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Meta is deleting links to Pixelfed, a decentralized Instagram competitor. On Facebook, the company is labeling links to Pixelfed.social as “spam” and deleting them immediately.
Straight from the Elmo playbook
After the last few years using exclusively Fuji cameras, bar a short test with a Ricoh GRiiix, I am sorry to say I’ve switched back to Sony. There are a few reasons for this, but this is in no way a justification or a reason why I think they suck, merely my thoughts on the subject as a few people have asked. This won’t be a very elegant post, just a few points I feel are worth raising.
Auto Focus
“Why don’t you just manual focus like a real photographer?” I hear them shout back to my pathetic moaning. The truth is, when I got my first Fuji camera after selling all my Sony gear about 4 years ago, I thought the autofocus sucked. It didn’t. Granted, it wasn’t as good as I was used to with my Sony A7iii, but after a bit of experimentation I got used to its quirks and found it pretty reliable for the types of photography I wanted to do.
Since getting the XT5 I felt a decline in performance from the autofocus, particularly AFC, which affected my enjoyment. In street photography there can be fleeting moments and I missed quite a few of them because of poor or slow autofocus. Recent firmware updates have promised to fix this but have indeed made it worse! This came to a head around a month ago when camped out waiting for a shot I had lined up. After more than 45 minutes of waiting for subjects, the autofocus kept letting me down.
It was as they call it, the straw that broke the camel’s back.
Build Quality
There has also been a significant decline in build quality. My trusty XT3 felt like a masterpiece and was a delight to use. As was my X100V. Solid, reliable and nice to use. Whereas the XT5 had creaky doors covering the ports and seemed to be made for the scratchiest plastic they could find.
It never let me down in the short time I had it, but it didn’t fill me full of confidence, and I know others have had problems with cracking, whether sealing and other minor issues. Fujifilm seems more concerned with purposely restricting manufacturing than actually making good cameras.
I Miss The Joy
There are things I will miss from Fuji Cameras, particularly how enjoyable they are to use with top dials for settings, but they lost the joy I had when first using them due to the above issues. I don’t make any money from my photography, and these frustrations got in my way of having a good time when out and about.
Sony cameras often feel too sterile and boring. Perfect for a pro workhorse but missing something special. However, the A7CR that I picked up, with a 50 mm prime, feels at least a little like a Leica and has brought me back at least some enjoyment.
Kōdō Shimon writing about the rise in AI ‘Street Photography’
Street photography isn’t just about getting images. It’s about being present in the world, engaging with fellow humans, finding the courage to put yourself in uncomfortable situations.
I should preface my thoughts on this with the fact that I am not against LLMs’ use as an assistive tool. I do so daily and am a big fan of what they can do for my life and my productivity (yes, I just threw up a bit typing that word out).
What I really hate is the use of AI to create an end product that means absolutely nothing. I have been quite into this, creating supporting images for my blog posts with AI because I thought it was needed, but I quickly realised that it completely misses the point.
The whole point of looking at a photo is because it captures a point in time that happened. I won’t get into the whole “what is a photo?” debate here because photographers can manipulate it, play with colours, and enhance the effects present in the image. But it still happened. At some point, a sensor captured the photo and processed the image of a real-world event.
This is what evokes the emotions. The ability to see the image and reflect on it happening. Otherwise, what is the point? For street photography in particular, this is one of my passions, and creating it artificially defeats the whole purpose of the genre. When I take photos, I want to show the beauty and the art in everyday life. From the small details you miss when you don’t look deeper.
Other street photographers capture moments that may never be repeated. Events and people that are frozen in time as a reference point of things that happened. As pointed out in the post, the use of AI to recreate these types of photos represents
“the collapse of meaning in our rush to simulate experience rather than live it”. The end product is the only concern, producing an image instead of creating a photo. “emulation versus native execution” as Kōdō puts it.
When I take photos, I am engrossed in the world like no other experience can reproduce. It is very much like meditation, enabling me to think about nothing else than spotting beautiful details of everyday life that you may consider mundane. It is an experience, and I like to think that transfers through the resultant image.
Remove all of this out of the process, and it completely misses the point. You get nothing more than a throwaway arrangement of pixels that means absolutely nothing — but then again, forgettable media seems to be what the world revolves around now.
Manuel Moreale writing Kindness in a transactional world
Kindness is the reason why I’m doing this. There’s no other reason. I don’t care about getting a reward. I care about showing people that in this stupid transactional world, we can still be kind to one another. We can still help someone, even if we’ll get nothing in return.
