to be first class citizens where like I want to see a library of queries that my team are using and each one I want to know who built it and when it was built. And I want to see how that's changed over time and be able to post comments on it." Two types of documentation: official docs vs. temporal/timestamped notes [29:46] "There's another type of documentation which I call temporal documentation where effectively it's stuff where you say, 'Okay, it's Friday, the 31st of October and this worked.' But the timestamp is very prominent and if somebody looks that in six months time, there's no promise that it's still going to be valid to them." Starting an internal blog without permission - instant credibility [30:24] "The key thing is you need to start one of these without having to ask permission first. You just one day start, you can do it in a Google Doc, right?... It gives you so much credibility really quickly because nobody else is doing it." Building a search engine across seven documentation systems [31:35] "It turns out, once you get a search engine over the top, it's good documentation. You just have to know where to look for it. And if you are the person who builds the search engine, you secretly control the company." The TIL (Today I Learned) blog approach - celebrating learning basics [33:05] "I've done TILs about 'for loops' in Bash, right? Because okay, everyone else knows how to do that. I didn't... It's a value statement where I'm saying that if you've been a professional software engineer for 25 years, you still don't know everything. You should still celebrate figuring out how to learn 'for loops' in Bash." Coding agents like Claude Code and their unexpected general-purpose power [34:53] "They pretend to be programming tools but actually they're basically a sort of general agent because they can do anything that you can do by typing commands into a Unix shell, which is everything." Skills for Claude - markdown files for census data, visualization, newsroom standards [36:16] "Imagine a markdown file for census data. Here's where to get census data from. Here's what all of the columns mean. Here's how to derive useful things from that. And then you have another skill for here's how to visualize things on a map using D3... At the Washington Post, our data standards are this and this and this." Claude Skills are awesome, maybe a bigger deal than MCP The absurd 2025 reality: cutting-edge AI tools use 1980s terminal interfaces [38:22] "The terminal is now accessible to people who never learned the terminal before 'cause you don't have to remember all the commands because the LLM knows the commands for you. But isn't that fascinating that the cutting edge software right now is it's like 1980s style— I love that. It's not going to last. That's a current absurdity for 2025." Cursor for data? Generic agent loops vs. data-specific IDEs [38:18] "More of a notebook interface makes a lot more sense than a Claude Code style terminal 'cause a Jupyter Notebook is effectively a terminal, it's just in your browser and it can show you charts." Future of BI tools: prompt-driven, instant dashboard creation [39:54] "You can copy and paste a big chunk of JSON data from somewhere into [an LLM] and say build me a dashboard. And they do such a good job. Like they will just decide, oh this is a time element so we'll do a bar chart over time and these numbers feel big so we'll put those in a big green box." Three exciting LLM applications: text-to-SQL, data extraction, data enrichment [43:06] "LLMs are stunningly good at outputting SQL queries. Especially if you give them extra metadata about the columns. Maybe a couple of example queries and stuff." LLMs extracting structured data from scanned PDFs at 95-98% accuracy [43:36] "You file a freedom of information request and you get back horrifying scanned PDFs with slightly wonky angles and you have to get the data out of those. LLMs for a couple of years now have been so good at, 'here's a page of a police report, give me back JSON with the name of the arresting officer and the date of the incident and the description,' and they just do it." Data enrichment: running cheap models in loops against thousands of records [44:36] "There's something really exciting about the cheaper models, Gemini Flash 2.5 Lite, things like that. Being able to run those in a loop against thousands of records feels very valuable to me as well." datasette-enrichments Multimodal LLMs for images, audio transcription, and video processing [45:42] "At one point I calculated that using Google's least expensive model, if I wanted to generate captions for like 70,000 photographs in my personal photo library, it would cost me like $13 or something. Wildly inexpensive." Correction: with Gemini 1.5 Flash 8B it would cost 173.25 cents First programming language: hated C++, loved PHP and Commodore 64 BASIC [46:54] "I hated C++ 'cause I got my parents to buy me a book on it when I was like 15 and I did not make any progress with Borland C++ compiler... Actually, my first program language was Commodore 64 BASIC. And I did love that. Like I tried to build a database in Commodore 64 BASIC back when I was like six years old or something." Biggest production bug: crashing The Guardian's MPs expenses site with a progress bar [47:46] "I tweeted a screenshot of that progress bar and said, 'Hey, look, we have a progress bar.' And 30 seconds later the site crashed because I was using SQL queries to count all 17,000 documents just for this one progress bar." Crowdsourced document analysis and MP expenses Favorite test dataset: San Francisco's tree list, updated several times a week [48:44] "There's 195,000 trees in this CSV file and it's got latitude and longitude and species and age when it was planted... and get this, it's updated several times a week... most working days, somebody at San Francisco City Hall updates their database of trees, and I can't figure out who." Showrunning TV shows as a management model - transferring vision to lieutenants [50:07] "Your job is to transfer your