I bought a new shaver. It has Bluetooth and an app. This seems unnecessary.

Forty PATRIOTS joining us to wage WAR on the housing CRISIS by SACRIFICING their lunch break.

professional news: I'm going from Canberra to London until September to work on AI safety with Pivotal Research AI poses a multitude of problems/risks, from bad-but-manageable to catastrophic. our trajectory is bad; I'd like to work on making it better if you're in the UK and want to catch up lmk!

I'd vote for Andre

wow colour me shocked maybe, just maybe, reality TV dating shows shouldn't exist

the irony of the current thing I am vibecoding is strong

commercial flights can be a good deal if you actually want to go to whatever the plane’s destination is, but if all you’re looking for is a place to sit it’s a total ripoff. most places offer benches for free

today I am reminded that I have some specifically Australian assumptions in my worldview that are not Western assumptions

Two long weekends in a row here in the ACT, which I normally find thrilling but currently find slightly annoying as someone who isn't presently working and whose measures to deal with that involve various forms of transacting during business hours

Can't overemphasise enough to my Australian AI sceptic friends that this was *absolutely* the case among a group of faculty, postgrads and undergrads I personally knew at the ANU between 2010-2015, when they had no idea that LLMs would be a thing

Really have mixed feelings that my private extras insurance has in fact paid out more in half a calendar year than I will pay in a full year's worth of premiums, and I'm fairly sure that's been true every year I've had extras cover so far

I'm gonna regret booking my dentist appointment for pre-8am aren't I

Regardless of whether the structure of the social media news tax is ideal, the fights we're having over this are a prelude to what it'll be like when we start trying to tax AI companies

had an extremely Canberra day today

because Reasons, I am reading the source code to xpdf 3.01 (aug 2005), how's your day going

A society where middle class people can have servants is a society where if you were reborn there, you don't have great chances of landing in the middle class

the Productivity Commission's call for initial submissions on its housing supply regulation inquiry is out: www.pc.gov.au/inquiries-an... @abundanthousing.org.au will of course be making a submission

This is both entirely true *and* not what somewhere between a large minority and a majority of the people saying "AI is a bubble" mean.

right now is the time where thoughtful people steeped in the traditions of the free culture and free software movements could be leading the public debate with proposals on how we avoid copyright maximalism while also not giving the AI companies a free-for-all. instead...

Some people are sceptical that AI could ever replace humans but I'm pretty sure I could build a Claude agent for the US government that takes over the weekly task of lying to Axios about a deal with Iran being imminent. As a bonus, Axios could automate uncritically writing that up.

some weeks ago I made the mistake of riding home on Hindmarsh Drive, where the bike lane ends and throws you into the shoulder of an arterial road with an 80km/h speed limit

the New England separatists weren't ambitious enough forget New South Wales + New England, we need New South Wales + New North Wales + New England + New Scotland + New Northern Ireland

I too am extremely impressed by the SaaS trajectory of people who start hardware companies

Mission Largely Accomplished

join me for the unofficial Missing Middle Approval Day party with me and maybe a max of about 3 other massive nerds at Verity Lane (aka first venue I could think of) starting right now

the posting to policy pipeline continues to flow

so much to do, too cold in the morning to do it

cannot believe how much some professional associations get away with charging for conferences

American YIMBYs: what's the relationship like between your various organisations and the bodies that represent the US planning profession?

Also true in one state of Australia, and no, this isn't counting unofficial time zones

1) what

Grattan Institute’s new report shows that letting Australian homebuyers choose the car-parking they need will: → make housing cheaper, → get more homes built faster, and → create more walkable cities.

I live in a 2 bedroom unit with a friend who is a car owner. As is normal, we get two basement parking spots - one of which goes permanently unused, apart from right now when my housemate has just bought a new vehicle and hasn't yet sold his old one. Expensive waste!

I read this as I am pacing up and down my living room to get my Fitbit over the line to 10,000 steps so it'll buzz

new report with some fresh new analysis of car parking in the Australian context, with Australian data. abolish parking minimums if you want to solve a housing crisis (featuring my friends @mbowes.bsky.social and @dbecon.bsky.social! ping @parkingreform.org)

we're going to achieve AGI before we've achieved reliable web application session timeout notifications

I appreciate the SMS confirmations for appointments that ask me to reply in all caps to confirm because I feel enthusiastic. Am I going to a dental checkup? YES

looks like national e-bike standards are coming...

love to be on the phone for 2.5 hours only to be told at the end that a ticket has been opened and I should expect this issue to actually get sorted... sometime this week

Federal payments for zoning reform let's goooo

it is deeply annoying that the lightbulbs section of my local Coles only sells non-dimmable LEDs for regular ceiling lights, the halogens are gone. not my fault my landlord still has dimmer switches installed

Linux user life lessons

I have at long last DONE THE THING, and successfully expanded my /boot partition from 0.5GB to 2GB, the hard way

made my first nixpkgs bug report + PR! github.com/NixOS/nixpkg...

this has led me into by far the most cursed part of this yet, which amazingly is nothing to do with PXE, involving the Nix package manager, the libxcrypt password hashing library, and a build log that is 570MB long

this wasn't quite true. now shaving a PXE yak

recent ACT Machinery of Government changes have resulted in some surprising new directorates and agencies

talking with a functional programming friend this evening and learned that apparently one of Australia's main employers of Haskell programmers is Bellroy, as in the wallet company, who maintain their e-commerce stack in-house and apparently write most of it in Haskell. wat

Update: we're at 87 minutes late. Can we hit 90 by the time I reach Canberra?