💬 Quotes
🔗 GDS weighs in on the NHS’s decision to retreat from Open Source – Terence Eden
a meeting _without_biscuits.
💬 The UK's Civil Service
😂 Perfect - only the British.
BUT - please don’t ignore this article - particularly if you are in the UK - and as I track the latest moves in New Zealand - also there.
Some people make things happen. Some people watch things happen. And then there are those who wonder, ‘What the hell just happened?"
💬 Carroll Bryant
It’s bad enough being in the second category, but too many people are in the third.
🖋️ You Don't Get Your Teeth Back
Sartre warned us about procrastination. He was talking about the human condition - but it equally applies to how organizations move, how people engage, and why waiting for ‘perfect’ means you never move. And by then, your bite has gone.
A variation on ‘walk anywhere in a hospital with a white coat and clipboard’.
When you don’t ask for permission, people read it as a sign that something is already underway.
💬 Matthew McConaughey
Charity Is Doomed To Fail argues that traditional charity reacts to symptoms instead of addressing causes of issues like trafficking. The author calls for a proactive, well-funded, business-driven approach as embodied by The Future Found, highlighting Dan Pallotta’s point that new thinking, capital, and strategy are needed for real change - shifting from reactive aid to tackling root problems at scale.
💬 Sadly - unknown - so far
I need to go find the source, because someone talking about Dan Pallotta in the same breath as 🔗 The Future Found is definitely someone I need to talk to.
🖋️ I think it might be who you hang out with
Brit here - and though Björk does not sit at the top of my favourite artists - she certainly is no where near the bottom and I do not recall that particular refrain ever being that common - which might explain her Wikipedia entry.
🔗 LLCs essentially create a precedent for AIs
Companies can own property, sign contracts, sue, be sued, spend money, and shape elections. But companies cannot be killed nor can they go to jail. They have many of the rights of people. They are not people.
💬 Brad Barrish
I guess Mitt forgot to tell us that?
A question of understanding - because when I first read this post - I was attempting to reconcile zip (as in zip code) with ‘incompatible’ - confused because I had never heard of such a thing. As I am shuffling out my Drafts it dawned on me - of course - he’s talking Zip formats. 🤦🏼♂️
🔗 Why Is Everything Proprietary These Days?
how the fuck can a ZIP be incompatible??
💬 Kev Quirk
This from the end of March and only posting now as I am playing around with the Drafts MCP from @agiletotoise and discovering a few ‘lost in the stream’ drafts.
🔗 More Magic Math from OpenAI?
The real product here is not AI. It is an IPO prospectus.
💬 Om
Irony is dead.
🔗 The Youth AI Safety Institute Has Margrethe Vestager’s Backing
I love that the dickpanel is titled “We value your privacy” and then begins with the sentence, “With your agreement, we and our 399 partners use cookies or similar technologies to store, access, and process personal data like your visit on this website, IP addresses and cookie identifiers.”
💬 John Gruber
🔗 Wired on the Dark Mood Inside Meta
Unanswered remains my question from earlier this week: is MCI installed on Bosworth’s computer too? (And Zuck’s?)
💬 John Gruber
Given that Zuck keeps sticky tape over his computer camera - I am going to go with no.
Not so much the article (🔗 1Password is stepping on the rake again)
.. as his close 😂
Please note: If you have come here to recommend a different password manager, I implore you to not do that, as I just do not care. This is what I did. If something else works for you, good for you. Write it up on your own blog.
💬 Jamie Zawinski
Really? Is this right? I know nothing to be able to question - but it does seem to be an extreme that I would have heard about before?
The real problem is that Vercel doesn’t let you set a spending limit. Someone could DoS your app while you’re asleep and you’d wake up to a $10,000 bill with no recourse. It’s 2026 — AI crawlers and bots are everywhere, constantly hitting endpoints, triggering serverless functions. Vercel charges for CPU execution time, not bandwidth, so every bot visit costs you money. This isn’t a theoretical edge case. I couldn’t justify the risk anymore.
💬 Assaf Arkin
🔗 coolify-deploy — Vercel-style deploys on your own hardware — Labnotes
🖋️ Peter Kafka and Roger Lynch - Talking
A Podcast and Transcript: Roger Lynch reveals that Condé Nast’s survival isn’t about scale or content volume, but about brand authority and direct audience relationships, he suggests that when Google search collapses and AI platforms commodify content, only publishers with deep trust and “taste” that machines can’t replicate will make it.
