Since 2021, I've recorded every Book, Film, and Television series I've seen each year. 2021 2022 2023 2024 Here are the best and worst of my Inputs for 2025.

I have been thinking a lot about my use and adoption of AI. You've probably been doing the same. For me, there are two questions that keep popping up: How can I use AI to make me a better person? (Intrapersonal) What is responsible use of AI? (Interpersonal) This post deals primarily with the first question. Specifically, how can I use AI to be a better learner? Learning is such a huge part of my life.

A great podcast depends on the natural rapport of the hosts. Social chemistry comes from mutual trust, respect, friendship, and experience. It also comes from your environment. More often than not, my podcasts are recorded over video chat, or even asynchronously. But the Pirate School podcast has a different kind of magic. Talia and I record it on the couch. There's something about sitting on a lounge, arms spread, feet curled up, cushions, that makes for a much more conversational tone.

This is a deeply personal post. I'm actually not sure how to end it. I'm still processing, to be honest. So it doesn't read particularly smoothly. Please read part one and part two first. By now, you know about my strange experience at the Mauthausen concentration camp in Austria. You've also met my grandfather, Ron Fabri, and heard about my Italian-Egyptian ancestry. Here's how it comes together. In April I visited a relative from the Fabri side of my family.

I was in a very demotivating university tutorial yesterday. We're learning about Education Standards. ATAR scores.1 How most schools reconfigure their entire senior syllabus to optimise for university entrance exams. Teachers are expected to teach specifically for a good ATAR result. Test performance becomes competitive – not only for students, but for schools, and the broader community. ATAR results affect real-estate prices! I stayed after class and spoke to a lecturer about it.

When something doesn’t work the way you’d like, what’s your first inclination? Scrap it and look for a better one? Or, are you the kind of person who would rather build it again from scratch? You’re a founder. A maker. A hacker. A smith. We are founders. We learn lessons the hard way. We don’t easily take advice, but we often to surround ourselves with subject matter experts and develop deep relational trust.

I tried Dia. It's a new browser from the Browser Company that's all about AI-assisted browsing. Verdict: Hard no. First up, this was the first time I've ever experienced a sign-up form that refused to accept an iCloud address. Rude. Second, I just can't switch to a browser that misses all the native integrations which Safari enjoys. I can't touch my fingerprint to my keyboard to sign-in, or handoff to my phone, or auto-fill from Apple Passwords, use Apple Pay, that sort of thing.

I've been reading John Gruber's work since I was in high school. I've listened to every Dithering episode to date. I once started a blog about inspired by Daring Fireball (it petered out, as blogs sometimes do). And for the past five years, I've been recording Crossword with Jonathan Wold. It's a podcast about WordPress and the Open Web, with 15-minute (Dithering inspired) episodes. We recently talked with John in a guest episode of Crossword, and he was kind enough to link to our show from his blog.

I don't speak much about WordPress on this blog, but it's a very important part of my life. I've been working in WordPress for nearly 20 years! I've contributed to core, run releases, spoken at WordCamps, built and sold businesses on WordPress. I recently spoke about the WordPress Plugin repo at WordCamp Brisbane 2025. The session was recorded and is now available to watch on YouTube. The WordPress ecosystem is very unique.

I’m excited to announce Pretty Good Podcasts, a podcast network I’ve founded alongside Joshua and Jonathan Wold. The network right now is no more than a website which lists our podcasts. Our goal is to grow the list, grow an audience, and cross promote our shows. The website is pretty good, too. I hand coded it in HTML and CSS. No dependencies. No build. No AI. Took about 3 hours. Had a lot of fun doing it too!

Just a few quick thoughts on my first real experimentation with on-device Apple Intelligence. My project started out as a game where you are imprisoned, and you need to convince the jail guard to free you! The guard's dialogue would be AI generated on the fly, as well as set of possible responses for the player to select from. I felt that giving the player options to respond with, instead of freeform text, would make it more interesting and easier to play.

I've been working on some family genealogy, tracing back my maternal grandfather's line. There's quite a mystery there!1 Ronald Fabri's Baptism record from Alexandria, Egypt. The best part of family research is talking to family about all the old family stories. They're unlikely, maybe even impossible tales, but surely some parts must be true! Here are two of my favourites. Budelli A Fabri of old went gambling one night in Alexandria, and he won big!

Bloom's Taxonomy is a mainstay in education circles. It provides a structure for thinking about cognition, and how we learn. Basically, we structure knowledge by refining information through a process. This starts with lower-order thinking, and moves through to higher-order thinking skills. Wait! Forget Bloom for a moment. Those two concepts, let's focus there: Lower Order Thinking Skills (LOTS) Higher Order Thinking Skills (HOTS) Understanding what these are is absolutely essential in an world where LLMs are at our fingertips.

