Do we want the "#enshitification" of #Scotland in (so called) #AI #generated #pictures?

https://www.thenational.scot/culture/25793654.ai-art-starts-rewriting-scotlands-visual-identity/

Gen "AI" produces #banal #mediocrity of anywhere places.

👨‍💻 Oh joy, another "groundbreaking" open source project that's going to revolutionize... absolutely nothing! 🚀 Dive into the world of #GitHub, where you can now waste your time on Anthropic's assignment that was too mediocre to keep private. 🤖
https://github.com/anthropics/original_performance_takehome #openSource #mediocrity #innovation #wasteOfTime #techHumor #HackerNews #ngated

🚀 Another day, another tech bro trying to convince us that turning AI-generated slop into "art" will save civilization. 🎨 Because, clearly, what we need right now is more people swapping out #mediocrity for a side of existential dread. 🙄
https://slopper.robot-future.com/ #techbro #culture #AIart #existentialdread #innovation #HackerNews #ngated

🤖✨ Behold, the magical AI Tool Archive: the ultimate graveyard for AI buzzwords and 💩 SaaS solutions! Where "experts" ~review~ regurgitate the latest AI tools that promise to revolutionize your life by doing absolutely nothing. Submit your tool, because apparently, #mediocrity deserves a #spotlight too! 🙄🎉
https://aitoolarchive.com/ #AItools #Archive #AIbuzzwords #SaaSsolutions #HackerNews #ngated

🎉 Wow, congrats to OpenAI's #Sora for achieving the mind-boggling status of 71st and 108th place in the app stores—truly the pinnacle of mediocrity! 📉 The app that once soared like an eagle now plummets with all the grace of a headless chicken! 🐔💥
https://spencerdailey.com/2026/01/14/openais-sora-sits-at-71-in-the-us-app-store-and-100-on-play-store-what-just-happened/ #OpenAI #appstores #mediocrity #technews #achievement #HackerNews #ngated

Only the mediocre are always at their best.
-- Jean Giraudoux

⬆ #Wisdom #Quotes #JeanGiraudoux #Mediocrity

⬇ #Photography #Panorama #GoblinValley #Utah

🚨 Attention passengers: Prepare to be checkmated at 30,000 feet! ✈️ Delta's #chess #bot is your new sky-high nemesis, ensuring that even in the clouds, you'll remain grounded in your #mediocrity. 😂♟️
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c0mLhHDcY3I #Delta #Sky #High #Air #Travel #Fun #HackerNews #ngated

🎉 Wow, what a groundbreaking revelation: #XMPP involves... metadata?! 🤯 Strap in for an exhilarating #recap of a #presentation that even the speaker admits went "okayish"—a triumph of #mediocrity in the Critical Decentralization Cluster. 🤦‍♂️🎤
https://blog.mathieui.net/xmpp-and-metadata.html #metadata #CriticalDecentralization #HackerNews #ngated

Yet another intrepid "hacker" challenges the boundaries of #mediocrity by... enabling #JavaScript and #cookies. 🕵️‍♂️🔗 Who knew it only took web browser settings to transform a digital watch into a glorified paperweight? 😂⌚
https://medium.com/infosec-watchtower/how-i-hacked-casio-f-91w-digital-watch-892bd519bd15 #hacker #digitalwatch #innovation #HackerNews #ngated

#Mediocrity seems to be setting in
#ManUTD
https://news.sky.com/story/amorim-sacked-whoever-the-manager-man-utds-prospects-dont-look-great-13490954

🎉 Welcome to the #future, where we've finally trained #AI to mimic the exquisite #art of mediocrity! The article's revelation: AI can now match the soul-crushing blandness of human-written blog posts. Groundbreaking, truly, in the land of 🥱.
https://nik.art/the-suck-is-why-were-here/ #Mediocrity #Blogging #Innovation #HackerNews #ngated

"Don't be average. Don’t be boring. Be bold. Be fascinating!" - Futurist Jim Carroll

2025 is almost a wrap.

And that brings me to 279 days of my Daily Inspiration post in 2025, continuing the tradition that began early in August 2016, where each workday involves a bit of fresh new insight.

Since then, I have not missed ONE single workday. Come hell or high water, power failure or jet lag, the post has gone out!

Here's a slideshow of what I wrote in 2025. 279 inspirations! Today marks 280!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lJpEdbKByLE

And then it starts all over again tomorrow, on Thursday, January 1, 2026 - with my "10 Great Words for 2026," which itself began in 2006.
If you haven't signed up, join the 1/4 million who get it every day.

