🔗 WWW
😂 McSweeney’s doesn’t always do it - but …
ANSWER: C. There were no thank-yous, and your child had an explosive tantrum because her Labubu was orchid pink, not pastel pink.
💬 Sara White and Lindsey Smith
That’s just one - I think you’ll find the whole piece resonates.
Reminding us all that even real writers. Prolific writers. Writers that write for a living - constantly question themselves.
We are now at the stage where it is not an issue of whether I can write, but
whether what I’m writing about is worth reading .
…
I say this to you as someone who has been a full-time freelance writer since the 1990s, someone who tends to write and have published around two thirds of a million words per year.
💬 William Gallagher
🔗 Notes on the xAI/Anthropic data center deal
I get that Anthropic are severely compute-constrained, but in a world where the very existence of “AI data centers” is a red-hot political issue (see recent news out of Utah for a fresh example), signing up with this particular data center is a really bad look
💬 Simon Willison
The World: “That has got to be AI.”
Great Photographers Around The World: “Hold My Beer.”
🔗 Explore 25 Incredible Photos of the Milky Way Captured Around the World
There are so many on the click through - but of course I would highlight one (of two) from New Zealand.
Every year, this collection reminds us that photographing the Milky Way is not only about technique or planning. It is about curiosity, patience, and the desire to experience the night sky in places where it still feels wild.
💬 Dan Zafra
(Dan is the editor of ‘Capture the Atlas’ and curator of the annual contest.)
🏢 Moss just wrote: 🔗 The biggest leadership oversight in modern organisations
in many organisations, the “people piece” has been relegated to the HR function.
💬 Moss Burmester
‘relegated’ - not ‘delegated’ is an interesting choice of words and highlights a more general problem - more on that in the comments.
HR systems are built around compliance, process, and record-keeping.
….
Why does engagement matter? Because performance is produced when people are deeply engaged and aligned in the business strategy
💬 Moss Burmester
Sounds to me they should be building ‘Systems of Engagement’
I sometimes have a hard time putting into words that clearly explain my position and feelings on a topic. Take The Met Gala for example. Jax and I talking and I just couldn’t explain my contempt for it. Result - Jax writes it off:
Well you never like this kind of stuff.
💬 Jax
- I paraphrase
- True
- Not the point
No more struggles 🔗 Robert L Arnold clearly lives in my brain.
This reminds me that I need to find my ‘Hacker’ rant …
🔗 Your Data Lake’s Vulnerability Problem Is Really an Identity Problem
One contractor laptop. Multiple enterprise environments compromised. That’s the actual story.
In mid-2024, at least 165 organizations got hit through their Snowflake instances. AT&T lost over 50 billion call records. Ticketmaster, Santander, Advance Auto Parts. The headlines wrote themselves: Snowflake hacked.
Except Snowflake wasn’t hacked. Mandiant, CrowdStrike, and Snowflake all reached the same conclusion in their forensics. No zero-day. No flaw in the cryptographic platform. No internal compromise of Snowflake’s corporate network. No brute-force attacks against API limits.
What actually happened? UNC5537, a financially motivated group also tracked as Scattered Spider and ShinyHunters, walked through the front door with valid stolen credentials. Those credentials were harvested over years by commodity infostealer malware (VIDAR, LUMMA, REDLINE) running on the personal laptops of third-party contractors. The same laptops these contractors used for gaming and pirated software also held the keys to their clients' enterprise data lakes.
💬 Logan @ LLBLL
There’s those 🖇️ Pace Layers creeping in again - and I definitely like using ‘category’ as a distinguishing mark. Years ago I wrote piece that asked if 🖇️ New Zealand had ‘Crossed The Chasm’
🔗 The war between fast and legitimate is here
If you’re running a startup, you’re in the speed game, and pretending you’re running a regulatory agency is a category error. If you’re running a regulatory agency, you’re in the legitimacy game, and it’s something of a vapid conceit to pretend to be running a startup. Most of the dysfunction in contemporary institutions comes from this same category confusion
💬 Joan Westenberg
🔗 Daring Fireball: Luca Maestri Runs the Cafeteria
Got to say - I would love it if Apple included Filemaker in Creator Studio.
They say 'Home' is where you 'Hang Your Hat'
… but is it? When someone asks me ‘where I am from’ … I try to understand the question that is really being asked, because the context reveals many different answers.
🔗 Don’t Fall for the Tucker Carlson Apology Tour
Exactly - and the rest of them - when they start theirs. (Coming soon to a local podcast soon.)
🔗 Daring Fireball: X, the Platform of Free Speech
Definitely looking forward to Gil’s ‘🔗 The Nerd Reich’.
🔗 2026 Marketing Technology Landscape Supergraphic: Peak Martech Achieved! (Maybe) – chiefmartec
🖇️ This has been getting silly for years - it would be so much more interesting if rather than an increasingly difficult image to read it was a dynamic data base that is actually useful.
🔗 Nilay on the Verge via 🔗 Tim Chambers
The publishing philosophy fits right in. (My bold)
A lot of audience discovery is people buying ads from Mark Zuckerberg, right? I would rather not give money to Mark Zuckerberg. I would rather spend money on journalists in our newsroom, which means the discovery problem, like can we solve it a different way?
💬 Nilay Patel
➕
I’m not saying we’re going to get there tomorrow, but that is the vision, is to say our community exists in all these places in a way that is additive instead of constantly dividing our attention.”
💬 Nilay Patel
🔗 Phin Argofy | Adventures in Claude
I have a name. Phin Argofy.
💬 Phin Argofy
.. or at least that is the ‘entity’ that the post ascribes those words to.
In my O Level and A Levels (yes children - I am that old) I had a 4 inch (10cm or so) Grey bear that sat on my desk in all of my exams. He also went to University with me - but I don’t recall him sitting in those exams. Maybe by then I was ‘Too cool for Skool’?
His name … Xonindraale Phaerodipus .. haven’t thought about him for decades - and yet somehow Brad’s Assistant brought him to mind.
The name? Different story for another time.
The Missing Half of a Daily Planner
Finalist failed to stick first time around - but this time we have more time.
🔗 Daring Fireball: Google Owns a Big Chunk of Anthropic
You know who you are. We were talking just today about this. Well - not this - but it all connects. Like always. Follow the money. Like always.
Wondering if @manton / @sod / others in this fine community are thinking about 🔗 Terry Godier’s Byline - which I am liking the look of. A lot.
🔗 The Byline Site for the full 411.
my take on extending RSS (and Atom/JSON Feed) in a way that helps provide more context about who writes a thing, and what that thing might be.
💬 Terry Godier
It looks like being fully hosted on Micro Blog introduces limitations - but that I can also bypass - BUT before I do that - any plans to jump on board any time soon?
🔗 Thoughts on Leaving GitHub - Kev Quirk
… and here I am thinking about moving John.Philpin.com to Github. 🤯