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Instagram may have started as a photo app where we posted one photo at a time but now the advice is to always go for the carousel, says Jack Appleby:

Carousels are the only content type that gets a second chance on Instagram. That’s an invaluable safety mechanism for your content considering how mindlessly we flick our thumbs through the feeds.

Sounds advice, even though I don’t always practice what I preach in my own Instagram feed. Also, a reminder that it is necessary to follow how the algorithms on social platforms are developing.

The communication landscape is ever changing. The 2025 Digital News Report from the Oxford’s Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism shows that social media is now where most Americans get their news.

For the first time, social media has displaced television as the top way Americans get news. “The proportion accessing news via social media and video networks in the United States (54%) is sharply up,” the report’s authors write, “overtaking both TV news (50%) and news websites/apps (48%) for the first time.”

If you are keen on cycling some of the iconic mountain passes in Switzerland but are not sure whether they are open yet, don’t worry, there is a website for that.

Playful murals add color to the cityscape which can otherwise be quite gray. I saw this one in Budapest when I visited last week.

Fictional editor Arthur Howitzer Jr in “The French Dispatch”, via Harry Dry’s excellent newsletter:

“Just try to make it sound like you wrote it that way on purpose.”

The tower of the St Pierre cathedral (well, one of the towers to be precise) offers a beautiful view of Geneva. I went there on a Friday with colleagues, one step at a time, and captured what you see above.

Donella H. Meadows in Thinking in Systems:

Hunger, poverty, environmental degradation, economic instability, unemployment, chronic disease, drug addiction, and war, for example, persist in spite of the analytical ability and technical brilliance that have been directed toward eradicating them. No one deliberately creates those problems, no one wants them to persist, but they persist nonetheless. That is because they are intrinsically systems problems-undesirable behaviors characteristic of the system structures that produce them.

Very interesting book and a reminder to think outside the box of simplicity.

Economical writing by Deirdre McClosky is an excellent book of 35 rules for clear prose. In the final chapter she quotes Mark Twain’s seven rules for good style.

The writer should

say what he is proposing to say, not merely come near it;

use the right word, not its second cousin;

eschew surplusage;

not omit necessary details;

avoid slovenliness of form;

use good grammar; and

employ a simple and straightforward style.

These seven are worth following, as are McClosky’s thirty-five.

Simon Willison’s principles for link blogs: include names, add value, be liberal with quotes. Why? One reason is that

Sharing interesting links with commentary is a low effort, high value way to contribute to internet life at large.

Simon Willison wrote a good overview of LLMs at the end of 2024:

“The key skill in getting the most out of LLMs is learning to work with tech that is both inherently unreliable and incredibly powerful at the same time. This is a decidedly non-obvious skill to acquire!”