vision into their heads so they can go and have the meetings with the props department and the set design and all of those kinds of things... I used to sniff at the idea of a vision when I was young and stupid. And now I'm like, no, the vision really is everything because if everyone understands the vision, they can make decisions you delegate to them." The Eleven Laws of Showrunning by Javier Grillo-Marxuach Hot take: all executable code with business value must be in version control [52:21] "I think it's inexcusable to have executable code that has business value that is not in version control somewhere." Hacker News automation: GitHub Actions scraping for notifications [52:45] "I've got a GitHub actions thing that runs a piece of software I wrote called shot-scraper that runs Playwright, that loads up a browser in GitHub actions to scrape that webpage and turn the results into JSON, which then get turned into an atom feed, which I subscribe to in NetNewsWire." Dream project: whale detection camera with Gemini AI [53:47] "I want to point a camera at the ocean and take a snapshot every minute and feed it into Google Gemini or something and just say, is there a whale yes or no? That would be incredible. I want push notifications when there's a whale." Favorite podcast: Mark Steel's in Town (hyperlocal British comedy) [54:23] "Every episode he goes to a small town in England and he does a comedy set in a local venue about the history of the town. And so he does very deep research... I love that sort of like hyperlocal, like comedy, that sort of British culture thing." Mark Steel's in Town available episodes Favorite fiction genre: British wizards caught up in bureaucracy [55:06] "My favorite genre of fiction is British wizards who get caught up in bureaucracy... I just really like that contrast of like magical realism and very clearly researched government paperwork and filings." The Laundry Files , Rivers of London , The Rook I used a Claude Project for the initial analysis, pasting in the HTML of the transcript since that included elements. The project uses the following custom instructions You will be given a transcript of a podcast episode. Find the most interesting quotes in that transcript - quotes that best illustrate the overall themes, and quotes that introduce surprising ideas or express things in a particularly clear or engaging or spicy way. Answer just with those quotes - long quotes are fine. I then added a follow-up prompt saying: Now construct a bullet point list of key topics where each item includes the mm:ss in square braces at the end Then suggest a very comprehensive list of supporting links I could find Here's the full Claude transcript of the analysis. You are only seeing the long-form articles from my blog. Subscribe to /atom/everything/ to get all of my posts, or take a look at my other subscription options . What is data journalism and why it's the most interesting application of data analytics [02:03] "There's this whole field of data journalism, which is using data and databases to try and figure out stories about the world. It's effectively data analytics, but applied to the world of news gathering. And I think it's fascinating. I think it is the single most interesting way to apply this stuff because everything is in scope for a journalist." The origin story of Django at a small Kansas newspaper [02:31] "We had a year's paid internship from university where we went to work for this local newspaper in Kansas with this chap Adrian Holovaty . And at the time we thought we were building a content management system." Building the "Downloads Page" - a dynamic radio player of local bands [03:24] "Adrian built a feature of the site called the Downloads Page . And what it did is it said, okay, who are the bands playing at venues this week? And then we'll construct a little radio player of MP3s of music of bands who are playing in Lawrence in this week." Working at The Guardian on data-driven reporting projects [04:44] "I just love that challenge of building tools that journalists can use to investigate stories and then that you can use to help tell those stories. Like if you give your audience a searchable database to back up the story that you're presenting, I just feel that's a great way of building more credibility in the reporting process." Washington Post's opioid crisis data project and sharing with local newspapers [05:22] "Something the Washington Post did that I thought was extremely forward thinking is that they shared [ the opioid files ] with other newspapers. They said, 'Okay, we're a big national newspaper, but these stories are at a local level. So what can we do so that the local newspaper and different towns can dive into that data for us?'" NICAR conference and the collaborative, non-competitive nature of data journalism [07:00] "It's all about trying to figure out what is the most value we can get out of this technology as an industry as a whole." NICAR 2026 ProPublica and the Baltimore Banner as examples of nonprofit newsrooms [09:02] "The Baltimore Banner are a nonprofit newsroom. They have a hundred employees now for the city of Baltimore. This is an enormously, it's a very healthy newsroom. They do amazing data reporting... And I believe they're almost breaking even on subscription revenue [correction, not yet ], which is astonishing." The "shower revelation" that led to Datasette - SQLite on serverless hosting [10:31] "It was literally a shower revelation. I was in the shower thinking about serverless and I thought, 'hang on a second. So you can't use Postgres on serverless hosting, but if it's a read-only database, could you use SQLite? Could you just take that data, bake it into a blob of a SQLite file, ship that as part of the application just as another asset, and then serve things on top of that?'" Datasette's plugin ecosystem and the vision of solving data publishing [12:36] "In the past I've thought about it like how Pinterest solved scrapbooking and WordPress solved blogging, who's going to solve data like publishing