Hamid

2 Mexican Navy ships laden with humanitarian aid dock in Cuba as U.S. blockade sparks energy crisis Two Mexican Navy ships laden with humanitarian aid docked in Cuba on Thursday as a U.S. blockade deepens the island’s energy crisis.

Way to go Mexico!

www.ctvnews.ca/world/articl...

your dead AI mother loves you so much ❤️

Malicious Google Ads Target Mac Users with Fake Mac Cleaner Pages Follow us on Bluesky, Twitter (X), Mastodon and Facebook at @Hackread

Yet another reason why a search engine without any ads is the way forward:

hackread.com/malicious-go...

A black and white illustration of a pregnant woman sitting on a chair. Another woman is supporting her from behind, while a second woman is sitting in front of her, ready to help deliver the baby.

For centuries, a “gossip” was a woman who attended another woman's delivery. The word was a corruption of “god-sib” or “god-sibling,” meaning “sister in the Lord.” The gossips offered support to mother & midwife. Only later did it become derogatory.

More info: www.historyextra.com/period/gener...

wikipedia turns 25 today! the last unenshittified major website! backbone of online info! triumph of humanity! powered by urge of unpaid randos to correct each other! somehow mostly reliable! "good thing wikipedia works in practice, because it sure doesn't work in theory" - old wiki adage

Lord Darnely (husband of Mary, Queen of Scots) was quite the husband and expecting parent

Yessssss. Exactly this.

An oil painting of King James I of England wearing an utterly ridiculous hat

What an utterly ridiculous hat. Puts a stovepipe to shame.

Amazon Prime Video riddles your feed with suggestions for purchase beyond whatever your subscription level is but it's practically impossible to find your purchases on the desktop app. Frankendesign.

The Fraud Using a cache of hitherto unseen documents and exclusive insider accounts, this sensational new book tells the story of how a shadowy group, Labour Together, came to the cusp of delivering Sir Keir St...

orbooks.com/catalog/the-... <— Paul Holden’s

Highly recommend ‘The Fraud’ if you haven’t read it. Excellent background on just how reprehensible and unlikeable these people are

Looking forward to a better way in 2026 🥂

Hamid's review of The Golden Road 5/5: An excellent historical *argument*. So often - particularly a problem with narrative histories - historical non-fiction hides arguments and analysis beneath layers of events or, worse, don't have...

⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ - Just finished William Dalrymple's 'The Golden Circle': an excellent historical argument — the kind that doesn’t hide its thesis under a pile of narrative.

www.goodreads.com/review/show/...

#ReadWithHamid

Turns out Mary, Queen of Scots, also loved the knife. She crafted this embroidery - for the Duke of Norfolk, just after his release - showing a hand decending from the heavens to excise a barren vine, with the embroidered Latin text 'Virescit Vulnere Virtus' ('virtue flourishes by wounding'). Lmao.

Passage from the book 'The Stolen Crown' by Tracy Borman. The passage reads: "The following day, Mary was taken to Carlisle Castle. Elizabeth wrote to her there, congratulating her upon her escape and instructing the bearer to convey certain messages relating to Mary’s ‘estate and honour’. Enjoying the upper hand, she could not resist chiding her cousin that if she had had ‘as much regard to her honour as she had respect for an unhappy villain, everyone would have condoled with her misfortunes, as to speak plainly not many have’."

Elizabeth I definitely loved a bit of the ol' twist of the knife

I love that EFF knows their base well enough to lead with "we understand you probably already have a lot of polyhedral dice sets..."

All it took was late-stage capitalism

@kagi.com hey folks - do you guys have a rough timeline for your Windows & Linux app releases for Orion? As you can imagine, I'm extremely keen to escape from the enshitternet.

Over the Christmas hols, I read through Cory Doctorow&#39;s &#39;Enshittification&#39; and loved it. I had a good long think about how I could start divorcing myself from the &#39;Enshitternet&#39; as... Over the Christmas hols, I read through Cory Doctorow's 'Enshittification' and loved it. I had a good long think about how I could start divorcing myself from the 'Enshitternet' as far as is possible ...

Have been inspired by 'Enshittification' to make a bunch of platform switches over 2026. Which, I guess, means I'll be using this place a lot more.

Anyway, here's a list of what I'm looking to switch from and to, piggybacking off of Doctorow's recommendations. www.linkedin.com/feed/update/...

Happy New Year folks! I’ve kicked off January with ‘Thou Savage Woman’, a book about female murderers and this passage on ‘cruentation’ (the belief that the bodies of murder victims will bleed in the presence of their killers) is quite something. #ReadWithHamid

Adulthood is watching Christmas movies and knowing Kevin McCallister probably died of asbestosis 25 years after crawling through that New York rubble chute.

Just opened YouTube to look for any interesting documentaries on the Terra-cotta army in Xi’an and it’s just a useless pile of conspirabollocks. For Pete’s sake.

Arturino was his comedy singing alter ego. Cracked me up whenever I heard it.

Wuthering Heights - Arturino Talamonti Listen to Wuthering Heights - Arturino Talamonti by Arturino Talamonti #np on #SoundCloud

Just heard that an old and dear friend of mine passed away. Eamon Downes gave me my first meaningful role in the business way back when and we had some amazing fun together. He was wonderful. I’ll always remember him with great respect and love. on.soundcloud.com/M1EpETaMHHOB...

What's great about the DM piece is that it provides a little more context from the report but which raise questions about using this methodology to draw such conclusions:

1) Which 'two four-week periods'?
2) How were the 250 commercials chosen?
3) How many adverts are screened annually in the UK?

The DM has now picked up the 'too many blacks on TV' story, related to the C4 report, using so much of the exact logic from The Spectator that I suspect it was either plagiarised in part or heavily cribbed from. The Daily Mail of course rachets up the "woke" hysteria. Archive link: archive.is/TQXu9

Study: Diversity in ads correlates to gains in revenue, brand perception Those with the highest diversity scores showed an 83% higher consumer preference, according to Deloitte-owned agency Heat.

Yikes. That’s terrible.

Guess he’s now tossing out the data that claims diversity correlates to gains in revenue and brand perception?

www.marketingdive.com/news/study-d...

I think Rory picking up on it and thinking it’s smart enough to distribute is a ripe demonstration of implicit racism in advertising. It drives smart people to overlook obviously stupid conclusions because: vibes.

people are only x% of the population then they should only appear in x% of adverts’ is stupid to the point of demanding that we must simply see fewer black people on screen
* the author doesn’t talk about the number of *characters* in adverts which would be the fair comparison w/ population