🔗 We Are Living in Pinocchio’s World
The grifters and the hucksters and the influencers selling impossible things succeed because audiences reward certainty and punish doubt. They honor confidence and resist complication. A clean story about a genius who will fix everything travels faster than a difficult story about tradeoffs. The Field of Miracles stays open because people keep wanting to bury their coins there.
💬 Om
Trust isn’t something a brand builds with an ad campaign. It’s what’s left if the marketers don’t ruin it.
Curiosity isn’t simply what’s left after a complete education. It’s still there if the system doesn’t ruin it.
Musicality isn’t a feature you add to an amplifier. It’s what’s left when you stop ruining it.
Customer delight isn’t something we add to our projects. It’s what’s left if we don’t ruin it.
Satisfaction in our work isn’t created by the boss. It’s what’s left if they don’t ruin it.
Reminds me of two connected thoughts that I have always liked …
How do you make a statue of an elephant? Get the biggest granite block you can find and chip away everything that doesn’t look like an elephant.
💬 Too many people to name. [🔗 Why](https://quoteinvestigator.com/2014/06/22/chip-away/)
Music is the space between the notes
💬 Coltrane, Mozart, Debussy… take your pick ...
📺 Finally got a show I could watch from beginning to end - not the best - but compared to some others I have been trying out, 🔗 The Beast in Me is worth ★★★
Crucial Track 🎵 June 3, 2026
"Can't Find My Way Home" by Blind Faith
An integral part of Spencer Davis and Traffic before this side project with 'the world's first Supergroup' .. and Stevie was barely 21 when he wrote this 🤯
There are some great covers out there - but seriously - did you know that this even existed? And no - it is not a 'great' cover (in both senses of the word) ... 'good' maybe - but not 'great'.
More of Stevie in the future.
👁️ Must have 7 or 8 shows started and not one has grabbed me. Added one more to the list tonight and just started episode 2 - back to back. Been a while since that happened.
🔗 Honestly, Stop Saying Honestly
We already killed the slop in our writing . The em dash, “delve,” “tapestry,” “in today’s fast-paced world” - the measured lexicon of words that spiked in published text the moment the models got loose on it. “Delve” alone rose about 1,500 percent in scientific abstracts between 2022 and 2024. These words are not wrong. They are tells. A reader sees three of them and stops trusting the page, even when the substance is fine.
💬 Adventures in Claude
Two Thoughts
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Very self aware 😂 and interesting to see how anyone can control the LLM’s output if they spend time on the problem - something which we don’t typically do - used as we are to our world of ‘instant gratification’.
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Just a couple of months ago 🖇️ I wrote: “but no one can deny that we have seen a bucket load more of them ( (em dashes) ) since LLMs turned up.
Jeremy Keith [ @adactio ] writes 🔗 here and quotes 🔗 Time
What is being mechanized by AI is our tastes - our ability to discern quality (or originality)
💬 Ray Nayler
Might I suggest that we have been doing that all by ourselves for decades - if not forever?
Tech accelerated it and now AI is certainly moving it into hyper drive - because that is what AI does.
Maybe I haven’t implemented Standard.Site properly - but underwhelmed by how my ‘Longform’ posts are rendering on BluSky.
… i.e. the same as they did before I implemented Standard.Site 🤷🏻♂️
Crucial Track 🎵 June 2, 2026
"Everybody's Talkin' (1971 Mix)" by Harry Nilsson
Interesting that his two biggest hits were other people's songs. #JustSayin
🖋️ Just One Story From The Aftermath Of Maui
This is a repost from August 2023. Life has moved on for the world - but for those caught up in it all it is their new reality. Just a reminder that whilst the news moves on at speed - reality takes time.