Bricks and mortar bookshops making a comeback in the United States

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Bricks and mortar bookshops making a comeback in the United States

30 April 2026

Andy Hunter, CEO and founder of indie bookseller Bookshop.org, talking recently with Shannon Cudd of Fast Company:

“People are really galvanizing around bookstores as a force for good in our culture,” he says. “You see that in the fact that there are about 70% more bookstores now than there were six years ago in the United States. After 20 years of declining numbers, they’re coming roaring back.”

This can only be a good thing.

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America, books, bookshops, trends

Born again social network Friendster aims to resurrect real-life friends networks

29 April 2026

Even after Friendster stopped being a social network I still checked in on the website from time to time. It’s evidently been a while since I did that though.

Last time I looked, Friendster — having gone through a number of changes in direction — was a gaming platform, but, as I’ve learned, ceased operations in 2015.

After almost a decade in the wilderness, American developer and entrepreneur Mike Carson has revived the old virtual community, but things are little bit different this time around.

When I signed up (again) I needed to install the Friendster app on my phone, even though there is a website. The biggest difference, that I can see so far, is in the way you connect with other people.

Instead of searching for people you might know, friending people on the new Friendster requires doing so in person. In order to connect, you and your prospective friend need to scan codes on each other’s phones. I’m no Snapchat power user, but I think they do, or did, something similar.

Friending acquaintances face-to-face means friends networks may be somewhat smaller than some social network users are accustomed to, but as copy on the website tells us, Friendster is “built for real-life friends”. That’s a feature that will certainly appeal to some people.

Friction-maxxing, a buzzword to restore balance to your life force

24 April 2026

Canadian author and researcher Kathryn Jezer-Morton documented friction-maxxing in an article (paywalled) for The Cut, in January this year. Weeks later, a Wikipedia page was published about the phenomenon. Is that, then, why friction-maxxing is now referred to as a cultural trend?

For the uninitiated, Wikipedia defines friction-maxxing thusly:

Friction-maxxing is the practice of intentionally choosing less convenient options in daily life to build tolerance for discomfort, resist technology-driven ease, and preserve what proponents describe as meaningful human experiences.

I’ve been seeing references to plain old friction, chiefly across the blogosphere, well before January though. Bloggers using the term in their writing were suggesting there ideally/always needed to be a certain difficulty in what we do, whatever that is. This because we’ve somehow come to expect everything we do to be simple and effortless.

I probably live relatively straightforwardly. I work, then I don’t work. I don’t run marathons, climb mountains, or cross oceans in a sail boat. It seems to me if you want more friction in your life, those sorts of activities make a good start. Friction-maxxing, on the other hand, suggests relying less on automated and algorithm-powered goods and services. And AI.

Instead of ordering food delivery, you should prepare the meal yourself. Rather than dictate notes, or type into a notes apps, you should hand write them on paper. Instead of setting up meetings on video calls, you should arrange a face-to-face gathering. Instead of texting or emailing, you should call, and speak to someone, or meet in person. Frightening, no?

For my part, maybe I should, for instance, see movies at the cinema, not stream them in the frictionless comfort of our home. I’ll let you know how that goes.

The big tech companies and social media platforms tell us “boredom, social awkwardness, and effortful thinking”, among other things, are problems to be eliminated. And now that they have been, so we’re told, friction-maxxing is required to make life trickier again. To restore the balance.

Talking of social media though, to instantly increase friction, reduce, or dispense with social media, set up a personal website, and start blogging. That’ll be a source of friction for months.

But in a world where public transport doesn’t run to timetable, traffic gets gridlocked, computers freeze, websites fail to load, phones find themselves in an area with no reception, the coffee grinder at the cafe breaks just as you arrive, you’re caught out by off-app, non-forecast rain in an open, unsheltered space, who needs to be creating friction?

