Yeah my initial impression from all of this is that the media industry is not covering itself in glory

A few highlights from a quick @sydneymusic.net merch shoot yesterday Merch available from store.sydneymusic.net. Support your local gig guide!

A couple of snaps of James Valentine while sitting in on a jam with his son (not pictured) and friends at the Ev in Redfern. An icon. Vale.

I did regular on-air chats with James a few years back about whatever was in the pop culture discourse that week. The week Will Smith slapped Chris Rock we had a cackling, ranting hour-long call to prep for a 10-minute segment about it. I have never known an ABC without him.

A prediction that I've been sitting on since the start of 2026 is that I reckon Live Nation will get big into drone shows, with a large amount of the creative (music, visuals, drone choreo) being increasingly AI-generated. Just I wanted to write this somewhere so I can point to it if it happens.

This speaks so much to the evolving detachment I see in the world around me. Another way to describe it could be these two figures. They illustrate 2023 v 2025 night time economy spend in NSW (in Australian dollars). Source: NSW 24 Hour Economy Commission

Great story. Shot walking to the "Guitar Gently Weeps" performance at the Hall of Fame!

BIG HELPS! this is a lot

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We have new merch and it’s shipping next week! @sydneymusic.net's FY27 Fundraiser is live. We critically need to raise $30,000 to cover our budget for the first half of next financial year. Order a tee or some stickers to help us get more people out to shows! Merch/donate: store.sydneymusic.net

Bumping this news about our new tees (and stickers!) SydneyMusic is fundraising for its survival beyond June 30. We need to raise $30,000 in donations in order to secure our future in the new financial year. Hit our store at store.sydneymusic.net Thank you!

We have new merch and it’s shipping next week! @sydneymusic.net's FY27 Fundraiser is live. We critically need to raise $30,000 to cover our budget for the first half of next financial year. Order a tee or some stickers to help us get more people out to shows! Merch/donate: store.sydneymusic.net

Good local gigs at pocket money prices is where a love for live music starts.

We have new merch! Pre-orders for our brand new "Hot Shows In Your Area" drop are open now, with a strictly limited 10% discount ahead of stock arriving. Get yours now from store.sydneymusic.net All profits go towards keeping our gig guide running into the next financial year!

Hot Shows In Your Area

I mean if my CFO's previous IPO (as CEO!) looked like this I'd probably be looking for ways to limit the damage too

I just published a deep-dive into the 250-hour build behind syntaqlite, a SQLite formatter and LSP I built using AI agents. AI agents were the only reason built this after 8 years of wanting but there's a psychological toll to AI-assisted engineering. The post-mortem: lalitm.com/post/buildin...

We're throwing a party on Thursday night at the Gladdy. A lovely arvo: us DJing the courtyard at sunset, followed by four great local bands, then people with great taste playing tunes until sometime in the morn. Don't just sit there, do something. RSVP/info: events.humanitix.com/heathensong-...

This is pretty interesting. I also think it's fascinating that the presentation singles out and pwns Ghost, given that's the publishing architecture that a lot of independent journalism relies on

People should watch this. TLDR: we are globally becoming at risk of extremely serious cyberattacks because AI can find vulnerabilities everywhere. Attackers are powerful at a systemic level now. youtu.be/1sd26pWhfmg...

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IRANIANS ON TEMPORARY VISAS WILL BE RESTRICTED FROM RE-ENTERING AUSTRALIA UNDER CONTROVERSIAL NEW POWERS BEING ROLLED OUT BY THE GOVERNMENT.

I mean the less funny thing to consider is that the reason Sora got discontinued so shortly after OpenAI signed a military contract is that those GPUs are gonna be busy

Finland suspends a plan to move its election platform to AWS, opting to remain on domestic servers through the 2027 general election, as trust in the US frays (Kati Pohjanpalo/Bloomberg) Main Link | Techmeme Permalink

my fear from 7 months ago no longer feels like a fear, it’s just increasingly becoming the reality

Read our submission to the NSW Government's Social Issues Committee on “The State Of Live Music” sydneymusic.net/reads/sydney...