Ugh. Facebook. There's a lot of us out there. Those strange, backward people who refuse to use Facebook or Instagram. Ads? algorithms? influencers!? ick! Unfortunately, those of us who prefer to stay signed-out of such social media platforms often find ourselves attempting to access a business Facebook page, or some Instagram post that a well-intentioned friend found amusing. In such cases, we're bombarded by nagging login prompts, blocking the content and barring our way.

I believe AI is a multiplier. AI tools multiply: The quality of the work The speed at which the work can be done The competency of the operator But! You can only pick two. Speed + Quality If you are already very competent at producing the work on your own, you can leverage AI to increase the speed of your work while maintaining a high standard of quality. It won't make you any better at what you do, but it will reduce the time you spend doing it.

Pursuant to my previous post regarding the en dash (wherein I beseech readers to consider British style selections for the dash parenthetical), I further propose the adoption of a little non-standard grammar to more plainly distinguish human writing from that which was contrived by large language models. I'm not suggesting we simply make up new rules! However, we might consider leaning a little on historical precedent. I've been reading Sense and Sensibility, where I've become smitten by Austen's use of run-on sentences which employ a lowercase letter after a terminal punctuation mark.

Very important announcement. I've been using the em dash wrong. On this blog, ranges will now be correctly represented by an en dash. 0–9, 1987–2025, א–ת. Additionally, I'd like to invite readers to join me in adopting the Guardian / Economist style of using spaced en dashes for asides – just like this. Of course, I'm predisposed to a more British format. But the reason you should consider switching styles is because the un-spaced em dash aside has become a classic telltale marker of AI generated writing.

I've been trying to reconcile the way I feel about AI. (It's been a hot topic on Async recently.) On the one hand, I see so much shitty code submitted to the WordPress plugin repo. It's easy to see how AI is making things way worse for the web – in terms of security, homogenisation, and long-term maintainability. There are legitimate concerns about loss of craft, content scraping, and enshittification.

I started out the year (or rather, finished last year) with the goal of writing, and publishing, regularly. I have been writing. A lot! Publishing, less so. I've recently dropped some big commitments that will allow me a little more time to write and reflect on this blog a little more often. I'm going to experiment with taking a break from adding audio episodes to each post. You can continue to catch me on Async, Crossword, and Pirate School.

I have a deeply personal post I need to write, but it won't make sense without the context. So I'm going to break it up into multiple parts. They might seem disconnected to begin with. This is part two. Part one is here. On the 22nd of September, 1949, Ronaldo Fabri got on a boat, leaving behind a country on the brink of revolution. Egypt in 1949 was a country with a long history and fresh wounds.

I have a deeply personal post I need to write, but it won't make sense without the context. So I'm going to break it up into multiple parts. They might seem disconnected to begin with. This is part one. In 2009, Talia and I went on a Contiki tour of Europe. Despite being the only married couple (we were only 22!) on a Contiki tour, we managed to have a great time touring Europe without getting too sloshed along the way.

We're spending the last days of pesach in Mullumbimby. There's an amazing Jewish community here, full of young families and friendly faces. The Rabbi was kind enough to let us park our caravan in the yard of the shul, so we'll be very close to services over the next two days. This morning I was up early with Zohar and we went for a 6am walk down Burringbar Street, which is the main street of the town.

When was the last time you were offline? Like, really offline. Not just signed out of Slack. Not Do Not Disturb. Not even airplane mode. I'm talking phone entirely off for a good 24 hours. Stay at home, with no internet, and no screens. It's a forcing function for your mental health. I challenge you to try it. Once a week, or once a month, or once a year. Some sort of schedule helps set the right expectations with friends and family.

Out of sheer curiosity, I applied for a job that had a really interesting cross-over between Education and AI. I flubbed the interview. I felt very out of practice, but also, the CEO had very silicon valley vibes. She was operating at a way faster speed to me. Come to think of it, people often say that I'm calm or relaxed. Do they mean it as a compliment? It only happens when I'm on work trips.

I received a proposal today. Someone asking me to invest a decent chunk of money into their work. But the proposal was kind of hard to parse. It was written well, but the concepts weren't well organised. The structure was too complex, and poorly formatted.1 Of course, it was AI generated. I spent 30 minutes going over it with a colleague, call it an hour between us. The damn proposal probably only took 5 minutes to generate.