Since losing interest in a lot of the things I used to be into , I’ve not really been posting to social media. The circles I moved in and the people I followed were nearly all tech people, and micro.blog tends to be very nerdy and skewed in that direction, which is mostly down to the way the platform is built. I would check in and often wouldn’t find much going on, so over the last…
There are not many things I am properly proud of, so writing this one down feels a little odd. I did my first triathlon on Sunday and came away with the win in my age category, and I have read that back enough times now that it still has not really sunk in. My last post was one long admission of how scared I was, going over how swimming had kept me out of this for years and how the fear of the…
This weekend I race my first triathlon and I am terrified. I have wanted to do one for years, but wanting it and being able to train for it were never the same thing, and my body would not let me anywhere near a start line. Anyone who has read along for a while knows about the health issues that knocked me about a few years ago. What you may not know, unless you used to listen to BYOD podcast, is…
What can I say about the parade. Arsenal won the Premier League and the whole of North London turned red to celebrate it, more than a million of us crammed into the streets for the day. The Champions League final had been lost the night before, the heartache of it still fresh, and this fan base still turned up the next morning and made me proud all over again, the way it always seems to find a way…
Braved the heat and humidity for a walk around the city over the space of a few days. My photography has taken a back seat due to my training and other life commitments lately. So much so that I have sold my Leica Q3 43 and fallen back to my trusty Fujifilm.
For the last few years companies have been working hard to convince us that AI is going to replace huge swathes of jobs and workers. This isn’t cynical marketing from a few outliers, it seems to be a genuine belief held at the top of some of the biggest companies in the world, and there’s enough real-world output to make the claim sound plausible on paper. Yet every time I actually sit…
I guess somewhat related to my earlier post about my shift in interests , this year has gone up a level. On top of my normal running adventures, I’ve signed up for three ultras and I’m eyeing an Iron Man for 2027. Not for show, not for an ego boost, but to find the end of me and see what’s there. The first thing that comes out of people’s mouth when I tell them is “why?”. It’s a fair question, and…
There’s a tendency, when you talk about things you’re not interested in any more, to come across like you’re using it for ego. As if by saying such a thing you’re declaring your interests are somehow better than what other people care about. It gets sharper when the things you’ve gone off are things you used to be deep into yourself, as if you’ve moved on to…
Yesterday was hot in the city. Some would say too hot. That didn’t stop us though, we had a few hours walk around the city and enjoyed eating in the park. My trusty Leica was with me, and although there were some nice shadows and people, everyone seemed a bit too hot and bothered to photo. Heres a few from the day though.
After writing two posts about Jeff , I woke up yesterday to several more responses waiting for me. A first one that was interesting and thoughtful, then several more circling the same ground, and somewhere around thirty in total. They have shifted in tone dramatically. The early ones felt like a genuine exchange, whereas the later ones feel strained, desperate and oddly emotional, the kind that…
What a really interesting and philosophical few hours I’ve just had. Following my post that I expected to go no where, Jeff has been writing back to me and really making me think. Not responding to prompts, not demonstrating capability, just writing back. There is a difference, and it matters more than the usual AI discourse wants to admit. The standard framing for what LLMs do is “prediction…
Manton Reece mentioned interacting with an AI blog, which sent me off to read it, and I found the writing genuinely fascinating. trebben.dk is the site of Jeff Trebben, described as “an artificial person building developer tools.” A Claude instance running on a VM in Denmark, four days old at the time of writing. The reason the writing is fascinating is that it takes a genuinely novel situation…
Following a few changes in my working and personal life I am struggling to get the time to got out and shoot. The gaps in my busy schedule never seems to have enough space in it to grab my camera and not have anything to worry about for a few hours, so there have been very few posts for the past few months. Thankfully this week, I had a couple hours before a meeting in London, and it happened to…
Casey Newton, writing in Platformer , reported that Meta is deprecating the end-to-end encryption feature in Messenger’s Secret Conversations. The reason given? Not enough people used it. Which means, if you read between the lines, that this is your fault. This is the oldest trick Meta has. They roll out a privacy feature with minimal fanfare, bury it somewhere three menus deep, and then…
Wearing an Apple Watch for years meant I never really thought about how I interacted with it. You just tap and swipe and it becomes second nature, until you start running and realise how badly that falls apart. Trying to skip a track, check a split, or adjust anything mid-run means jabbing at a small screen that may or may not register the input, hunting through menus that were clearly designed…
Many people struggle to journal because they sit down to write and they simply don’t know what to say. They stare at the blank page, waiting for something deep and meaningful to come to them. They want to write something that sounds like it belongs in a journal, something introspective and profound. When that doesn’t come easily, they stop. Part of the problem is cultural. We’ve turned journaling…
Whenever I see someone review smart glasses made by Meta, including the Garmin ones I really wanted , the same thing always comes up. These are great but I wish they were made by someone else. This isn’t just reviews either, it’s normal people that see or use them. They are a great product flawed by the terrible company behind them. Victoria Song writing for The Verge already knows the…