Manuel’s posts are some of my favourite to read online. Through provoking, and revolving around pushing to the web. So I may find references to his work all over my blog because of how similar they feel to my thoughts. Particularly when it comes to writing and publishing for free.
Getting paid for doing something you enjoy is every person’s dream, yet when I think about getting paid for writing online, I would dread it. I enjoy it much more when my motivation is just for the fun of it. To be kind and put out my thoughts, ideas, and solutions to problems into the world and hope they help someone in a similar position.
As I have written before, I see my place in this world as being for others. I always put myself last, and I am perfectly fine with doing so because the things I do are because I like being kind. I want my actions to show that in a world that seems to value return on investment and monitoring even part of your life, you don’t need to live like that.
Manton Reece pondering about free trials whist at the coffee shop:
At the coffee shop this morning I asked the barista to make my latte before I paid for it so I could try it first. Wait, no. Because demos and trials are an important complement to things that need thought and time and money, like a $40 app. But does $5 software need a trial? What about if it’s $1?
In discussions around software, it’s easy to draw comparisons to physical products like coffee, but these analogies often fail to capture the unique nature of digital tools. While I understand the reasoning behind such comparisons, they don’t hold up under scrutiny—particularly when discussing something as nuanced as software trials.
Take coffee, for example. It’s a physical, tangible product. When you order a coffee, you know what you’re getting, even if the quality or flavour varies slightly. You won’t ask for a coffee and end up with something entirely unexpected, like a cup of vinegar. There’s a general understanding of the outcome, and the decision-making process is relatively straightforward.
Software, however, is entirely different. Its value and functionality are often abstract until experienced first-hand. Even with detailed descriptions, videos, and user reviews, it’s nearly impossible to fully grasp what a platform offers without direct interaction. This is especially true for platforms that serve specific use cases or offer unique capabilities that might not be immediately clear to new users.
This is where trials come into their own. A trial provides potential users with a hands-on experience, letting them explore the platform and see how it fits into their workflow. For established platforms like WordPress, Ghost or Todoist, extensive documentation and community resources can complement the trial experience, but for platforms with less widespread adoption, trials are even more critical. They bridge the gap between curiosity and commitment, allowing users to make an informed decision.
Imagine arriving at a software platform’s website with very little information on, which is the case with micro.blog, without a clear understanding of what the service offers, it’s challenging to assess its value. A trial in this context isn’t just helpful—it’s essential. It removes barriers, eliminates guesswork, and allows potential users to discover the platform’s strengths for themselves.
By offering a trial, software platforms create an invitation to explore, reducing friction and encouraging a broader audience to engage. For some services, this approach has proven invaluable in growing a loyal user base and showcasing the platform’s potential in ways that static explanations simply cannot achieve.
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News publishers can choose between the standard YouTube embedded player or a version designed specifically for them, which gives greater control over the ads experience, but removes YouTube branding and links back to YouTube. This version provides publishers greater control over the ads running on their videos, but YouTube doesn’t have visibility into which ads are served.
Am I the only person that things this makes perfect sense to both YouTube and the publisher?
Don’t worry, this isn’t the usual post about AI and it stealing everyone’s content. That’s true, of course, but this post is a bit different — although still AI-adjacent.
As is customary around this time of year, I start to think about my goals for the following year and, more importantly, the tools I am going to use to get to them. I usually start with digital things because my analogue choices are far easier and much more enjoyable. The first thing on my list is typically my note-taking and writing app.
After going around the houses more than a few times, it all boils down to two really — iA Writer and Ulysses. I always end up sticking with the tried and true on Ulysses, but there are a few features that I really like on iA Writer. The developers really think about what their app needs to do, but also how its usage affects the web as a whole. The best reflection of their shared thinking is arguably one of the best features I have seen for a long time, Authorship.
Born of a desire to see version control like changes, Authorship saves the state of your document, and then anything you pasted in is shown as dimmed. Keeping tabs on what you actually wrote and what has been appropriated is beneficial when researching topics and ensures you reference all of your work correctly. However, it goes much deeper than this when viewed in a world full of Ai.
It also remembers what ChatGPT wrote for you, and now with the launch of writing tools on Apple devices, what Apple Intelligence changed during a proofread. Why this doesn’t exist at an OS level I am not sure, but this has proved invaluable for me already, and means, of course, I am experimenting again — at least to see how good (or not) Apple Intelligence is.
I love the fact that the iA Writer developers have thought to develop a feature that should exist everywhere. I often wanted to see changes editors made to my writing before publishing but couldn’t be bothered to compare it in depth. That is how you become a better writer. Perhaps this information should be transferable to the webpage on publish?
