Scéil Eile

Finished reading: The Narrow Corridor by Daron Acemoglu 📚

Both fascinating and disturbing. The content about the Weimar Republic sent a shiver down my spine. History doesn’t repeat but it can rhyme. Don’t take democracy for granted.

Bathing shelter Bull Wall.

How Fighting Monopoly Can Save Journalism | Washington Monthly

policy makers enabled the emergence of a new kind of monopoly that engages in a broad range of deeply anticompetitive business practices. These include, most significantly, the cornering of advertising markets, which historically provided the primary means of financing journalism. This is the colossal policy failure that has effectively destroyed the economic foundations of a free press

Soft Day

Multilingual Dublin.

All good things come to an end. I sat in from of my first Apple machine in 1986 and have been an Apple fanboy ever since. No more. As an EU citizen, I found their communication yesterday re new App Store rules condescending in the extreme.

2023 letter | Dan Wang

Fascinating as always. Will need to re read a few times.

How We Crowdfunded $750,000 for a Giant Book about Keyboard History | by Glenn Fleishman | Jan, 2024 | Medium

The book project Shift Happens raised over $750,000 via crowdfunding on Kickstarter in February 2023. Author Marcin Wichary hired me six years ago — first as editor and later adding the role of project manager — for this sprawling enterprise. People have asked us since: how did you raise such a huge sum for a book? A book on keyboards?! And it’s 1,216 pages long?!

Fascinating.

Incoming storm Isha is looking pretty nasty.

The future of long distance train services through the Channel Tunnel - Jon Worth

A very deep dive. Passport control now a major factor in slowing things down.

The Lazy Tyranny of the Wait Calculation - by Ethan Mollick

The teams I worked with did valuable research, and the effort produced teaching experiences with real impact, but, at some point, if we could have anticipated the evolution of AI, we could have waited.

An interesting thought exercise.

The incredible shrinking podcast industry | Semafor

The dominant podcasting platform had begun switching off automatic downloads for users who haven’t listened to five episodes of a show in the last two weeks

Calm

Ireland’s Eye

John Battelle’s Search Blog Predictions 2024: It’s All About The Data

What truly matters here is how consumer expectations will shift toward a model where each of us is feels in control of our core public personae independent of any tech platform.

‘It is a long time since Santa has been in our house’: Scenes of joy at Dublin Airport as families return for Christmas – The Irish Times

Parents hugged their adult children with a ferocity borne of the pain of absence..

Can confirm. I was one of these parents this year.

Adding the RSS feed of a Bluesky account to NetNewsWire is super easy.

It’s a windy day here today and it’s fascinating looking at live electricity generation dashboards for the grids in Britain and Ireland.

National Grid Live This dashboard is by Kate Morley

EirGrid Smart Grid Dashboard

Noticing a lot of Irish early Twitter adopters getting comfortable in Threads.

Read earlier about a bunch of crypto enthusiasts in the US raising almost $80m to support preferred candidates in elections next year.

Contrasting that with the Irish system where the maximum any politician or candidate can accept from an individual or corporate donor in a year is €1,000.

iA Writer Test Please Ignore.

Threads is very slick. Interesting times with these platforms and protocols.

Happy to hear that the European Council has decided to open accession negotiations with Ukraine and Moldova.

Cop28 is a farce rigged to fail, but there are other ways we can try to save the planet | George Monbiot | The Guardian

Since the climate negotiations began in 1992 more carbon dioxide from burning fossil fuels has been released worldwide than in all preceding human history.