2026-08-10 04:01:43
#SilentSunday
Car boot sales are so full of broken dreams; musical instruments, skateboards, home fitness equipment. They are also a monument to maturity; books read, films and games completed, toys and clothes outgrown. We also see the inexorable march of progress in the "obsolete" technology on every stall; desktop PCs, watches, calculators, cameras, innumerable phones.
I have been furiously refactoring some internal software at work this week.
It has long been a spaghetti of python scripts with a vague idea of how to pass data into each in the right order that lives only in my head. That is exactly the wrong thing!
I have started to treat it like real software and plan out the flows so I can point it at the input file and come back the next morning to a clean and complete output file (the dream!)
This work was so involved that one day when I was particularly "in the zone" my lunch consisted of eating peanut butter out of the jar at my desk. For clarity, I see this as a highlight of the week.
One of the houses I go past on my evening walks must be having a big clear out. They had an honest box for some DIY stuff last week and now they've started leaving boxes of books and DVDs out with a "Help Yourself" sign.
I got a handful of films I've been after for a while, a couple I had never heard of that sounded interesting, and an enormous atlas.
Thanks, neighbours!
My heart breaks in the silence of your thunder
My heart is hollowed out like a bird without a song
Heidi Curtis, "Hollow Heart"
2026-08-06 15:34:05
I have a small bugbear: the trope that old people aren't tech savvy. A guy at work brought it up this week — a joke about how if you want to do some exploratory testing, just give the app to his mum and she'll find a way to break it. She's rubbish with computers, apparently.
And honestly, as a sweeping statement (I don't know his mum!), that's kind of disingenuous.
It's tricky to define "old". My parents are in their 70s, which still isn't old old. Some of the grads I hear talking about "old people" bandy around ages like 50. Come on! — you're talking about "dumbing things down" for the generation that hacked the Pentagon on their lunch break because they were bored 🙃 I think people default to "the generation above my own" without considering the history of technology.
My mum was born in the British Isles in the 1950s. Sure, she didn't have the internet, but it's not like she was born into a 17th-century Amish community!
She had to learn how to use a car, a typewriter, a telephone, a word processor. She was doing all this at a time when some of the greatest advances in technology were being made.
My dad, now in his 70s, has an engineering background and worked in Research and Development and environmental safety; certainly no stranger to technology.
The people who are now in their 60s, 70s, and 80s are the same people who built computers and invented the internet. They've learned how to program VCRs, operate Betamax and DVD players, and gone from AM to FM to DAB radio, from vinyl to cassettes to CDs to MiniDiscs (and then back to CDs because MiniDiscs).
Slowly, they watched washing machines and tumble dryers turn into something you'd only see in science fiction. Speaking of which — they grew up watching Star Trek, which foreshadowed all the internet and technology we have now.
Old people have been led to believe they're not tech savvy, because they find it difficult to use modern technology — the confusing mess that is "Web 2.0" and beyond.
The internet has become actively hostile to many; entire walled gardens of adverts, jump scares, misinformation, adverts, scams, fear-mongering, and adverts. All marketed as the "safe" part of the web.
Applications (we used to call them "programmes") that change their UI every update. Everything designed for 20-year-olds' eyes. QR Codes, fingerprint scanning, and more meaningless acronyms than you can shake a stick at. Faster, faster, more, more. "Bitesize".
If you're not immersed in that frequently enough to become desensitised, it's an assault every time you open your phone to text your kids or pay a bill.
Physical technology is also hostile. The processing capabilities of modern phones, for example, are mind blowing. Yet vast swathes of the internet are so inefficient; bogged down by aggressive tracking scripts and unnecessary bloat, that it all feels sluggish. Voice technology — once hailed as the future — is patchy at best. Now we have "AI" to "help". Modern technology should be amazing but it's frequently meh.
It's not that old people are incapable of using it — the technology has let them down, not the other way around.
2026-08-06 03:32:12
Andreas tells a story of seeing an image of cats on social media with several many comments decrying it for being "AI generated".
Do we now have the obligation to check each and every picture, video, quote, text, post, etc. that we come across for whether it's human or AI generated? Do we have to apologise profusely if something slips through and we accidentally share slop? Do we have to police each other and check other people's posts and point out to them (with proof!) that they posted or shared or quoted slop? Is this the 2026 version of having fun on the internet?