Do so at subscribe.jimcarroll.com

----
There's no doubt that there's a lot of challenge to come in 2026, but there's also a lot of opportunity.

Opportunities become even bigger when exponential trends become a reality.

But here's the thing - it's up to you whether you will turn it into an opportunity, or whether the challenge will bury you.

It depends on the choices you make and the actions you take.

But there is a dark side to velocity.

If you choose to let the challenges rule, you'll slide into mediocrity like
everyone else - you'll embrace it.

But if you decide to be bold, be daring, you'll escape it - and you'll find it absolutely fascinating!

So what's your choice - are you going to embrace, or escape, the potential for mediocrity that is in front of us with this exponential world?

You need to think about the issue of mediocrity in terms of your personal choice and the company you are involved with. If you decide to do boring things and chase average, you'll be mediocre. If you choose to be bold, you'll find things to be far more fascinating! If you take a mediocre organization and give it average tools and vague objectives, you don't get innovation. You get accelerated incompetence.

I explored this side of the equation in my satire "Embracing Mediocrity"—a guide on how to do the bare minimum—and its antidote, "Escaping Mediocrity." In the past, you could survive being "average" because the market moved slowly. You could hide in the margins.

You should choose to buy the books right now. Be bold! You'll find them to be fascinating!

Visit mediocirity.jimcarrolll.com. Use the code BEBOLD, and you'll get 20% off!

Here's what you need to think about.

Read the full post.

----

Futurist Jim Carroll will resume his Daily Inspiration tomorrow with his 10 Great Words for 2026.

**#Mediocrity** **#Bold** **#Fascinating** **#Average** **#Uniqueness** **#Creativity** **#Exponential** **#Leadership** **#Moonshot** **#Excellence**

Original post: https://jimcarroll.com/2025/12/decoding-tomorrow-mastering-2026-26-escaping-mediocrity-dont-be-average-dont-be-boring-be-bold-be-fascinating/

📸🤦‍♂️ Nathan Rooy discovers that flashy websites are like McDonald's cheeseburgers: popular for being just "good enough." Instead of a gourmet web experience, it's a buffet of #mediocrity sourced from Common Crawl's greatest hits. Web connoisseurs, prepare to feast on the bland! 🍔💻
https://nry.me/posts/2025-10-09/small-web-screenshots/ #flashywebsites #webdesign #cheeseburgers #CommonCrawl #HackerNews #ngated

Only the mediocre are always at their best.
-- Jean Giraudoux

⬆ #Wisdom #Quotes #JeanGiraudoux #Mediocrity

⬇ #Photography #Panorama #TheMaze #Canyonlands #Utah

Vox wails about #Frances #Allen, a coder who dared to actually make things work, thus ensuring her swift erasure from the annals of overhyped #tech #mediocrity 🙄🖥️. After all, who needs #efficiency when you can have #bloated #code that everyone remembers? 🤷‍♂️📉
https://voxmeditantis.com/2025/12/13/frances-elizabeth-allen-the-woman-who-made-code-run-fast-and-was-forgotten-because-it-worked/ #Vox #coding #HackerNews #ngated

In 2014, I wrote "#Humankind (hopefully) will not be extinguished by its own #bombs. The main reasons for our demise will be #mediocrity and #indifference."

In 2017, I blogged about that: https://karl-voit.at/2017/03/06/mediocrity/

And today: "#UN slams world’s ‘#apathy’ in launching aid appeal for 2026" https://manilastandard.net/news/world/314677768/un-slams-worlds-apathy-in-launching-aid-appeal-for-2026.html

Sometimes, I really hate it when I'm right. 😔

#publicvoit

LINE's new typeface: because we all needed yet another #font to confuse our documents with 🌱🖋️. It's like adopting a pet rock that's copyrighted—congratulations, now you can #license your way to #typography mediocrity! 🎨📄✨
https://seed.line.me/index_en.html #LINE #Typeface #Design #Creative #Mediocrity #HackerNews #ngated

So Dems caved, getting nothing but empty promises of a future possibility of debating a bill that would... I don't even know anymore, because once again they negotiate for nothing but maintaining the status quo. Except now the status quo is fascism writ large. #fuckinghell #democrats #mediocrity #primarythecowards

Ah, the noble quest of building the same app a thousand times just to prove that every framework is equally mediocre! 🤔 Who knew #redundancy could be so enlightening? 😅 I'm sure the 11th version will be the charm! 🍀
https://www.lorenstew.art/blog/10-kanban-boards/ #appdevelopment #mediocrity #frameworks #softwareengineering #humor #HackerNews #ngated