But none of this is really friction, it’s simply life. Annoyances we must deal with. But it keeps us on our toes, and alive. I’m not then convinced by this… cultural trend.

It seems to me embracing friction-maxxing is an attempt to conceal some other, possibly deeper malady. It’s a smoke screen. A marketing term even. Friction-maxxing is akin to putting a band-aid, not on a small cut or scratch, but something far more serious. Something that likely requires proper diagnosis and treatment. If something’s wrong, distractions are not an ideal solution.

Claude Mythos identifies hundreds of bugs in Firefox browser code

23 April 2026

Brian Fagioli, writing for NERDS.xyz:

Something interesting is happening inside Mozilla, and it is not your typical browser update story. With Firefox 150, the team says it fixed 271 vulnerabilities after turning AI loose on its own codebase. That is not a typo. Two hundred seventy one.

Mozilla engineers uncovered the astonishing haul of bugs in Firefox’s code after turning to Claude Mythos, an AI agent that has rattled the tech sector on account of its stealth and sophistication, and fears it could be manipulated by bad actors.

Helping make software used by millions of people safer however, is for today at least, a positive.

Em dashes mean AI wrote for you, am dashes mean you did the writing

22 April 2026

If you subscribe to the notion that the presence of em dashes (—) in a body of text means — in the AI age — the piece must have been composed by an AI agent, you could consider using am dashes instead. Yes, that’s right: an am dash, as opposed to an em dash.

The am dash looks a little like a tilde (~) but with a slightly longer, flat mid horizontal section, between the curly ends. Its creators are calling the am dash a punctuation mark — don’t things likes need to be ratified first? — and, in addition, claim it is unusable by AI.

The am dash may be unusable by AI agents at the moment, but as we’ve seen, AI learns quickly, and copies even faster. If you want to use the am dash in your writing, you’ll need to download one of two typefaces, which the new punctuation mark is inherent to.

By the way, I’m not being flippant when I suggest the am dash needs official recognition as a punctuation mark. I say so, because it seems to me readers unfamiliar with the am dash might think it’s an error, a typo. Maybe even an AI agent attempting to render an em dash, but botching it.

My website is ninety-two percent not ready for AI agents

20 April 2026

This is where we’re at now. Your website needs to be AI agent ready, or it presumably no longer makes the grade. I scored eight out one-hundred. Can I get a badge?

I’m not sure though disassociated is a website AI agents have any interest in anyway.

In any event, AI agent readiness is the new SEO. Since responses to search queries are AI summaries, your website likely no longer features in search engine results. And if it does, chances are no one will click through anyway. They’ll be content with the AI search summary.

But, you may be rewarded with a visitor or two, if an AI agent is able to use information you published, in response to a question (prompt) posed, provided the agent lists your website as a source. We should all be thanking our lucky stars.

I have all sorts of work to do, meanwhile, if I want my website to be AI agent ready. Work that I probably don’t have the time to do. For one, “support” here for Markdown is non-existent.

But, might a low AI agent ready score aid in keeping AI scrapers away? Somehow I doubt it. Even if a website is deemed “low quality” on account of its poor readiness score, I can’t see information hungry AI scrapers ignoring whatever content they can get their hands on.

Tom Rothman calls on cinemas to screen films, not trailers and ads

17 April 2026

That’s the upshot of what Rothman, CEO of Sony’s Motion Picture Group, said at CinemaCon, held in Las Vegas, in the United States, this week, says Brent Lang, writing for Variety:

At CinemaCon, the annual exhibition industry conference unfolding this week in Las Vegas, Rothman bluntly told the cinema operators in the audience at Caesars Palace that they needed to cut back on the trailers and commercials that can last for roughly 30 minutes before the opening credits even roll.

It’s been sometime since I saw a movie in an actual cinema (an Australian cinema). We just about always stream movies at home now. I don’t know then if local film-goers are subjected to thirty-minutes of ads and trailers, prior to a screening — euphemistically called pre-feature entertainment — as appears to be the case in parts of the United States.