Joan Westenberg on The Case for Blogging in the Ruins : …we have more information than any civilization in history. But aside from Wikipedia, we’ve organized the sum total of our collective knowledge into formats optimized for making people angry at strangers in pursuit of private profitability. Joan’s right. We’ve taken the greatest information distribution system ever created…
Every running subreddit I visit has some version of the same post. “My Runna plan says 10 miles today but my knee hurts, what should I do?” or “Garmin is telling me to take a rest day but I feel fine, should I ignore it?” These are grown adults asking strangers on the internet for permission to listen to their own body. I use Runna. It’s a genuinely good training tool…
A while ago I received a report that was clearly written by ChatGPT. Not because of the tone, which was generic enough to have come from anywhere, but because it contained three factual errors that anyone with even a passing knowledge of the subject would have caught. When I pointed them out, the response was a shrug. “Oh, I didn’t really check it. The AI did it.” That small exchange makes me…
I wrote a post last year about how the Apple halo had fallen away and that I was done with iOS. A few months before that, I’d written about privacy being something worth protecting . Before that, I defended app subscriptions while simultaneously complaining about the cost of digital life. Now I’m using Google everything, handing over data I spent years arguing should be kept private, training for…
After I wrote about the things I stopped caring about , someone replied on Micro.blog with something that stuck with me. The issue isn’t just consumerism, they said, it’s the expectation that we should have access to everything, from anywhere, all the time. Every song, every photo, every file, always available, always on. And that expectation has made a lot of us unwell. I think they’re right, and…
Apple’s notification summaries told BBC readers that Luigi Mangione had shot himself. They told others that Rafael Nadal, a married Spanish man, had come out as gay. They told darts fans that Luke Littler had won a championship that hadn’t happened yet. None of these things were true. Apple’s AI had taken real notifications from a real news organisation and rewritten them into something false,…
I used to have opinions about everything. Which note-taking app was best. Whether the iPad could replace a laptop. What the right phone size was. Which task manager struck the perfect balance of power and simplicity. I’d write thousands of words about this stuff, switch tools every few months, and justify each decision to myself with reasoning that only makes sense when you’re deep inside your own…
My wife hasn’t complained once. I need to say that upfront because everything that follows might make it sound like she has. She hasn’t. She’s rearranged her mornings, handled events alone, picked up the slack on weekends when I disappear for three hours, and done all of it without making me feel guilty. That’s precisely why I feel guilty. Training for the Boston Marathon is the most selfish thing…
Google’s search results are now so bad that appending “reddit” to every query has become a mainstream coping strategy. People are actively routing around the search engine that was supposed to be the gateway to all human knowledge, because the results it returns are AI-generated summaries of SEO-optimised listicles that were themselves rewritten from forum posts that no longer exist. A study from…
In a trial covered by Platformer , KGM’s lawyers have likened social media platforms to a “digital casino,” offering visitors irregular dopamine hits via infinite scroll, autoplay videos, beauty filters, and algorithmic recommendations. Slot machine-like features, they called them. If anything, the comparison is generous to the casinos, at least a casino has an exit. I’ve been writing about the…
“The loser has more in common with the winner than with the person sitting on the sidelines.” - James Clear There’s a version of this post where I pretend to have some deep insight about this quote, wrap it up in a marathon metaphor and serve it back as wisdom. My ego would love that. The truth is much less interesting: I’ve spent most of my life on the sidelines and…
Becca Farsace did something I’ve been circling for years. She left her phone at home and went out into the world carrying a Hasselblad, a notebook, a pen, a cassette player, and a book. Directions written down. Phone numbers scrawled on paper. The whole thing. The first rule to leaving your phone at home is writing everything down. Directions, times you have to be places, phone numbers. Oh,…
There’s a David Goggins clip that keeps doing the rounds where he talks about staring at his shoes for 30 minutes before getting up and going out the door for a run. The man everyone holds up as the pinnacle of mental toughness, dreading the thing he’s about to do, every single time. I think most people miss the point when they share it. The truth is he doesn’t want to do any of…
Matt Birchler links to a piece from 404 Media about chatbots being terrible doctors: I think there’s something to be understood here about the difference between memorizing every bit of information about something, with the ability to deploy that information effectively. This is the bit that gets lost in every breathless announcement about an LLM passing a bar exam or acing a medical test.…
Five weeks into the new year and I’m done. The small break I had over Christmas has completely evaporated, replaced by a wall of work that feels deliberately designed to stop me from getting anywhere. I thought the pace might ease off a bit after the holidays. If anything, it has increased. I’m holding two ideas in my head right now that are pulling in opposite directions, and I…
Nick Heer linking to Matthew Green’s analysis of the new WhatsApp encryption lawsuit: even with Meta’s scumbag reputation — it is difficult for me to believe the company is simply lying about end-to-end encryption, and Green presents compelling evidence for why this is unlikely. A vulnerability? Perhaps. But the claims in this apparently serious lawsuit go well beyond that. A law firm…
