I’m a little bit tired: a two hour journey back from Folkestone this morning (thank you farmers, tractor convoys in a mediaeval walled city are fun) and several pints last night make me want a nap. It was a friend’s birthday, and there was pizza. I narrowly avoided dad dancing.
Things I have been writing
I’m not entirely sure why this week’s Ten Blue Links was the Folsom City Prison edition – perhaps because I mention hacking prison laptops – but it was, and there’s some good stuff in there. I also wrote about who AI might indicate the end of the line for Google. Google is a strange company in many ways (someone once described it to me as “a university research division funded by an adtech company) and I suspect it’s at a crossroads. Of course, like IBM, it won’t vanish – companies can last a long time on momentum alone – but it feels like without a major change of course it won’t be seen as a visionary company again.
Things I have been reading
After 80 days of daily reading I broke my streak, and, it seems, had a bit of a break. But I’ve started again, picking up Guy Standing’s Plunder of the Commons. Standing starts off looking at the historical enclosure of common land, but then swiftly moves into the way that everything which we have banded together to do in common is quietly – and sometimes not so quietly – being taken away from us and given to individuals to profit from. Same shit, different century.
I bought and finished Kara Swisher’s Burn Book. It’s fairly obvious some of the shall we say more critical reviews have done quite a bit of selective quoting. Like quoting a sentence and then missing out the all-important one which follows, showing exactly the opposite of what the critic is claiming. Good book, and I would recommend it to everyone.