Colm Doyle

How much of this inauguration is going to be religious leaders?

The number of politicians and media outlets who will pontificate on the dangers of the far right, whilst simultaneously posting about it on X drives me kind of batty.

There is no law that says you have to post there. You can just stop. It literally financially contributes to the problem.

It’s the height of hubris to assume that your contribution is so valuable that you’re too good for the other levels of civic society and *have* to go right for the top job.

The Presidency is not a place to cut your teeth in politics. If you want to contribute to society, there’s lots of places you can start off. Run for council, work at a NGO, heck run for the Dáil if you want.

It’s reasonable to say that it’s perhaps too hard to get on the ballot for President in Ireland, but I think it’s also reasonable to say that constitutionally the highest office in the land, and maybe it should be hard to get on that ballot.

It also subtlety elevates these non-runner candidates to the same level as people with a reasonable chance of winning, which then means realistic candidates are forced by the media to engage with the talking points of these fringe candidates.

It’s giving airtime to people who are doing it solely to get airtime and I doubt ever actually believed they realistically were going to win the election.

I get it, it’s going to drive traffic, and because you’ve been covering it for so long, it’s now newsworthy.

But I don’t understand why outlets in Ireland are covering the “withdrawal” of “candidates” who were never officially on a ballot, and never had a realistic chance of being on one.

Trump seeks to rename Department of Defense to Department of War The Trump administration has focused on restoring a "warrior ethos" to the Armed Services.

The DoD is transitioning to a new identity. This is a process, and to support them during this time they would prefer if you addressed them by their preferred identity, which whilst not yet their legally recognized identity, makes them more comfortable.

www.axios.com/2025/09/04/t...

Exclusive: Most states allow jails and prisons to charge inmates for own incarceration The debt wheel puts up more obstacles to escaping the poverty that likely put them in jail

What kind of madness is this? Prisons in the US charge the prisoners for room and board?!?

www.axios.com/2025/07/12/e...

The action items workflow has become a big part of my daily routine. I don’t think I could go back to a day without it.

It’s amazing how much capacity you can pack into a microSD card these days, but it’s such a pain when you misplace one. They could be literally anywhere.

Track and Measure Your Professional Impact | Clonra

It’s hard to describe how much of a step up from my old approach of markdown files and google docs this is. It’s what I imagine having a chief of staff is like.

If that sounds appealing to you, sign up below so you’re first to get access when I roll out these features soon.

clonra.com

Finally, if someone asks me about a specific project or workstream, I have a chat interface where I can ask questions of my logs, and Clonra will answer me with links to the relevant log.

Whenever I need a summary of the last week/month/quarter or whatever, I can run a summary action and it will produce one in a few seconds.

Every day at 5pm, Clonra sends me a reminder to log. I spend 5 minutes writing down a summary of my day. Notable actions, things to follow up on, things I learned. Clonra then parses the log, and identifies concrete action items based on what I’ve written.

It’s not obvious to current users of Clonra, as I haven’t yet rolled them out, but over the last month or two I’ve built a handful of AI powered features for the tool that is starting to make it a second brain for me.

The workflow I’ve built is really powerful.

WhatsApp and Advertising So it begins…

I’m surprised it’s taken this long, but let’s not pretend this is anything other than the thin end of a very lucrative wedge.

cdoyle.me/whatsapp-and...

Cue everyone in Ireland frantically checking their euromillions ticket

@reckless.bsky.social I assume the Trump cellphone network is an MVNO and not the Gene5ys final boss?

I’m talking about pro/semi-pro photographers here. Obviously Facebook and Instagram ate their lunch for random party snaps long ago.

Kind of mind boggling that after 21 years and four different owners, Flickr still seems to be the default place for pro / semipro photographers to share images. Seems like someone should have grabbed that market share by now.

Jannik Sinner prepares to serve at Roland Garros. He is wearing a blue baseball cap and a green polo shirt.

Nike seem to have dressed Jannik Sinner as an Irish rugby player for @rolandgarros.com 😂

That roundabout doesn’t look all that complicated to me, unless I’m missing something massive…

Who could have possibly predicted that the new Pope would be an old white guy

All the men’s hurling teams this weekend at club and county level should wear skorts, and continue to do so until this is sorted. Create complete chaos until the Camogie Association are forced to back down.

In case anyone cares, I too would like to buy Chrome. I have two empty Red Bull cans and about 23 euro in cash. This is my final offer Google.

When Push comes to shove | Clonra A quiet week with one notable new feature, and some nice quality of life improvements

One of these days, we’ll stop having terrible puns as titles. But not today.

Having said that, it was a quiet week with one notable new feature, and some nice quality of life improvements.

clonra.com/changelog/wh...

Staying up for another little bit so. #masters

As I mentioned last week, changelogs are a great way to demonstrate momentum, just like logs in Clonra.

Even though I did the work for all these features, I was still surprised as I looked through git logs and Linear history at just how much I shipped.