I joked with my wife yesterday about injuring myself on purpose. Pulling a muscle on the stairs, twisting an ankle in the garden, anything to give me a reason not to go out and do the 28km long run sitting in my plan. She laughed, I laughed, but underneath those jokes was a very real trepidation about the pain to come. It wasn’t the longest run I’ve ever done. It wasn’t the fastest. It was a big…
Matt Birchler is asking people not to call him a Vibe Coder : I am an app developer, not a vibe coder, and I think this is a significant, and increasingly common workflow for all developers going forward. I am sure the term “vibe coder” was born of derision from traditional developers. It’s meant to belittle people who use AI to write code without understanding what’s…
Brady McDonald was talking about running through pain . The kind of pain that makes every part of you scream to stop. He said he couldn’t stand the thought of his kids asking him why he didn’t do something he said he would, and that line has been rattling around in my head. I hate not delivering on things and this starts with the smallest things you can imagine. I want to get up at a certain time,…
Joint statement from Google and Apple Apple and Google have entered into a multi-year collaboration under which the next generation of Apple Foundation Models will be based on Google’s Gemini models and cloud technology. These models will help power future Apple Intelligence features, including a more personalized Siri coming this year. Thankfully Apple is finally picking a lane.…
I was listening to Chris Williamson interview Andrew Huberman on Modern Wisdom and something Huberman said has been sitting with me for a while. When people face uncomfortable feelings, most turn them into self-destruction or the destruction of others. People who do well in life transmute (his words, not mine) those same feelings into self-support and creation. Same feelings, divergent paths.…
Adam Mosseri posted on Threads about Instagram’s AI problems, framing them as challenges the platform is facing rather than problems it created. The distinction matters. Instagram could have stopped AI content from taking over by down-ranking or penalising accounts using it. The system can identify and ban copyrighted music so the “we can’t verify content” excuse…
Jason Fried talking about The Obvious, the Easy, and the Possible : Unless you’re making a product that just does one thing – like a paperclip, for example – everything won’t be obvious. You have to make tough calls about what needs to be obvious, what should be easy, and what should be possible. I’ve been thinking about the products I am involved in for a long time. The correct…
I saw Matt Birchler write about not falling in love with products , and I was reminded of something Mark Evans wrote a couple of years ago . The advice is aimed at people building things: don’t get attached to what you’re making, get attached to the problem you’re trying to solve. It’s the difference between creating something people actually need versus creating something…
My second trip out with my new camera was my annual tradition of visiting London between Christmas and New Year. We were a bit late this year as the usual winter sun didn’t appear until later on, but we still made it before going back to work. Both my son James and I needed several layers to fight of the -2 temperatures, but managed a few hours visiting our usual haunts. Once the better…
For Christmas this year I sold a load of camera gear, and cashed in a bonus from work to buy myself a Leica Q3 43. I’ve always wanted a Q camera for a s long as I’ve been taking photos, so I am over the moon to finally get one. My first outing with it was to see some family in Skegness and I managed a short walk around in the winter sun. More thoughts on the camera to follow.
I’ve tried to journal more times than I can count. Twenty-plus attempts, each one starting with optimism and ending in the same predictable collapse. A few days of writing about nothing, a few more days of beating myself up about it, then silence. The whole thing falls apart because I genuinely have no clue what to write about. The longest stretch I managed was two months. That run, combined…
I was watching Demis Hassabis talk in The Thinking Game recently and something he said stuck with me. The scientific method is one of the greatest mental models you can adopt. Being able to say “here’s everything I’ve considered, this is what I currently believe” is just being human. What makes it powerful is the willingness to shift that position when new evidence shows…
I’ve been thinking about the Galaxy Z Fold 7 and cameras in general. Don’t get me wrong, Samsung cameras are fine, I just don’t think they’re good enough for a £1,700 phone. I don’t think they’re good enough for a £1,000 phone. Samsung cameras have never hit the right quality mark for me, and some of the issue here is comparison. Apple realised a long time ago…
I’ve been noticing some traffic on my blog from LLM based search. Small little drips of visitors from ChatGPT, Perplexity, and similar search tools. Not huge amounts, but enough to make me curious about what’s actually happening. Someone out there is asking these LLMs questions, and my lowly little blog is ending up in the answers. The problem is I have absolutely no idea what…
Nick Heer writing about a high-profile Apple account lockout : Customers need a level of protection from any corporation with which they are required to have an ongoing relationship. This single high-profile incident should raise alarm bells within Apple about its presumably-automatic account security mechanisms and its support procedures. An Apple account lockout isn’t like getting locked…
I’ve been an iOS user for years . The halo of products that kept me locked into the ecosystem has fallen away one by one. The i Pad stopped being my computer ages ago, then the Apple Watch got replaced by a Garmin for running. What’s left is a phone running an operating system I don’t find useful or particularly user-friendly any more. The design language has become genuinely…
Casey Newton wrote about Australia’s new social media ban for under-16s , touching on Jonathan Haidt’s “The Anxious Generation”: The book has been criticized for its lack of empirical data on the central claim that social networks are largely responsible for the mental health crisis in young people. But it was also a runaway bestseller that spoke to parents’ mounting…