Running his agency is no longer tenable - so sales announced - but somehow it’s still ok to continue to chair the 28 Olympics.
Got it.
🔗 Mark Bernstein: AI: New Frontiers
Today’s AI can make you better at doing things you do well. That is what AI is for.
A simple sentence to cut through the noise.
we will discover that even if your job mostly consists of interacting with LLMs, doing so well will require people who remember what it was like to read and interpret a document or contrast two ideas without asking an LLM to do it for you.
There used to be a lot of people that used to be able to thatch roofs - and now there aren’t. But that isn’t quite the same IMHO.
🔗 Ring cancels partnership with law enforcement supplier Flock – FlowingData
This comes shortly after Ring’s Super Bowl commercial for dog-finding. Ring owners were already rumbling, but it seems cute dogs were not enough to calm things down. Trust is already lost
Even tech companies are drawing lines.
🔗 Meta planning facial recognition with glasses – FlowingData
Meta’s internal memo said the political tumult in the United States was good timing for the feature’s release.
🤯
🔗 Goldman Sachs Boosts Apple Inc. with Positive App Store Trends
NB: No meaningful (or perhaps even measurable) impact from off-Appstore payments alternatives. Turns out adding friction to a frictionless business is not an attractive option for the customer.
💬 Horace Dediu
‘Ease’ replaces ‘Price’ in my 🖇️ 4 E Model for the Age of Engagement.
I feel I might have shared this in the past - but bears repeating.
🔗 How to Grow Up: Nick Cave’s Life-Advice to a 13-Year-Old – The Marginalian
Read. Read as much as possible. Read the big stuff, the challenging stuff, the confronting stuff, and read the fun stuff too. Visit galleries and look at paintings, watch movies, listen to music, go to concerts — be a little vampire running around the place sucking up all the art and ideas you can. Fill yourself with the beautiful stuff of the world. Have fun. Get amazed. Get astonished. Get awed on a regular basis, so that getting awed is habitual and becomes a state of being. Fully understand your enormous value in the scheme of things because the planet needs people like you, smart young creatives full of awe, who can minister to the world with positive, mischievous energy, young people who seek spiritual enrichment and who see hatred and disconnection as the corrosive forces they are. These are manifest indicators of a human being with immense potential.
💬 Nick Cave
Scripting News: Friday, February 13, 2026
the quality assurance of decentralized systems will be done by AI, and overseen by a non-profit organization, staffed by retired journalists.
Human curation is what it is going to be about. BUT - for truly excellent curation - the skill set is way more than ‘Being Human’ - a starter for 10.
Composition Skills
Be Credible
Increase Friction
Good Judgment
Restraint - lots of it
Taste - not fashion
Translation across domains
🔗 Apple Repeats Release Date for New Version of Siri – Asymco
NB: I’m told repetition is necessary in order for others to understand. Sometimes you’re supposed to say the same thing twice. Sometimes even three times. But still, some fail to grasp the idea.
Tell ‘em what you are going to say.
Tell ‘em.
Tell ‘em what you said.
…number one rule of any presentation.
Then again - there are so many comments made about Apple by people that clearly do not understand Apple that it is no surprise that this keeps slipping through.
🔗 The Top 5 Longreads of the Week
@manton - saw this and thought might be an interesting spin on your new Longreads feed on Micro Blog.
From the same post - love it. One day corporate decision makers will think before making decisions. (Or did some lowly dev make this decision all by themselves.)
Sky’s website let you search for shows but, for some unfathomable reason, at the time required you to type in at least three letters. I said this was a problem, since Sky’s most popular and so presumably most searched-for series then was ER.
There isn’t any — not any — criticism of his performance that doesn’t tell you more about the critic than the show. I suppose you can argue that the praise for his show also reveals something of the critic, but that one I’m okay with because they’re celebrating something well done and also they are not talking bullshit.
True of much - not just Bad Bunny.
Today I learned that you can DoS a Waymo by opening its door
And that’s how you get a $100 billion valuation my friends.
According to ‘Integrity’ my blog @ https://john.philpin.com has
123,014 links across 12,604 pages and 8,602 are ‘bad’.
Double checked because 123,014 seemed a lot - but that is what it says.
I didn’t check the 12,604 pages - that seemed about right.
But the implication is that there are an average of 123014/12604=9.76 links per page. AVERAGE. That would also mean that only 0.699 % of my blog links (which spread over nearly 20 years mind you) are broken.
From ‘AHREFS’
At Least 66.5% of Links to Sites in the Last 9 Years Are Dead (Ahrefs Study on Link Rot)
What say you @amerpie
ð Network map of Bluesky users.
“Theo Sanderson visualized the network of 3.4 million Bluesky users, placed by follow patterns. It is searchable and interactive.”
.. you can find you
.. and apparently I am specifically âthereâ because that is where i fit with other followers ..
You can also check your followers - and your followers' followers â¦.
Suddenly you could be âall over the placeâ.
Still not sure what someone… john.philpin.com/2026/02/1…
🔗 Network map of Bluesky users.
Theo Sanderson visualized the network of 3.4 million Bluesky users, placed by follow patterns. It is searchable and interactive.
.. you can find you
.. and apparently I am specifically ‘there’ because that is where i fit with other followers ..
You can also check your followers - and your followers' followers ….
Suddenly you could be ‘all over the place’.
Still not sure what someone like me can do with this - but who cares. It’s wonderful.
I have never really looked into Ghost - but plenty of people have - and they tell me how great it is. And I have no reason to believe otherwise, so hard to believe that this has only just happened.
Starting today, automated welcome emails are now built right into Ghost .
My Drafts Inbox below 200 for the first time - in a loooong time - mainly thanks to an action I just discovered for Raindrop.
Side Note - it didn’t work on the 1st, 2nd, 3rd …. Who knows how many times I tried❓
I gave up and decided to ask the Drafts Community - I wasn’t holding my breath - the action is over two years old. BUT - almost by return @agiletortoise responded and in no time at all - I was working. THANK YOU.
Side note - nothing technically wrong with the action - it was just a little more prescriptive than I am used to with Drafts actions - but did not understand the underlying code well enough at all - to be able to spot that.
The old promise of platforms will provide is broken.
➕
Your authentic ideas are lost in a sea of algorithmic content designed for engagement.
We’re not going back.
Now we need to build something new.
What we build is up to us.
🔗 There’s no such thing as Tech ~ Ten years later - Anil Dash
Not wrong - yet constantly amazed by how this isn’t main stream thinking - by any stretch of the imagination.