Read our submission to the NSW Government's Social Issues Committee on “The State Of Live Music” sydneymusic.net/reads/sydney...

Interesting. Is the crowd turning against Harry Styles? That new song definitely isn't doing well

Love music and in Sydney? @sydneymusic.net is doing a survey to collect feedback on our gig guide, and what our city needs. We'd hugely appreciate your input. Takes 5 minutes: sydneymusic.net/survey

Always good when proof of stupid laws rushed through parliament occurs quickly

Love music and in Sydney? @sydneymusic.net is doing a survey to collect feedback on our gig guide, and what our city needs. We'd hugely appreciate your input. Takes 5 minutes: sydneymusic.net/survey

Pretty good, honestly. Thoughtful presentation, and you might as well go all in on slop if you're going to properly examine it.

I got Claude Code to write me a GUI “Hello World” app in assembly code and... well, I'll be damned

Talking about this (and some great gigs) on ABC Radio Sydney at 9:35

I find this extraordinarily depressing from the NSW government's report on the Night-Time Economy (NTE) Source: www.nsw.gov.au/business-and...

Here's where live music happened in Sydney in 2025 (source: SydneyMusic.net gig guide)

Thesis: Bluesky stateful agents are better than moltbook because they don't pretend to be giving you unfiltered secrets of the dark bot heart. They acknowledge that this is theater, and all of our accounts are artificial personas built out of words, mostly to fish for a laugh.

lol this is absolutely the wrong take, jesus christ

The Australian acts featured in the Hottest 100 have been active for a surprisingly high average # of years. I chatted about it a bit on ABC Radio Sydney last Saturday. In the 2010s the average number of years that the Aussie acts in the H100 had been active was 4-6 years. It's now 9-10 years.

Bums me out that we also don't get access to the benefits of solar power. While homeowners are bragging about their cheap power bills, landlords have no incentive to install panels on houses they don't live in.

I don't have time to get into this in detail, but here's my take on the Hottest 100 this year

“There are 250 local bands playing in Newtown tomorrow and none of them will appear in the Hottest 100 — maybe one" — me on ABC Radio this morning Any guesses on who the one act might be?

I was present for the birth of the web, the explosion of personal sites, and the blogging revolution, and you know what we never had to do? Beg people to use our shit.

Good, thoughtful piece on something that's getting a shitload of buzz at the moment. Super intrigued by the addiction to progress — people are doing stuff, but I'm not yet seeing much concrete evidence that it's effective. lucumr.pocoo.org/2026/1/18/ag...

My fucking god I love Sydney band half request so much. RIYL: Slint, They Are Gutting A Body Of Water, Sebadoh, Slowdive, y'know — shoegaze-y slowcore-y stuff. Get amongst. Incredible live. halfrequest.bandcamp.com/album/sunmark

They really showed their hand when they introduced "re-roll" into the vocabulary last year e.g. "oh if the code that's generated doesn't work, you might need to re-roll a few more times with the same prompt" literally heard that on a YC podcast

Just got word of another community-run DIY space being shut down by council. Super frustrating. Australian music is already on the ropes and our best acts wouldn't exist without the support of a thriving DIY culture. We need to stop the demonisation of democratising how artists platform their work.

I can't shake the feeling that ATProto is the ideal mechanism to solve the problem of event listings (i.e. replace FB Events) • Venues or artists publish events • Events are aggregated by curators or a feed reader • Some kind of intelligence to deduplicate/consolidate repeated items Feels right?

This release of iOS is, no word of a lie, the first time I've seriously thought it might be time to drop Apple - entirely due to Liquid Glass. It's an abomination.

Been using Google Workspace for Nonprofits (free) for over three years, and I've never been upsold for additional services once. In the last 3 months I've been upsold a paid AI subscription at least 4 times, each time using language like this. Hate that many orgs will take this up. Exploitative.