Revisiting 2016 - Links from ten years ago

Published on June 3, 2026

Revisiting 2016 - Links from ten years ago

Last year, when Pocket finally closed, I needed an alternative read-it-later service. I looked at all the new cool options such as Matter, but they were overly complex and expensive for my needs. I also looked at cutting out an additional service and instead using Safari’s read-it-later features, but I use my read-it-later service to kick off items for my newsletter, so I needed something with API access.

After a bit of research, I ended up back where I started many years ago before I started using Pocket, and that was using Instapaper.

Fortunately, my account still worked, and after logging in, I was fascinated to find links from ten years ago. I thought it would make an entertaining post to revisit some of them to see what I and the world were thinking ten years ago.

DIY standing desks

I was thinking about standing desks, but also building my own, I guess because they’re expensive. I clearly gave up on the idea and didn’t even get a standing desk until 2020, thanks to company home office setup money. A lovely Fully desk, which I still have in my home office, even though sadly the company was acquired in 2019.

Building a standing desk

23 IKEA standing desk hacks with ergonomic appeal

Scraping an HTML table

I have no idea why I was trying to do this. I am pretty sure that back in 2016 I would have ended up using something like nokogiri, but now? Well, probably AI 🤷‍♂️. Still, this solution using Google Docs remains pretty cool.

The simple way to scrape an HTML table: Google Docs

Trump 1.0

Remember those heady days when Trump was elected the first time, and at the end of the first term we all thought, ” that wasn’t as bad as we thought”? Weren’t they happy days? Well, not really, but still.

The case against Democracy

When Hillary and Donald were friends

Those taking selfies with Hillary Clinton aren’t narcissists – but our best hope

Globalisation is dead, and white supremacy has triumphed

Using AI for creative work

I am fond of telling people that AI is nothing new. Even the principles underpinning the current wave of tools aren’t that new. People were using algorithms to generate writing and films ten years ago too. They weren’t good, but that’s besides the point.

Writing with the machine

Watch your language (automatically)

An AI wrote this movie and it’s strangely moving

The Archers hits its peak

I forget when I started listening to the long-running BBC Radio 4 soap opera The Archers. It’s one of my guilty pleasures. One of the reasons I love it is that the plots are rarely controversial and it’s generally pleasingly dull. But ten years ago was different, and they had one of their most controversial and memorable storylines.

How a radio soap got a country talking about domestic abuse

The ellipsis is mightier than the em-dash

If a telltale of AI-generated writing was the ellipsis, then I would be in trouble. Ten years later, it’s still underused and the ”…” overused.

The mighty ellipsis

Are we all introverts now?

Clearly I was either wondering about my own behaviour or that of others ten years ago, and this is pre-2020 lockdowns and all the knock-on effects of that and people’s ability to socialise.

Am I introverted, or just rude?

What a decade

One of the things I love about history is how, on a smaller scale, things don’t change that much. It’s often only when you zoom out that you see the more seismic change. Of course I have been selective with the links I showed here, and they represent aspects of my interests that are relatively similar to ten years ago. However, it’s also striking how many are pretty similar to the conversations we’re having now. Some of the same people, the same topics, the same undercurrent themes.

But zoom out and the past ten years, honestly the past six have seen monumental change, as I said to someone recently, “It’s like every year since 2020 looked at the previous year and said, ‘I’ll raise you’”. We had the COVID pandemic, with some of its impact still playing out and some of its Impact basically reverting to what came before. Politics since 2016 has been a wild, wild ride, and that’s still yet to resolve to whatever conclusion it arrives at. The amount of full-scale conflicts that began in the past years has had global impact. The energy crisis, AI, the divisiveness of social groups, and so much more. While looking back ten years, we may not see much small-scale difference. I think if I undertake the same exercise in 2036, the story might be quite different. But then again, as history proves time and time again, maybe it might not.

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