Jamie McHale

Sun, 05 Jul 2026 07:42:30 +0100

Currently reading: Age of Reason by Jean Paul Sartre 📚

Fri, 26 Jun 2026 07:27:59 +0100

“I do think that if I had to choose one word to which hope can be tied,” Illich once said, “it is hospitality.” In the same context, he also claimed that “if there is something like a political life to be, to remain for us, in this world of technology, then it begins with friendship.” “Therefore my task,” he explained, “is to cultivate disciplined, self-denying, careful, tasteful friendships. Mutual friendships always. I and you, and I hope a third one, out of which perhaps community can grow. Because perhaps here we can find what the good is.”

Thu, 25 Jun 2026 21:54:05 +0100

🔗 AI 174- You’re It, TheZvi

Ethan Mollick: Decisions about how to use AI in your organization are increasingly organizational design and strategy decisions, not IT choices: How do you integrate agents into your firm? What intelligence will you outsource? What are the boundaries of the firm? What is the role of people?

Thu, 25 Jun 2026 21:53:18 +0100

🔗 Everyone Arguing About Whether the Midjourney Scanner Can Replace An…, Matt Schwartz

The Bitter Lesson is simple. AI gets powerful when you feed it raw, unfiltered data and let learning, search, and compute to the work.

Tue, 16 Jun 2026 08:08:00 +0100

🔗 Agency IS a Virtue, Actually, Dr. Gena Gorlin

The hardest part of “just doing things” is having things you want to do. Figuring out what you want, and integrating your wants so that they amplify rather than inhibit one another, is essential to the kind of decisive action we associate with High Agency. But having clarity on what you want is not something that just happens to you, at least not for long; it is something you need to build and maintain using your agency. And this includes actively and honestly reflecting on your ideas of what is right and good, lest these ideas end up guilting and inhibiting you more than they guide and inspire you.

Sat, 06 Jun 2026 18:20:34 +0100

Went to see the flamingoes in the wetlands near Bouzigues. Great to see them in the wild! Wish I’d brought my longer lens!

Sat, 06 Jun 2026 18:15:53 +0100

Went back to Mèze today, with a little more sun than last time. Lovely port with restaurants, just a short walk from a small beach. Perfect wee family day.

Thu, 04 Jun 2026 17:42:19 +0100

Mèze 🇫🇷

Wed, 03 Jun 2026 15:08:08 +0100

Spending the week near Étang de Thau in the south of France. Beautiful weather and good food! 📸🇫🇷

Fri, 29 May 2026 08:59:04 +0100

A couple of highlights on AI and writing:

🔗 Slop Readers, Jacob Falkovich

Here’s the trick: the substance comes from volition, and the volition, for now, is all human. LLMs can’t write good if you tell them “write something for my catering page”. You’re not giving them any substance, and they won’t bring their own. LLMs write fine enough if you tell them exactly what you want to say and to whom and how, the whole structure of argument and motivation and your personal connection to it. But if you get that far, why let Claude be the only one who hears what you wanted to say? Just publish the prompt.

🔗 We Need a Name for This, Because Armin Is Putting…, Drew Breunig

We need a name for this, because Armin is putting his finger on a problem that’s everywhere: people running their writing through an LLM because they think it makes it clearer, when in actuality it sands off all the detail.

Thu, 28 May 2026 22:09:20 +0100

🔗 Norma Sancho’s on AI and Education

So, the question is not only: “Are students using AI to avoid thinking?” The question is also: “What kind of economy and educational system has made a robot feel more viable, attentive, more dialogic, and more intellectually available than the institution charging students for a degree?” If we want students to think first and use ChatGPT later, then someone has to care about their thinking before ChatGPT enters the room.

Sun, 10 May 2026 09:13:48 +0100

Jack watching the boat at Brighouse with his gran 📸

Thu, 07 May 2026 21:13:58 +0100

Long Meg and Her Daughters. Neolithic stone circle, near Penrith. ~3000 BC 📸

Thu, 07 May 2026 17:17:57 +0100

Family day out at Lowther Castle near Penrith. Great adventure playground and a series of gardens to visit. 📸

Tue, 05 May 2026 21:08:16 +0100

Day out at the National Railway Museum in York. The attached WonderLab was good family fun with a giant ball run and pneumatic tubes.

Mon, 04 May 2026 20:28:45 +0100

Lovely sunny day out at Piglets Adventure Farm near York. Recommended for a family summer day. Gocarts, pedal tractor, wee beach area were all favourites.

Mon, 04 May 2026 20:27:31 +0100

Train journey down the east coast with the boy

Fri, 17 Apr 2026 22:15:45 +0100

🔗 Video:

Why would we expect that people can develop and pitch a great idea for a novel interface without ever using and iterating upon a real working version of that interface? Non-programming designers are trying to invent something in an interactive medium without being able to make something meaningfully interactive. And so much of invention is about intimacy with the materials and about tight feedback and about sensitive observation and authentic use. So, it’s a catch-22. To enter into proper dialogue with their medium, a non-programmer needs to get help from a programmer. And that generally requires the idea to Be at least somewhat legible and compelling.

Fri, 17 Apr 2026 21:27:13 +0100

🔗 What Will Be Scarce?, Alex Imas

The same economic forces that moved 40% of the American workforce off farms and into factories and offices will move workers out of automatable commodity production and into what I’ll call the relational sector. By this I mean the human-intensive, provenance-rich, sometimes artisanal part of the economy where the human aspect is part of the value of the good or service itself. The economics of scarcity won’t disappear, it’ll just relocate.

Boutique, prestige, local, status enhancing, caring

Fri, 17 Apr 2026 20:13:48 +0100

🔗 Against Taste - by Will Manidis - Minutes, Substack

This is what the taste thesis gets exactly backwards. The patron who built the cathedral was not exercising taste. He was exercising will. He was exercising worship. And that will was devoted to something beyond himself — towards God, towards the city, towards a future he would not live to see. Strip the transcendent out and what remains is consumption. However exquisite the eye, however refined the palate, however flawless the Queen Anne proportions — the activity is acquisition. And the acquisition leads nowhere.

Sun, 12 Apr 2026 16:20:08 +0100

Kite weather at Portobello. Food at The Beach House (their portion sizes seem to be better these days), then along to the play park. Teaching Jack how to ride his new pedal bike along the front.🪁📸

Tue, 07 Apr 2026 07:40:01 +0100

🔗 How Social Media Shortens Your Life - by Gurwinder, Substack

I don’t fancy meditating in graveyards, or lugging a human skull around, so I make my own memento mori from words I can repeat to myself. If years were letters, the average human lifespan would not be longer than this sentence.

Sun, 05 Apr 2026 11:49:04 +0100

Happy Easter folks!

Sat, 04 Apr 2026 22:20:09 +0100

🔗 The Ozempicization of the Economy, kyla scanlon

What’s being sold as personal control is not actually control. Control would go beyond the individual, to mean affordability and functional institutions and to quote Kayyeem, a government that actually governs What’s being sold instead is the feeling of individual control through the bet, the hack, the feed, the subscription, the optimization

Sat, 04 Apr 2026 22:01:39 +0100

🔗 You Are Not a Function, Brendan McCord

In a world where your economic value can evaporate overnight, “Become a whole person” sounds like advice from someone who has never worried about next month’s rent. The utilitarian case for education has the force of necessity behind it. For millions of people, making yourself useful is what responsibility to their families demands. Yet if the response to being replaceable is always to train for a different function, you have entered a race you structurally cannot win. The principle that makes your education valuable is the same principle that makes you disposable the moment the function migrates.