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My mate Paul collected collections. He wrote a book, ‘Recollections of a Collection Collector.’ It was never published. Lance Stater – Detectorists, Series #1 Episode 6 Back in 2019 I attended Boring IX, a conference …

Almost two week ago, Casey Neistat put out a classic Casey video called Sisyphus and the Impossible Dream. It’s all about Casey’s love/passion/obsession with running and a dream/goal/ambition to run a sub-three-hour marathon. I’ll let …

In more mb-media news: earlier this year I launched a new podcast with my friend Syd Andrerson, called Absolutely Crushed. It’s a bi-weekly comedy interview show in which we gossip with a guest about their …

AI search is a doomsday cult To even entertain the idea of building AI-powered search engines means, in some sense, that you are comfortable with eventually being the reason those creators no longer exist. It …

The problem with autobiographies is that every anecdote ends with "needless to say, I had the last laugh!" This corporate-autobiography is no different - as it details the rise and impact of Bellingcat - a …

It is 1920 in Littlehampton and Edith Swan has been receiving letters. They are of an obscene nature but she, and her family (she lives, as a spinster, with her father and mother), must forebear. …

Heather Knight and Amy Qin report for the NY Times (archived) on a problem that I wouldn’t have thought of but that’s obvious once pointed out: In San Francisco, where more than a fifth of …

Several years ago, when I was much stupider, I briefly interned for a reasonably well-known agent. I let her know ahead of time that I had a vacation lined up where I would be off …

Years ago I wrote about my trouble with a job queue in Postgres, in which table bloat caused by long-running queries slowed down the workers’ capacity to lock jobs as they hunted across millions of …

When contributing to other users’ repositories, always start a new branch in your fork.

I’ve been listening on the radio to Merope Mills talk about a new rule that is being introduced into British hospitals following the death of Martha, her 13-year-old daughter, in hospital. https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-68348301 Merope felt that …

I'm in Politico today, musing about why British internet regulation keeps hopping in circles on one leg.

Is it me, or is there a trend going on that's trying to tell us something? It starts with new products. In terms of new cameras, we're down from a peak of 21 new mirrorless …

I recently encountered an open source project that hadn't received updates for a while. The issue tracker had ~200 open issues, ~70 open pull requests, and CI was partially failing. It's not uncommon for projects …