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Career | Mental Health

Is there room for calm in your meetings?
ByMike McBride February 2, 2026February 1, 2026 Reading Time: 3 minutes

Mora’s advice is to slow down, pause after someone finishes speaking, take a breath before coming off mute, and slow your speech.

I think those are great ideas that I plan to spend a little more time on and bring to the meetings I host in order to bring calm to the whole team. But then I started thinking about the many meetings I take part in each week, and how few of them feel anything like that. They ooze anxiety, tension, and focus on “getting through” the agenda at lightning speed before the next meeting comes at us with even more of the same.

They make us feel more distracted and uneasy, not less.

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Mental Health | Tech

Worth Reading – “Pizza Parties Don’t Fix Burnout”: The State of Librarian Mental Health
ByMike McBride January 28, 2026 Reading Time: 2 minutes

It’s exhausting to go to work every day for people who refuse to stand behind you as a human being and treat you like an expense they would do anything to be rid of.

Sadly, that is the state of the workplace for many people. It’s not just at the library, and it won’t be fixed by pizza, yoga, or any other lunchtime activity.

Read More Worth Reading – “Pizza Parties Don’t Fix Burnout”: The State of Librarian Mental Health
Career

Show Your Work, and You Might Get Lucky
ByMike McBride January 28, 2026January 27, 2026 Reading Time: 2 minutes

The post is written by a developer, and he’s got good advice for anyone looking for that kind of work. I’m not a developer, but I can say with some confidence that this advice applies to everyone. In this job market, who you know is everything.

Scratch that. It’s not who you know, it’s who knows you and your work. The more people who see your work, the more likely you are to land a job. It’s not always that simple, but it sure increases the odds. Maybe for the rest of us, it’s not about having a GitHub repository for our projects, but about writing a blog, being involved in user groups, or volunteering with your industry’s educational resource.

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Blogging

Blogs are Back
ByMike McBride January 26, 2026January 25, 2026 Reading Time: 1 minute

If you aren’t yet that dedicated to RSS feeds, this may be a super-easy way to get started. It’s free, you don’t even need an account, the data is stored in your browser, or you can create a free account and sync the data across your devices.

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Artificial Intelligence

Worth Reading – General Purpose AI Will Never Be Safe
ByMike McBride January 24, 2026 Reading Time: 2 minutes

I think we can agree that granting someone full access to the open internet without education or tools to protect themselves would be dangerous, no?

OK, but what is a general-purpose LLM but a collection of everything that the model could ingest, without rules about what was safe and what wasn’t?

Yet we expect people to use them, and aren’t making any effort to make them safer.

Read More Worth Reading – General Purpose AI Will Never Be Safe
SocialNetworking

Worth Reading – Fake news and trust
ByMike McBride January 21, 2026 Reading Time: 1 minute

This is the instruction manual. Make everything seem dangerous and chaotic, then offer simplistic fixes and explanations that aren’t true at all, but fit a narrative you wish to manipulate people with. As Seth describes, the easy thing to do is to accept those explanations and stop thinking about it much further. We are hard-wired to do that. We’ve been educated to do that. We’ve been told simplistic lies like the world is fair, and good things happen to good people, and we believe it because the truth is much less comfortable.

Read More Worth Reading – Fake news and trust