Sophie Dennis

A photo of a fluffy yellow gosling on a rocky riverbank.

I am already longing for spring, but at least I have lots of photos to tide me over until March.

Here's a cute gosling stopping by the river for a drink.

#birds #wildlife #nature

Calendar cover with rainbow

Just a quick post to say my calendars are here, £16 each all profits to Tavistock food bank. They are selling fast, so link in my profile or here, thanks. US shipping back on #Dartmoor #Devon #landscape #photography #calendar #charity
thegreenlanesshimmer.etsy.com/listing/4382...

"Here's what I want, figure it out" is not something you prompt a machine for. It's an order that a manager gives an employee, because the "figure it out" part requires a significant amount of expertise. Expertise both in doing, and in understanding the request better.

AI can't do either.

They packed a lot of mystical woo into what was basically prime time family TV - especially as it jus have been still peak Mary Whitehouse time.

And wasn’t it all so convincing that the Kev Costner Robin Hood thought the witchy stuff and Muslim merryman were RH lore

But won’t that mean missing out on much quality Much the Millers Son action, and proper West Country Little John?

Yeah I guess that’s my fear. That I am remembering it as great but that’s by 40 year old standards. Maybe what it really needs is a proper remake … though the scope for that being even worse must be vast

Now to find out how @andycayenne.bsky.social feels about watching many hours of slightly iffy 1980s sword and sorcery. I’m also slightly nervous in case it turns out to be wildly cheesy and 900 times worse than I remember. Are some things just best left to memory??

Please go through this thread if you are having a bad day. I promise you, it’s the loveliest thing I’ve seen on Bluesky for a while 🥹

Watching Arrow has clearly tipped them off about my youthful Robin Hood obsession

Long COVID in Young Children, School-Aged Children, and Teens This JAMA Pediatrics Patient Page describes the symptoms of long COVID in children.

“Long COVID is common, affecting up to 10% to 20% of children with a history of COVID-19. With almost 6 million US children potentially affected, this is higher than the number of children with asthma, the most common chronic health problem in children.” jamanetwork.com/journals/jam...

our cat Charles with Villager, shortly after it was published

How A Publisher Almost Killed The Book I Waited My Whole Life To Write: a thread

My novel Villager came out in 2022. It was published by Unbound, who had little marketing/sales power. But I was excited & proud, since I worked so f-ing hard on it.

Here's an extract: www.tom-cox.com/the-village-...

It IS a fucking great book. I hope - and am sure - it will recover. It’s the kind of books we’ll all keep reading and recommending for years and years

Guys guys guys!! Robin of Sherwood streaming on ITVX!! www.itv.com/watch/robin-...

Way past its prime: how did Amazon get so rubbish? Sick of scrolling through junk results, AI-generated ads and links to lookalike products? The author and activist behind the term ‘enshittification’ explains what’s gone wrong with the internet – and ...

Great canter through the turbo-charged enshittification mechanisms of internet-era capitalism, thru lens of Amazon

I particularly liked the definition of corporations: “artificial, immortal colony-organisms that use humans as their inconvenient gut flora” www.theguardian.com/technology/2...

Designing early help As the cliché goes, Early Help is the fence at the top of the cliff, instead of the ambulance at the bottom. Instinctively that feels like common sense, but when we look at public finances we see a…

'Designing early help'. Richard Selwyn. richardselwyn.org/2025/10/02/d...

Here’s the uncomfortable thing I learned the hard way: the more we tighten our grip on an organisation, the brittler it gets – and the more likely it is to shatter at the next jolt. Real… | Benjamin P. Taylor Here’s the uncomfortable thing I learned the hard way: the more we tighten our grip on an organisation, the brittler it gets – and the more likely it is to shatter at the next jolt. Real effectiveness...

The more we tighten our grip, the brittler an organisation gets – and the more likely it is to shatter at the next jolt. www.linkedin.com/posts/antler... Where could you remove a control / add a boundary to increase discretion and improve purpose achievement – and how would you know if it helped?

Definitely the Magic of Christmas

Christmas Elf sounds awesome… 🎄

I am happy to call it causation. We know social connection and community is really good for people’s health and wellbeing. It had its toxic side - hello status anxiety - and that was def part of the decline. But most platforms also made clear algorithmic choice to favour the entertainment model

So basically it all went to sh*t when social media platforms decided their purpose was entertainment not connection

We often call large fan/follower groups communities, and many provide community connection as a by product. Often between much smaller self-selecting sub groups. But they are way too large to consistently foster meaningful interpersonal relationships for the majority of participants.

The platform is then incentivised to push these larger, easier to monetise accounts - high volume, high ££ value, low social value - in preference to your lower volume, higher social value connections which have little monetary value to the platform. The platform can’t monetise warm fuzzies.

The entertainment model, by contrast, encourages the super account. The influencer. Tens or hundreds of thousands, even millions of “connections” in form of fans and followers. Monetisation along a well trodden ad/page view model becomes more straightforward and easier to incentivise

Connection and community are ofc constrained by Dunbars number. Most people will have a small number of high value (to them) connections. Dozens to low hundreds. But to the platform, value of any one account/post - assuming some form of $/view ad model - will be low.

The responses to this really show how social media went to sh*t when platforms changed their purpose from connection and community, to entertainment and engagement.

All the best outcomes are about connection and community. Yes some people also grew a large audience, but that was really a by product

How about approaching this from the other side- how do we incentivise employers to make the adjustments necessary to help people with disabilities into work. Rather than suggesting that if sick people just tried a bit harder they could not be sick, which is what this looks like

No wonder right wing leaning politicians are keen to emulate Gulf state migration policies: “It enables the citizens of the country to have huge amounts of leisure [and] a caste system, where mostly brown, dark-skinned people are running the society in terms of labour but not getting any benefit.”

‘Every day I cry’: 50 women talk about life as a domestic worker under the Gulf’s kafala system Denounced as giving a ‘veneer of legality to slaveholding’, the kafala labour code persists, allowing employers to abuse women, who vanish from society. This is the testimony of some of those workers,...

Or the maid, with the employer with grabby hands and nothing to eat but bread and noodles, no bedroom, and no way to leave.

www.theguardian.com/global-devel...

Tom wins at Alt text, even when he forgets

❤️ everything crossed