Guardian Media Group today announced a strategic partnership with Open AI, a leader in artificial intelligence and deployment, that will bring the Guardian’s high quality journalism to ChatGPT’s global users…

Yeah, no. Subscription cancelled, and I told them why.

Along with posting more often on my own blog, I’ve also been trying to get back in the habit of reading others’ blogs more regularly. I followed a link recently to my old friend and colleague Daphne Chong’s site. I really loved her “Ode to Twitter”, especially this bit:

I feel a surprising pang thinking about Twitter going away, even though I don’t actively post on it today. There is more than a decade of me catalogued – a lot of my professional growth, and serendipitous connections. Even now, I can’t get some of that back…

Looking back on the thousands of tweets I imported over the weekend, I know exactly what she means. It was a big part of my life for a long time, and I’m sad that it ended the way it did.

A few years ago, I read an article about how FOX News’ goal was to make people afraid to leave their house. (I apologize for not remembering where I read this.) But that line stuck with me. Make people afraid to leave their house. Make people believe that the unknown is scary. Make people believe that otherness is scary.

Source: How to grow old • Buttondown

I loved this piece about staying curious, about being open to new experiences, and about the need to protect our entire community. “Even if, and especially when, some of it might have become unfamiliar to us. Because those might be the places where our curiosity takes it tomorrow.”

I saw this video linked on Bluesky a few days back, and I’ve spent the last two days bingeing the series. I’m almost up to the end. It’s great! This young guy is a rapper and a music geek who nevertheless hates musicals and somehow hasn’t ever seen Hamilton. He watches a couple songs at a time, pausing to react to what’s happening, call out motifs that are repeating, and analyse how the writing illustrates character. Needless to say, he ends up loving it and gets fully invested in the story. His enthusiasm is infectious.

It’s weird that a lot of the media I have consumed lately – Wolf Hall, The Tudors, and Conclave – revolves around cardinals and Popes. Yesterday I was talking about papal conclaves with Rodd and he told me in all seriousness that they check the genitals of every papal candidate these days. “What?! No way,” I scoffed. “Yes way! It’s because there was a lady Pope once. They even have a special chair,” he claimed. A few minutes of research later, I crowed as I revealed to him that the papal toilet chair is a myth. He remains disappointed.

A company in Tasmania has purchased an ecologically-damaged 5000-hectare property called The Quoin that they are restoring and rewilding. I was stunned when reading this story to realise that the folks behind this effort are my friends Cameron Adams and Lisa Miller from Canva.

The news story was linked on Metafilter, and here’s what I wrote as a comment there:

I was one of the early Canvanauts (as they call themselves), working there for 16 months across 2015-2016. The job involved a pretty serious pay cut for me, but I was burnt out after working in streaming video (“How many ads can we cram in this before people stop watching?”) and it was so nice to work on a product with no ads, and that people loved enough to pay for. Cam was a colleague and a friend, and I met Lisa and their kids on many occasions. Melanie (CEO) and Cliff (COO) interviewed me and I worked with them on a daily basis. I didn’t always agree with every decision they made, but it was clear to me that their ambition did not extend to screwing over users. Even back then, when Canva was far from the unicorn it is now, the founders put their principles into action. I remember in particular a company offsite in Manila (we had a large team there) where the entire company spent a day giving back. I went with a group of colleagues to a shelter for women and kids who had been sex-trafficked, and we played games and I taught them to knit and it was one of the most meaningful things I’ve done in my whole tech career.

It’s wild to me now to see people that I am still Facebook friends with referred to as some of the richest people in the country. No, billionaires shouldn’t exist. But I’m really happy to see that these three continue to do good with their fortunes, and I’m proud to have contributed in some tiny way to important projects like the Quoin in Tasmania.