If memory serves, when I first started going to cinemas to see films — streaming was not a thing then — a few trailers and a small selection of ads were all we saw.

The whole thing lasted no more than ten minutes. If that. I don’t know who paid attention to the ads — not me — but I’d usually look at the trailers. Back then, trailer screenings were just about the only way to learn about upcoming film releases.

Whatever, the trailer/ad segment was usually considered to be a buffer, affording late arrivals a few minutes grace before the main feature commenced. Pre-feature entertainment was also an opportunity to buy snacks and drinks before the screening.

One Sydney cinema I once went to regularly, didn’t hold back in this regard. “You still have time to visit the candy-bar before the film starts”, the audience would be informed, part way through the trailer/ad segment. A shrewd business model if ever there was one. Make advertisers pay to promote their goods and services, while oblivious patrons are downstairs buying popcorn.

I doubt the practice would surprise Rothman. He also noted reserved seating meant cinema-goers were not entering the auditorium until just before the feature screening starts, sparing themselves the prolonged pre-feature entertainment anyway.

I might, by the way, sound critical of watching movies at a cinema. While I’m definitely an adherent of home streaming, I used to — ten to fifteen years ago — almost live at the cinema. Something the then staff of a place I was a regular at, could attest to. Back then I also used to write a lot about film here. Not so much now though. Plus, there is no nearby cinema where we are now based.

Streaming then — minus unwanted ads and trailers — it is.

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film, movies, technology, trends

Hampshire College, a liberal arts university, to close

16 April 2026

Not good news. Word that the university, located in the American state of Massachusetts, is to close. I didn’t go to university after leaving high school, couldn’t decide what to study, but maybe a liberal arts degree might have been a good fit.

If I’d known, back in the day, such courses even existed.

And while a number of local tertiary education institutions offer liberal arts courses, I believe Australia only has one dedicated liberal arts uni, Campion College, situated in Toongabbie, in Sydney’s west, which opened in 2006.

If liberal arts degrees are new to you, here’s how Campion describes the course:

We celebrate the humanities at the heart of the Western intellectual tradition — literature, philosophy, theology, history, and the study of languages and culture. These disciplines are not simply subjects to be learned; they are the foundations of a rich education that shapes the whole person and has guided human flourishing for centuries.

I’ve heard it said liberal arts degrees are for those interested in everything, but nothing in particular.

This is sort of thing no longer desirable? University courses catering for people with broad interests, rather than something more focused? It would be unfortunate if that were so, and was resulting in the closure of places such as Hampshire College.

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education, philosophy, trends

Mark Zuckerberg will exist as the forever Meta CEO as an AI clone

15 April 2026

Claudia Efemini writing for The Guardian:

The AI clone of Zuckerberg, Meta’s founder and chief executive, is being trained on his mannerisms and tone as well as his public statements and thoughts on company strategy.

Ostensibly Zuckerberg’s AI clone will allow tens-of-thousands of Meta employees “access” to their CEO, someone whom they never see in person, no matter how long their tenure at the company.

Of course employees won’t actually be interacting with Zuckerberg, something anyone “connecting” with the ai-CEO (does that seem like a good title for such an entity?) will be acutely aware of.

I doubt it’s Zuckerberg’s intention to remain CEO of Meta after his death by way of an AI clone — ignoring for a moment the legalities of such a premise — but the technology Meta is developing has the potential to make the scenario a possibility.

AI must be integrated into everything because it is AI

14 April 2026

Han Lee:

Every company, every function, every individual contributor is expected to close the AI gap. Ship AI features. Build agents. Automate workflows. That nobody on the team has ever trained a model, designed an evaluation system, or debugged a retrieval system is beside the point. Conviction is sufficient.

AI technologies must be integrated into every aspect of our professional and personal lives, not because AI is worthy, but because we should simply just do so.

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