I’m happy for readers to see what I wrote and what the super-intelligent spell check updated for me. I might launch it as a comedy B-side. With this said, I do feel that there’s some responsibility for those that post to the internet and particularly bloggers to ensure what they are posting is their own work. Removing all the arguments that LLMs stole all of our work, it still rests on our shoulders to ensure the web we all know and love remains genuine.
I would love to find a way we could ensure that the people we follow, and possibly even support, have full authorship. It might be words, or photos or increasingly video that AI muscles into, and I would rather not live in a world where we are not sure if you created what you post or not. We place a lot of trust in the things we consume online and with entertainment being provided increasingly by sole creators it would be nice to know it was all their own work.
On a recent Vergecast, Nilay and David were chatting about the very real idea that the current state of streaming services is just cable TV all over again. Of course, they are correct, but they also kept coming back to the idea that the only services that make a serious amount of money are those that convince people to make the content for free. The best example of this is YouTube, and I just don’t see it that way.
I understand some people do. My son used to watch a huge amount of gaming content and toy reviews when he was younger. People I follow online seem to really value YouTube Premium to remove ads from one of their most used services. Yet I balk at the £12.99 per month cost because I don’t see any value outside of finding information on how to do things.
Don’t get me wrong, when a new phone comes out, or there’s an interesting camera I want to take a look at, YouTube is where I head to find video reviews. However, I think most of that is because web searching is so broken that it’s the only place I can reliably find what I am looking for. To me YouTube is transactional. I want to watch a few reviews of a new gadget, and that’s the place to find them all in one place. Outside of that, YouTube is a resource on the same level as Wikipedia.
I visit it often when something breaks in the house. The vacuum has yet another toy stuck in it, and I need to know how to take it apart. Or my heater is leaking, and I need to know if I can undo this screw or not. I can’t imagine YouTube being the place I go to watch something in the evening instead of Netflix — but clearly lots of people do.
Many years ago I tried, but I spent even more time trying to find something to watch than I would do in the Netflix never-ending carousel. Do people really sift through all the garbage to find something worth watching? What is there that’s worth my time? Certainly not Mr Beast or Fortnite streamers.
The best feeling in my online life is when I have inspiration for a post and I open a fresh sheet in Ulysses. Just then, right before I start typing my garbled English onto the sheet and ruin the whole thing, that is an electric feeling that anything could happen.
Maybe I write a really great post, everyone loves it and I get loads of comments and replies. Writers I love begin posting link posts to it, and this fantastic post is referenced all over the web. Massive publications invite me to write op-ed’s for them and send me big cheques in the post.
Or maybe no one reads it. It gets buried in the constant stream of other blog posts being written. Drowned out by all the noise from influencers and stupid vertical videos of people dancing about. Perhaps it contains a stupid typo and I offend someone, meaning I lose my job and become homeless. My wife leaves me due to the embarrassment of writing ‘form’ instead of ‘from’, and now my kids hate me.
Perhaps I won’t bother. It was a stupid idea in the first place anyway.
After more than 40 years (yes, I am old) I am well aware of needing massive barriers in the way of my bad habits. I have very little self-control when it comes to dopamine boosting things, and my phone is the worst.
I realise how pathetic that is. Over the years, I’ve given advice which is regurgitated from that which I receive (often unrequested) multiple times. To simply stop. Much like an addict l, because that is what I am of sorts, I’ve tried too hard too quickly and slowly returned to ‘normal’.
This is a personality weakness that unfortunately I just can’t overcome. Hence, why I need to babysit myself and treat myself like an idiot. A title that I well deserve because I can’t put the shinny thing with bright flashing colours down and live in the world.
So in steps Screen Time. Yes, that truly pathetic attempt and virtue signalling that Apple introduced with iOS12 six years ago. It’s slow, it uses unnecessary battery life at times, and it’s easy to get around. Let me tell you though — it works.
Typically, the criticism with Screen Time is that it is too easy to bypass. That instead Apple should have built some kind of phone jail to keep people like me out in times of weakness. Instead, I think it strikes the right balance. By putting a simple screen in between me taping the icon and opening the app ensures I think about if I do want to open the app. Something the popular Opal app charges a fortune for.
It puts just enough friction between me and something that won’t benefit my future self, and still being able to use the app if I need to. I have set downtime for the times I want to switch off and also limits to some apps for each day. Babysitting myself works really well, because my monkey mind just can’t stay away.