Struan Donald

Asunder by Kerstin Hall

Drops you right in and lets you work it out as you go. A road trip and a mystery of capricious gods, weird magic and distrust. Loads of lovely ideas.

We should have more trains

I got two episodes in to Wonder Man and have got no further. I was enjoying Ben Kingsley but everything else about it was just painful

Imagine you have two machines. One you can open up and examine all of its workings, and if you give it every picture of a cat on the whole internet, it can reliably distinguish cats trom non-cats. The other is a black box and it can also reliably distinguish cats from non-cats if you give it half a dozen pictures of cats, some apple sauce, and a hug. These machines sort of do the same thing, but even without knowing how the second one works 1 am extremely confident in saying it doesn't work the same way as the first one.

A.I Isn’t People www.todayintabs.com/p/a-i-isn-t-...

Oh, like just boxes but with no processors inside. Nvidia throwing shade very subtly

I bet Keir really treasures that scale model

I would simply ban algorithmic feeds and reccomendations

Brewhamia redecorated?

Looking forward to your assessment of where the characters sit on the democratic values matrix

lots of confidence all the way down

Give the chain isn’t on the chainring at the front that sort of looks normal so I’m not sure what the problem is

ooi what are you replacing it with?

The Bright Sword by Lev Grossman

Deeply anachronistic and I suspect it might annoy people who know more about Arthurian myth than my saw Excalibur thirty years ago knowledge, but super fun on the world post Arthur. Feels both modern and also old and does some interesting things.

The Familiar, by Leigh Bardugo

Books I have enjoyed this year, an ongoing thread for my own amusement. Will be sci-fi/fantasy forward.

Good bit of magical realism in inquisition era Spain. More magical than real tbf, doesn’t quote stick the landing for me and her YA origins are visible in the cracks. Enjoyable and immersive

I do think it is possible to use algorithms and machine learning to make things that say something about the human condition but I don’t think you can do that well in medium that cares about engagement over insight

I think there’s a lot of people who see social media as entertainment and so as long as it’s entertaining how the content is generated doesn’t matter. I am more on the social rather than media side so adding more algorithmic content feels like a loss

Prompted to Panic | Weeknotes #424 - thejaymo Moltbook is a Reddit-shaped doll’s house for language machines. A wearied note on why the discourse has been so strange.

This is good on how moltbook looking like a social network is causing some wild takes about What It Means. The where we are going bit of this feels very grim meathook future to me rather than exciting though thejaymo.net/2026/02/02/4...

one step away from getting it printed on a t shirt for your birthday

Trip to the big city and for the first time I have seen a starlink advert, someone using a folding phone and a tube escalator entirely lined in ads for a crypto platform featuring premiership footballers. Truly we live in times

So often I read things saying using AI will be more efficient but all they mean is it will be quicker

The only consistent thing in web development is that browsers are inconsistent

I've been to a prison that was built on the panopticon principles and it was deeply mad.

We should lobby for a transfer window and then we could do them in a nice batch

Microsoft is closing its employee library and cutting back on subscriptions Employees are expected to use new AI tools instead

The value of a library is its ability to expand the knowledge you currently have, not in the distillation of the knowledge in it. The reductive view much of the tech industry takes to learning and knowledge is just depressing

www.theverge.com/tech/862531/...

A lovely man who was one of the most continually surprising people I’ve met. We had a work thing at a venue with a DDR arcade machine. Mark walked over to it, stepped on and, as far as I was concerned, out of nowhere turned out to be very good at it. Absolutely delightful.

As a product manager I heard that you like containers

karmada.io

It is January 2026 and you are tired of people writing about AI so why not read one more thing by me to really tip you over the edge – exo.org.uk/blah/on-bicy... – in which a metaphor is examined and noticing is discussed

Of ants, Saul Bass, and lost dreams of a cybernetic ecology When Saul Bass released Phase IV in 1974, audiences expected a standard ecological horror film about mutant ants overrunning humanity. What they got instead was something stranger: a slow, geometric m...

@rodm.bsky.social assuming you have not already seen it this is probably of interest to you. I did not know there was an alternate ending www.ianbetteridge.com/of-ants-saul...

This made it into WebCurios 🎉

A smouldering thunderclap of a man brooded into the room, taut and sinewy as a stag. Jesamine could barely take her eyes off his stalking progress to ask “Who is that?”.
“That is the warband leader, Storm Goretti”.