tables full of data on the internet? So that was my original goal." Unexpected Datasette use cases: Copenhagen electricity grid, Brooklyn Cemetery [13:59] "Somebody was doing research on the Brooklyn Cemetery and they got hold of the original paper files of who was buried in the Brooklyn Cemetery. They digitized those, loaded the results into Datasette and now it tells the story of immigration to New York." Bellingcat using Datasette to investigate leaked Russian food delivery data [14:40] "It turns out the Russian FSB, their secret police, have an office that's not near any restaurants and they order food all the time. And so this database could tell you what nights were the FSB working late and what were the names and phone numbers of the FSB agents who ordered food... And I'm like, 'Wow, that's going to get me thrown out of a window.'" Bellingcat: Food Delivery Leak Unmasks Russian Security Agents The frustration of open source: no feedback on how people use your software [16:14] "An endless frustration in open source is that you really don't get the feedback on what people are actually doing with it." Open office hours on Fridays to learn how people use Datasette [16:49] "I have an open office hours Calendly , where the invitation is, if you use my software or want to use my software, grab 25 minutes to talk to me about it. And that's been a revelation. I've had hundreds of conversations in the past few years with people." Data cleaning as the universal complaint - 95% of time spent cleaning [17:34] "I know every single person I talk to in data complains about the cleaning that everyone says, 'I spend 95% of my time cleaning the data and I hate it.'" Version control problems in data teams - Python scripts on laptops without Git [17:43] "I used to work for a large company that had a whole separate data division and I learned at one point that they weren't using Git for their scripts. They had Python scripts, littering laptops left, right and center and lots of notebooks and very little version control, which upset me greatly." The Carpentries organization teaching scientists Git and software fundamentals [18:12] "There's an organization called The Carpentries . Basically they teach scientists to use Git. Their entire thing is scientists are all writing code these days. Nobody ever sat them down and showed them how to use the UNIX terminal or Git or version control or write tests. We should do that." Data documentation as an API contract problem [21:11] "A coworker of mine said, you do realize that this should be a documented API interface, right? Your data warehouse view of your project is something that you should be responsible for communicating to the rest of the organization and we weren't doing it." The importance of "view source" on business reports [23:21] "If you show somebody a report, you need to have view source on those reports... somebody would say 25% of our users did this thing. And I'm thinking I need to see the query because I knew where all of the skeletons were buried and often that 25% was actually a 50%." Fact-checking process for data reporting [24:16] "Their stories are fact checked, no story goes out the door without someone else fact checking it and without an editor approving it. And it's the same for data. If they do a piece of data reporting, a separate data reporter has to audit those numbers and maybe even produce those numbers themselves in a separate way before they're confident enough to publish them." Queries as first-class citizens with version history and comments [27:16] "I think the queries themselves need to be first class citizens where like I want to see a library of queries that my team are using and each one I want to know who built it and when it was built. And I want to see how that's changed over time and be able to post comments on it." Two types of documentation: official docs vs. temporal/timestamped notes [29:46] "There's another type of documentation which I call temporal documentation where effectively it's stuff where you say, 'Okay, it's Friday, the 31st of October and this worked.' But the timestamp is very prominent and if somebody looks that in six months time, there's no promise that it's still going to be valid to them." Starting an internal blog without permission - instant credibility [30:24] "The key thing is you need to start one of these without having to ask permission first. You just one day start, you can do it in a Google Doc, right?... It gives you so much credibility really quickly because nobody else is doing it." Building a search engine across seven documentation systems [31:35] "It turns out, once you get a search engine over the top, it's good documentation. You just have to know where to look for it. And if you are the person who builds the search engine, you secretly control the company." The TIL (Today I Learned) blog approach - celebrating learning basics [33:05] "I've done TILs about 'for loops' in Bash, right? Because okay, everyone else knows how to do that. I didn't... It's a value statement where I'm saying that if you've been a professional software engineer for 25 years, you still don't know everything. You should still celebrate figuring out how to learn 'for loops' in Bash." Coding agents like Claude Code and their unexpected general-purpose power [34:53] "They pretend to be programming tools but actually they're basically a sort of general agent because they can do anything that you can do by typing commands into a Unix shell, which is everything." Skills for Claude - markdown files for census data, visualization, newsroom standards [36:16] "Imagine a markdown file for census data. Here's where to get census data from. Here's what all of the columns mean. Here's how to derive useful things from that. And then you have another skill for here's how to visualize things on a map using D3... At the Washington Post, our data standards are this and this and this." Claude Skills are awesome, maybe a bigger deal than MCP The absurd 2025 reality: cutting-edge AI tools use 1980s terminal interfaces [38:22] "The terminal is now accessible to people who never learned the terminal before 'cause you don't have to remember all the commands because the LLM knows the commands for you. But isn't that fascinating that the cutting edge software right now is it's like 1980s style— I love that. It's not going to last. That's a current absurdity for 2025." Cursor for data? Generic agent loops vs. data-specific IDEs [38:18] "More of a notebook interface makes a lot more sense than a Claude Code style terminal 'cause a Jupyter Notebook is effectively a terminal, it's just in your browser and it can show you charts." Future of BI tools: prompt-driven, instant dashboard creation [39:54] "You can copy and paste a big chunk of JSON data from somewhere into [an LLM] and say build me a dashboard. And they do such a good job. Like they will just decide, oh this is a time element so we'll do a bar chart over time and these numbers feel big so we'll put those in a big green box." Three exciting LLM applications: text-to-SQL, data extraction, data enrichment [43:06] "LLMs are stunningly good at outputting SQL queries. Especially if you give them extra metadata about the columns. Maybe a couple of example queries and stuff." LLMs extracting structured data from scanned PDFs at 95-98% accuracy [43:36] "You file a freedom of information request and you get back horrifying scanned PDFs with slightly wonky angles and you have to get the data out of those. LLMs for a couple of years now have been so good at, 'here's a page of a police report, give me back JSON with the name of the arresting officer and the date of the incident and the description,' and they just do it." Data enrichment: running cheap models in loops against thousands of records [44:36] "There's something really exciting about the cheaper models, Gemini Flash 2.5 Lite, things like that. Being able to run those in a loop against thousands of records feels very valuable to me as well." datasette-enrichments Multimodal LLMs for images, audio transcription, and video processing [45:42] "At one point I calculated that using Google's least expensive model, if I wanted to generate captions for like 70,000 photographs in my personal photo library, it would cost me like $13 or something. Wildly inexpensive." Correction: with Gemini 1.5 Flash 8B it would cost 173.25 cents First programming language: hated C++, loved PHP and Commodore 64 BASIC [46:54] "I hated C++ 'cause I got my parents to buy me a book on it when I was like 15 and I did not make any progress with Borland C++ compiler... Actually, my first program language was Commodore 64 BASIC. And I did love that. Like I tried to build a database in Commodore 64 BASIC back when I was like six years old or something." Biggest production bug: crashing The Guardian's MPs expenses site with a progress bar [47:46] "I tweeted a screenshot of that progress bar and said, 'Hey, look, we have a progress bar.' And 30 seconds later the site crashed because I was using SQL queries to count all 17,000 documents just for this one progress bar." Crowdsourced document analysis and MP expenses Favorite test dataset: San Francisco's tree list, updated several times a week [48:44] "There's 195,000 trees in this CSV file and it's got latitude and longitude and species and age when it was planted... and get this, it's updated several times a week... most working days, somebody at San Francisco City Hall updates their database of trees, and I can't figure out who." Showrunning TV shows as a management model - transferring vision to lieutenants [50:07] "Your job is to transfer your vision into their heads so they can go and have the meetings with the props department and the set design and all of those kinds of things... I used to sniff at the idea of a vision when I was young and stupid. And now I'm like, no, the vision really is everything because if everyone understands the vision, they can make decisions you delegate to them." The Eleven Laws of Showrunning by Javier Grillo-Marxuach Hot take: all executable code with business value must be in version control [52:21] "I think it's inexcusable to have executable code that has business value that is not in version control somewhere." Hacker News automation: GitHub Actions scraping for notifications [52:45] "I've got a GitHub actions thing that runs a piece of software I wrote called shot-scraper that runs Playwright, that loads up a browser in GitHub actions to scrape that webpage and turn the results into JSON, which then get turned into an atom feed, which I subscribe to in NetNewsWire." Dream project: whale detection camera with Gemini AI [53:47] "I want to point a camera at the ocean and take a snapshot every minute and feed it into Google Gemini or something and just say, is there a whale yes or no? That would be incredible. I want push notifications when there's a whale." Favorite podcast: Mark Steel's in Town (hyperlocal British comedy) [54:23] "Every episode he goes to a small town in England and he does a comedy set in a local venue about the history of the town. And so he does very deep research... I love that sort of like hyperlocal, like comedy, that sort of British culture thing." Mark Steel's in Town available episodes Favorite fiction genre: British wizards caught up in bureaucracy [55:06] "My favorite genre of fiction is British wizards who get caught up in bureaucracy... I just really like that contrast of like magical realism and very clearly researched government paperwork and filings." The Laundry Files , Rivers of London , The Rook
In some cases, Wikipedia feels the need to "clarify" a certain video, which a commenter aptly called the "the blue box of gaslighting":  Now X community notes was promised to be something else, but to me it does look very similar. The note posts some helpful "context":  The reason that I'm critical is that especially on a topic like this, the note doesn't add any information. People who believe that the moon landing was staged will still believe that a...
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