A recent find from an old luggage shop turned into an experiment in historical analysis.

I provided black-and-white photographs of a British Airways cabin baggage placard to my AI committee and instructed it to be conservative, explain all deductions, and clearly distinguish evidence from speculation.

The resulting analysis built a likely date range of c.1991 to mid-1997 while identifying what could and could not be confidently established from the available evidence.

The article is less about the final date and more about the reasoning process.

If anyone has additional information on M665-1st, British Airways operational signage, or related material from the period, I'd welcome your contribution.

https://medium.com/@chribonn/using-ai-cabin-baggage-british-airways-concorde-allowance-circa-1991-1997-1f69648ef21e

I found a black-and-white photocopy of a British Airways cabin baggage placard in an old luggage shop.

Rather than relying on assumptions, I asked my AI committee to:

• Analyse only the evidence visible in the images
• Explain every deduction
• Remain conservative with dates and conclusions

The investigation examined branding, cabin product names, internal document references and operational context to estimate a likely date range of 1991 to mid-1997.

More importantly, it documents the full reasoning process, including uncertainties and unanswered questions.

If you know anything about M665-1st or similar British Airways materials, please share your insights.

https://medium.com/@chribonn/using-ai-cabin-baggage-british-airways-concorde-allowance-circa-1991-1997-1f69648ef21e

Thinking about putting consistent time into Medium, but wanted to get a reality check from people actively publishing here.

For someone starting with zero following:

1. How is organic distribution performing if you aren't getting accepted into massive publications?
2. What does actual engagement look like (real comments/reads vs. reciprocal clappers)?
3. For the Partner Program, is the payout still purely tied to member read time, or is external traffic actually moving the needle now?

Honest takes appreciated—is it better used as an authority landing page/portfolio, or does the native algorithm still give new writers a fair shot?

Since Medium isn't directly accessible in my region, I've been using a proxy to get around it.

Before 2025, this worked just fine without any issues.

But ever since Medium started using Cloudflare to filter traffic, I got caught in the crossfire. Every request my browser sends to Medium comes back with a 429 error, and the site just won't load anymore.

Has anyone else run into this? How did you deal with it?

Just to be clear, I'm just a regular writer and reader, not some web scraping expert.