Nielsen, in 2026, in the Bookseller: "rich metadata is important in selling books actually", like that wasn't a headline in 2016 or 2009 either... www.thebookseller.com/news/rich-me...

Rich metadata increasingly vital to book sales, NielsenIQ BookData finds

Metadata is no longer “merely a supply-chain requirement”, according to new research by NielsenIQ BookData, but a “strategic asset that can improve discoverability, help readers find books and support...

thebookseller.com

Annoyed that I can't keep the old Google UI that you can time travel to when searching for "The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time". It's genuinely better and faster than now...

It gives me great joy to announce that at 3.59pm today precisely, it will be the tenth anniversary of one of the finest things ever broadcast

We're just normal men, we're just innocent men (Lauren and Hacker: full clip)

YouTube video by Antigone Journal

youtu.be

Still training myself to remember the Lazy Strategy... Most problems in game design (and elsewhere) have multiple solutions. If the first solution you think of requires a ton of effort, even if its a perfect solve, don't settle. Try to find something easy for you to do instead.

A big part of the PHP fix was just one guy in Czechia, Ondřej Surý. What he had to say about it is worth a read www.theatlantic.com/technology/2...

‘If Anything Happens to This Guy … Everyone Is Screwed’

Ondřej Surý was a relatively anonymous volunteer working on PHP security. Then the internet exploded.

theatlantic.com

Given how there are already people scamming others selling AI art, how long until there are effectively AI software scams? Did that vendor actually build this thing you bought properly? Having a trusted person who can read and understand a new codebase is only going to become _more_ important

“Books are not too expensive,” Turrin said. “At least, that’s not the reason people don’t read. On the other hand, 50% of people say they’re not interested in reading. So we don’t have to make books cheaper, we have to make them sexier.” www.thebookseller.com/news/decline...

Decline in reading ‘main’ threat to EU book trade as turnover down 30%, FEP warns

The "main issue” facing the book trade is the declining number of readers, the Federation of European Publishers (FEP) warned in its annual Frankfurter Buchmesse presentation on the main data and tren...

thebookseller.com

LLMs produce statistically plausible text given a particular context. «Agents» run that in a loop, «given everything we’ve said so far and this new text, what is the most plausible next piece of text?» There is nothing there. It’s all in people’s heads.

Go to your camera roll and search “boat” and then post a photograph of a boat you like. Even before searching I knew the one I wanted. Baia de Guanabara, late 2016

George Walkley@georgewalkley.com · 3w ago

Go to your camera roll and search “boat” and then post a photograph of a boat you like. Looe, 2018—feels like a century ago.

Quick are you scrolling? You could just read a book for five or ten minutes and at the end you will feel so much better 🥰

I've seen no fewer than 5 different posts of people saying The Last Jedi is their favourite of the sequel films now the bot farms are down. Which it is. But I'm left thinking way more of the online nonsense was actually always bots than I realised. Not sure if that's reassuring

The people holding up the internet https://sheets.works/data-viz/holding-up-the-internet

The people holding up the internet

Four billion phones ask one text file what time it is. One lecturer keeps it in his spare time. We counted the rest.

sheets.works

Será que vamos ver menos atividade de um certo candidato pro segundo turno nas redes sociais também? www.reddit.com/r/technology...

From the technology community on Reddit: Russian disinformation bot traffic nearly eliminated overnight after Ukraine drone strikes cripple multiple of 'Russia's Google' data centers

Explore this post and more from the technology community

reddit.com

Recent shower thought on AI derangement were seeing is that it's a lot like how Yoda describes the dark side of the Force. Not stronger or better, but easier and faster, seductive. And once you start down that path it consumes you completely

ah damn, RIP Margaret Hamilton. she took safety-critical software engineering seriously, and got people to the moon and back. news.mit.edu/2026/margare...

In case you missed it - though I'm not sure how you would, as I was an absolute bore about it - my fourth folk horror novel TWISTED PIKE was released yesterday: www.canelo.co/books/twiste...

Twisted Pike by David Barnett | Canelo

Paperback and Ebook

canelo.co

There's a thread over on Mastodon where someone so very easily talked Muse into hacking itself so they could look at the innards and it is absolutely exactly as bad as you'd expect, if not worse how poorly put together this thing is

It's never "AI agent breaks containment, cures cancer, does a bit of tidying up and puts the kettle on", is it?

In big personal news, I’ve resigned and will be leaving Canelo at the end of this year.

AI made everyone on your team faster. So why are companies slower? Because "faster" usually means offloading the real work to whoever comes next. terriblesoftware.org/2026/06/17/y...

You Got Faster. Your Company Didn’t.

AI made you faster. But you’re not more productive; you’re outsourcing the slow part to everyone else

terriblesoftware.org

twitter.now is a new social network claiming X abandoned the trademarks when they changed their name. I'm finding this very amusing.

Twitter - The Square Is Back

The public square is back and better. Visit twitter.now. Not affiliated with X Corp.

twitter.now

That Bun rewrite that was looking questionable just the other day is out now. From the responses I'm seeing Anthropic actually did deliver a lot of what they were promising

A lot of important context to that last repost. Anthropic bought Bun in 2025. So this is probably the most high profile case of a big project being entirely rewritten in a new language, but they're letting Claude Code go at it with few guardrails.

lol i mean, this is a lot software nowadays and it's massively concerning when you think about it... but also lol tipiirai.com/writing/bun-...

There. I've said it. Again.

I find myself reaching for this metaphor often lately. These tools have a use but don't confuse them for something they aren't. www.notesfromthecircus.com/p/llms-are-u...

LLMs Are Universal Translators, Not Universal Thinkers

Or: Why the AGI Skeptics Are Right But Missing the Deeper Point

notesfromthecircus.com

Folk horror, sir? Yes, got it on tap. What's your poison? Let's see, we've classic remote, sinister village, that's our Withered Hill, very popular. Seaside is it, sir? You'll want the Scuttler's Cove. Gritty northern post-industrial horror? How about a Scratch Moss? www.canelo.co/authors/davi...

David Barnett | Canelo

About the author David Barnett

canelo.co

Home for the week

Some more context on this fuckup: https://mastodon.social/@colincornaby/117069185435215102 > BOTH projects were generated using Claude. So you have two people - both generating the same app from the same training data - having a public throw down over who copied who. Kind of embarrassing.

Baldur Bjarnason@baldurbjarnason.com · 3mo ago

“Mea Culpa - Dark Hours — Terry Godier” https://blog.terrygodier.com/2026/08/09/mea-culpa-dark-hours.html > it became clear to me that the web app I had launched using Claude was strikingly similar to his open source project, even reproducing a bug he had later fixed