🔗 What data sovereignty means for New Zealand
Data sovereignty is often viewed as a technical problem with a technical solution. In reality it is a question of accountability: who has the right to access information, under what rules and in whose interests. For New Zealand organisations, the answer increasingly depends less on where data is stored and more on whose law governs it, who controls the infrastructure and whether those arrangements can be trusted to hold when they are tested.
💬 Bill Bennett
We are learning - fast - that our laws seem to count for less and less. If a country has no rights - imagine how the the citizens of that country are faring.
Crucial Track 🎵 May 15, 2026
"I Write the Songs" by Barry Manilow
Never a fan of Barry. Too saccharine, too schmaltzy. Not my style - but there is always an exception to the rule (still looking for Rush’s exception - but that remains another story.)
When I first heard this in 1976 - my instant reaction - was - ‘TYPICAL - BLOODY BARRY. ’I’ write the songs … seriously? The arrogance.
But it hooked me. Totally - and still to this day remains on my Apple Playlist called Just Good Songs.
Of course he didn’t write the song, something I learned a little later - and so my dichotomy was resolved. Of course it was a great song - it was written by a ‘Beach Boy’ - and the claim ‘I write the songs …’ as certainly more defensible. Even more so when I realised that;
The ‘I’ in the song is God, and that songs come from the spirit of creativity in everyone.
💬 Bruce Johnston
(Why not share Bruce's version? In my mind - just not as good - so sticking with the version that hooked me.)
This reminds me of my own setup at home. An OpenClaw instance running on one machine, network-attached storage, a few other boxes humming away. Work-related computing running over a residential connection. I suspect that within a few years, this will be commonplace.
💬 Om
Not so long ago we had ‘family computers’ - I have friends who still use a shared computer.
The edge of two personal computers is moving to the norm.
The new edge is having a network of computers. (I’m looking at you @amerpie )
I hear the Mac Mini is selling well these days.
They shoot horses don’t they? I wonder if they shot typesetters?
🔗 Twilight of the Velocipede: Typesetting Races before the Age of Linotype
Kid” DeJarnatt, “Bangs” Levy, and “Young Jack” Fasey — they carved out reputations in what soon became a national touring circuit. A few became minor celebrities, like the Tribune’s star compositor, Thomas Rooker, who took to wearing diamond studs on his shirts.4 One particularly gifted compositor, William C. Barnes, stunned onlookers by setting type blindfolded, with his type cases reversed.
💬 The Public Domain Review
This time last week (checks calendar), actually yesterday, ‘Collective Wisdom’ said that ‘Consulting is Dead’.
But life moves fast. Today is a new day.
OOHH OOHH - I know let’s set up a consulting division.
No - let’s partner with a consulting company.
No - even better - let’s acquire a consulting company.
💬 Anthropic and OpenAI
🔗 OpenAI launches OpenAI Deployment Company, acquires Tomoro
Tom Siebel’s playbook from the 90s is alive and well - so much for ‘Collective Wisdom’ - which also has the habit of crowing about how everything is new - the old world no longer applies.
Right then.
The thing about 90% of TDMs [Technical Decision Makers] is that they’re motivated primarily by NOT GETTING FIRED. These aren’t people who browser Lobsters or push to GH on the weekend. These are people that work 9 to 5, get paid, go home, and NEVER THINK ABOUT WORK AGAIN. So to achieve all that, they follow secular trends supported by analysts and broad public sentiment. Oh, Gartner said that “AI strategy” is most important? McKinsey said “context” needs to be managed? Well, “Context Engine for AI Apps” is going to be defensible. Buy it.
💬 Mitchell Hashimoto
Nathan makes an important point. 🔗 Why this is not a newsletter.
Commentators with a large and loyal audience quit their jobs at a newsroom—which hires support staff, investigative reporters, and others who have no such followings—and bring a decent chunk of their economic value with them. The newsletter service and payment platforms get a cut. Money moves from institutional support to influencer economies. The commentators get some newfound freedom. But if we don’t have robust journalistic institutions doing news-gathering work, what is there to comment on?
💬 Nathan Schneider