Like Noisy Deadlines, I think I'm pretty good at spotting generated content — part of my job involves analysing LLM responses so I'm quite exposed to the tells. And, like Matt, I strongly feel that using an LLM to generate content for your blog is missing the point.
I'm starting to see some puritanical behaviour around "boosting slop" as if we are morally reprehensible for sharing LLM generated content. I've written before about how it's impossible to make a completely ethical decision and it's equally impossible to live a pure life by everyone's standards; everyone draws the line of what's "acceptable" just underneath themselves.
I share other photographers' photos on social media. I think that's important for fostering community and, as I am the algorithm, boosting reach and engagement.
I wouldn't knowingly share anything from a Nazi or about fascist ideology. That said, I don't scrutinise every photographer's post history in case they once said something that might be offensive to someone. I simply haven't got time for a comprehensive background check.
Neither do I have the time for a round of digital forensics on every single image that crosses my feed in case it was "AI". I do my best to only follow real people (to the best of my knowledge), I only boost images with alt text, and I won't share anything with a "generated" smell.
That said, where is the "AI generated" line drawn? Modern camera phone use artificial intelligence when making images all the time — HDR is AI. Is it wholly unacceptable to share images taken on any iPhone released after iPhone 13?
Just like sometimes the worst person you know makes a great point, sometimes AI generates a lovely image. If you're in the business of hauling folks over the coals for innocently but misguidedly sharing things on the internet, do better. As Joel says: As humans we definitely should be more understanding of each other
.
2026-08-03 04:36:09
The morning is crisp and clear enough to hear the plaintive bleating of sheep from over the fields. Sheep always sound alarmed like everything is distressing them. Same, sheep. Same.
I am trialling folding my #SilentSunday photography shares into my weeknotes (see above) because they're both posted on a Sunday. The Silent Sunday posts, by design, don't have any accompanying text so they don't really make sense as their own post.
Had my first pitch this week. I've written countless slides for pitches, had much input from a technical side, but never actually been invited to present. This client is local and works completely remotely so we hosted the pitch. In a novel twist, we ran it like a working session instead of a two hour presentation which seemed to go down well. The client is lovely and our team did themselves proud with a comprehensive plan that clearly responded to their brief, added some bells and whistles, and showed how the proposal breaks down into an MVP and builds up into the full ask and then beyond. I got a lot of praise afterwards, which was nice.
My Inseparable Pen arrived all the way from Japan in the most well-packaged delivery I've ever had. I've been using it all week for work and it's really lovely. The magnetic dock is brilliant and, once you've trained yourself to use it, really speeds up that "thought to note" time by removing the "where's my pen?" cognitive drain.
I heard two songs this week that referenced Vincent Gallo's "Buffalo 66" which is a clear sign from the universe to buy it and watch it. In other cinematic news, I watched 85% of "Lost Highway" as my #SecondScreenCinema on Friday mostly because the soundtrack is fantastic.
Rounded the week out with a canal-side stroll to the supermarket foraging blackberries on the way. Picked up still-warm-from-the-oven pastries from Marks & Spencer's. As is customary, we knocked any bourgeois sentiment off by eating them sat on the floor outside the shop like raccoons.
2026-08-01 13:13:02
Happy August!
Here are a few photos from my phone from the last month with neither rhyme nor reason to the theme.
2026-08-01 03:50:02
I have actually fallen in love with Mouth Ulcers. The band. Obviously. Seven-track EP "Silent Pictures" (a bargain at £5 on Bandcamp) is simultaneously fresh and 40 years old. Aside from the obvious comparisons to Joy Division and The Cure, the goth four-piece from London channel Long Blondes and Maven (ex-Nitzer Ebb); a confident swagger pervades the frosty guitar and militaristic rhythm section.
In the proud tradition of bands like Visage, Depeche Mode, and Mesh, we also have Actors — darkwave synthpop from Vancouver; the weather really infects the music up in that Pacific Northwest, huh?! Shannon Hemmett (from Leathers) adds that "Steve Strange" dispassionate murmur lost in the mix that feels isolating in a dreamlike way. Jason Corbett brings a lovely Bowie impression at times. One of those bands I am surprised I haven't come across before but will listen to again. The disturbing video for "Face Meets Glass" (YouTube link, sorry) is worth a watch.