👁️ Software companies are brilliant at building smarter mousetraps; they’re terrible at asking
Crucial Track 🎵 May 10, 2026
"When an Old Cricketer Leaves the Crease" by Roy Harper
I wouldn’t describe myself as a fan of cricket .. but this one is nothing to do with cricket and everything to do with life. Been in the soundtrack of my life for 51 and counting years and hard to reach the end without life memories coming to the fore.
🎥 F1, 2025 - ★★★★
I have no idea why it took us until last night to finally get round to watching. But get round to watching we did. I now have even less understanding as to why the delay.
If you still haven’t seen it … rectify the situation ASAP.
The protocols belong to no one. They can’t be acquired. They can’t be taken public.
💬 Terry Godier
Reminds me of an old adage of mine - that these days sits in my 🖇️ Johnsim Library.
😂 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
👁️ Ruminating … I wonder if there might be a way of better revealing the title-less posts in SourceFeed @terrygodier
Crucial Track 🎵 May 9, 2026
"The Ocean" by Richard Hawley
Hawley’s voice has me … every time. You can … I do .. just fall into his songs .. not just the ocean,
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.)
👁️ How often do people rebuild their site and if they do - why? What goes on to necessitate a rebuild to begin with - as opposed to just flushing the cache? #AskingForAFriend
🏢 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’
No plans to go - zero interest and the other two choices are ‘Project Hail Mary’ and ‘Devil 2’.
BUT - I was taken by the Silky Otter’s plot summary.
That’s got to be AI - No❓
The other summaries do seem more considered, so perhaps the summary writer is as inspired by ‘Michael’ as I am.
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.
👁️ Aggregate - Curate - Syndicate
SourceFeed and Crucial Tracks recently added to feed this blog, but Crucial Tracks doesn’t seem to populate until I get into the MB dashboard and refresh the blog. All other feeds including SourceFeed repost automatically.
Intended? Or me missing a trick somewhere?
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.