Crucial Track 🎵 June 16, 2026

"Pictured Within (Live)" by Jon Lord

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Jon Lord was always one of my favourites. My interest in Deep Purple emerged not from Taliesyn, Fireball or even 'In Rock', but rather their first live album 'In Concert'. He never managed to repeat that within Purple - but as a solo artist - that was Jon. I THINK I have them all - I certainly know them. But out of that library how do you choose a 'track'?

Hence the choice today - and again - NOT in studio from a live album with Steve Balsamo providing the vocals to one of his 'songs' ... extending it to over 10 minutes with Orchestra. Not sure. there is a single track that epitomises Jon's range - though Jazz and Rock doesn't appear in this recording.

Rock - well - you already know that side of him.

Jazz - well a little light fun introduction to Dave Brubeck's 🔗📼 Unsquare Dance

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📺 Watched 🔗 Missing You - another forgotten series. That said it is a ‘Harlan’ story and as I have noted before there are some great Harlan’s - just not all of them. I think the other challenge is that they all start to blend in to each other.

★★


{Over the past few weeks I seem to have been in a ‘there’s nothing on’ mood. As I scrolled around a few ‘started and stopped’ shows popped up whilst others I’d forgotten all about reminded me that there wasn’t a post.}

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🖇️ Review Ratings


📺 Finished 🔗 The Asset a while back and promptly forgot about it - which in itself tells you something.

 

★★


{Over the past few weeks I seem to have been in a ‘there’s nothing on’ mood. As I scrolled around a few ‘started and stopped’ shows popped up whilst others I’d forgotten all about reminded me that there wasn’t a post.}

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🖇️ Review Ratings


📺 Finished watching the 🔗 Second Season of The Four Seasons, having already checked off Season 1 a while back.

★★ is the best I can do. Nice premise, plenty of Vivaldi - but didn’t keep me coming back and sometimes forgot it for months on end. I never saw the Alan Alda movie - but nice touch to see him pop up in the show from time to time … 89 at the time!


{Over the past few weeks I seem to have been in a ‘there’s nothing on’ mood. As I scrolled around a few ‘started and stopped’ shows popped up whilst others I’d forgotten all about reminded me that there wasn’t a post.}

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🖇️ Review Ratings




🔗 ‘Anthropic’s Safety Superpower’

Apple’s is design quality and user-centricism, Microsoft’s is market share with no regard for technical or design elegance, Google’s is market share with high regard for technical elegance, and Meta’s is strip-mining the world’s social graph for profit.

💬 John Gruber

.. he is sometimes very good at getting to the nub very efficiently.


🔗 Does the Rule of 40 Work for Hardware?

I first wrote about the Rule of 40 in 2015. I’d heard a late-stage investor describe it at a board meeting - growth rate plus profit should add up to at least 40% - and the simplicity stuck with me.

💬 Brad Feld


🔗 AI Isn’t Breaking Work. It’s Already Broken. - Cal Newport

Hinds was discussing a new survey of 6,000 digital workers, which included the following arresting statistic: although respondents claimed that AI saved them 11 hours a week on average, only 13% reported any improvement in company performance.

More in the comments.


🖋️ Using AI to Cut Costs is Valid - And Not New

But first ask the question - so you aren’t disappointed in the results.


🖋️ Is Human Agency important OUTSIDE of 'The Organisation'

Satya Nadella seems to be arguing that Human Agency is important inside the organisation and that ‘done right’ AI allows for real ‘Human Agency’. My take is that he is only talking about how humans serve the organisation. What about if you are ‘just’ a human?


I had seen the clips - and ‘yeah - nah. But last night I watched: 🔗🎥 The Ballad of Wallis Island and for me it falls into one of my personal categories: ‘a little english film’ ★★★★

‘CAVEAT - any film can fall into this category - it’s nothing to do with being ‘English’.

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🔗 Neat idea from Dave

@dave - in case you are listening - I know you want to enrich the feed, two things that would make it very useful

Author and ‘something’ that might provide context.


🔗 The Gartner Group is now predicting that 40% of AI agent programs will be cancelled before 2027 - due to “rising costs, unclear business value and inadequate risk controls.”

… that was Ted Gioia in July last year. Less than 6 months to go before the deadline (at least according to the headline)

Gartner: More than 40% of agentic AI projects will fail by 2027

Although the copy reads:

More than 40% of agentic AI projects will be cancelled by the end of 2027

🔗 Source

Is it just me that thinks before 2027 means Jan 1 - not Dec 31.

Either way - wonder where we are up to so far?


Crucial Track 🎵 June 13, 2026

"Cross Road Blues" by Robert Johnson

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Of course we all know the original - take a listen before listening to Mysty Mayhem's cover ...

🔗🎵 Mysty Covering Robert

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📼🎵 May I introduce you to 🔗 Mysty Mayhem … you are going to love it. (Embed courtesy of TikTok - no account/login needed)



🖇️ Me back in 2024 - in turn referencing a post back in 2021 .. and guess what it (the use of AI in hiring) is only getting worse.

🔗📼 A short video observation on Substack explaining recent research at Stanford and why you might never be getting any response to your submissions.


🔗 Meet the System Orchestrator: Toward Intent-centric Computing

Transitioning the OS from a layer between hardware and applications to a layer between foundation models and experiences fundamentally shifts the architecture, but, in the case of Apple, it preserves its value as the agent of trust and discovery.

💬 Horace Dediu


🔗 Intent Computing vs. Spatial Computing

Clearly Apple is not deprecating Spatial Computing. It’s a remarkable creation and those of us who use it find it irresistible and irreplaceable.

Great piece from Horace Dediu - and iterates on why I am in - and firmly remain in - the camp of ‘Vision Pro’ was a success.

(It comes down to that old chestnut that many people still try to understand 🍎 through the lens of other companies and then double down with criticisms like ‘not innovative’, ‘where’s the next iPhone’, ‘they’ve lost the plot’ …)

🚧 Links to some earlier posts to come.