I will say Ed timed this drop masterfully

honestly it feels like there's kind of an economic rapture taking place right now unfortunately we are the left behinds :/

Super fun gig guide segment on ABC Radio Sydney's Saturday Breakfast with @domknight.bsky.social this morning! Played tracks by: • Folk Bitch Trio • Maddy Jane • Genesis Owusu • Sarah Belkner • Blain Cunneen • Ian Moss Heaps of great Aussie music to discover! Listen here @ 3hrs 30mins 43secs

Ollie is a great human, has a very thoughtful approach to these complex topics and has deep experience in the intersection of computing and creativity. Highly recommend if you're looking for a forum that will tackle these subjects head-on.

Forthcoming album from BAYANG (tha Bushranger) & Nerdie [of 1300, Xiao Xiao, koreancrashout] is not mucking around

Yesterday @caitlinwelsh.bsky.social and I were invited to speak to the students at Oxford Creative Academy, sharing our insights from running Sydney's most comprehensive gig guide. Was a phenomenal discussion! Slides available on request. Love doing these talks, hit us up if you're interested.

East coast (VIC, NSW, QLD) waste disposal company BINGO Industries have consolidated their environmental reporting data and published it as a public portal. You can look at various measures related to quality of air / water / noise / etc Interesting bingoindustries-public.esdat.net/locations

Had a really great time speaking to students at the University of Sydney Conservatorium of Music yesterday. Phenomenal discussions, lots of candid insights from the room and a lot of great ideas and solutions explored. Slides available on request!

Yeah they said this about DATs and I believe Albini’s quote was “it is almost criminally irresponsible to do final mastering to DAT,” and he was right

If this were in fact possible it would torpedo the entire AI industry, for which hundreds of USD$billions of apparently endless datacenter hyperscaling has been required to get the tech to where it is today And $10m for copyright? For what? What would that achieve? The fuck are you people on about?

DJing at the Oxford Art Factory 18th birthday with @caitlinwelsh.bsky.social this weekend. Should be a rager. Come thru! RSVP here: moshtix.com.au/v2/event/%E2...

Is there a gig guide in your part of the country? So far we've found 19 community-run gig guides across Australia. Explore here: everycorner.au ✨

Please, we’re so close.

America’s in a “sex recession”, adults having sex weekly dropped from 55% in 1990 to 37% now. Key culprits are smartphones and the pandemic. Social time has tanked too, young adults went from 13 hours a week with friends to just 6.5 by 2019. The loneliness epidemic keeps manifesting in new ways.

Good piece

"The most accurate model was the reasoning-enabled Cogito model with 70 billion parameters, reaching 84.9% accuracy. The model produced three times more CO2 emissions than similar sized models that generated concise answers" "Reasoning" models are just brute-forcing info like Bitcoin mining

🤨

If you need to give your evening a kick along: POLTERGEIST 9000 — “Higher Frequencies” Newcastle yob-electro-clash-punk swimming in the soup of a frankly astounding scene. Newie is on one. It's so cool. Playing this Saturday in the CBD at Chuck Trailer's with mumfighter for free

Hot tip: more and more light leaking through the cracks on American business cable channels. I've taken to watching CNBC late at night. The in-studio interview last night with OpenAI's CFO (who was previously CEO of Nextdoor for 6 years) was deeply strange and quite entertaining.

CommBank tried to replace 45 employees with an AI voice bot. Nek minit: “Despite claiming the voicebot had reduced call volumes by 2000 a week, CBA was forced to admit calls had actually increased as managers scrambled to offer overtime and even pull team leaders onto the phones.”

MIT’s NANDA initiative found that 95% of generative AI deployments fail after interviewing 150 execs, surveying 350 workers, and analyzing 300 projects. The real “productivity gains” seem to come from layoffs and squeezing more work from fewer people not AI.

Do you use @bandcamp.com? Today at @sydneymusic.net we did our first experiment with their new Playlists feature. We've published BAYANG (tha Bushranger)'s amazing selection of discoveries as a playlist, available to stream by anyone with a Bandcamp account. Go listen! bandcamp.com/sydneymusic/...

I have got tremendous value out of every single edition of my trial of @thesizzle.com.au and just signed up as a paying subscriber. I'm not an email newsletter guy! But this is like having the lushest RSS feed that curates itself. Good shit.

Did you know that Midnight Oil played 165 shows in 1978? And those were all in Australia. Anyone that's hung out with me in the last 6 months has had me pull these stats out on them — but I finally put them on my blog.

You can also read Harry's full interview about quitting Spotify exclusively in our email newsletter. On: how he listens to music these days, why he doesn't see value in streaming and the behaviours it encourages, and why the future looks bright. Plus, also from @joe.hardy.id.au: who owns Bandcamp?

SO amped about this. Absolute god-tier selection, had a blast pulling this together.

Between ARIA choosing this exact moment to have Spotify present the Awards, and creating a festival award that will almost certainly be won by a foreignly-owned entity — the timing is spectacular www.smh.com.au/culture/musi...

Really enjoyed this chat with Ruu. aka theculturedblackkid aka Ruedi Holbeck. We talked about the past and future of live music in Sydney, and why the tools that help us find out about local culture matter.

Really struck once again just how fleeting Taylor Swift's interest in being politically outspoken was

“Economies of scale" just translates to a picture of someone sitting at the top of the pile screaming “I drink your milkshake"

This coffee shop I'm in has a playlist that's stuck in 2010 and you can't tell me that doe-eyed blog indie music wasn't as ridden with tropes and clichés as the algorithm-bait that's being released today. Pretty uncomfortable listening really.

Reading through this list of writing that we've commissioned and produced, I'm super proud of what we've been able to get out there despite our limited resources. All commissioned writing has been paid for. It's great to have this tiny fragment of Sydney's scene captured in words and pictures.

Many of the Reads on our website had unintentionally been hidden. Now fixed! Take a read of our archive: interviews with BAYANG (tha Bushranger), Party Dozen, Darren "D.C." Cross, Mara Schwerdtfeger, Nick Ward, plus selections & picks from curators and organisers across Eora. sydneymusic.net/reads

the "Web3 Is Going Just Great" of AI...

Screenshot of how Grok.com appears in Google Search Sometimes I really do wonder ...

Thank you @thesizzle.com.au for this gift

Meanwhile, just up the Melbourne dial a little bit

There are 0 tracks from the last 10 years in the ARIA Australian Singles chart this week. It's incredible that a single one-day national radio poll could still obliterate the domestic charts two weeks later. (And this week on the "big kids" chart, DDIO is... number 32)

Hint: this is not how Bluey was created

Why do we pay these garbage generators any attention? This is a screen shot of Google Gemini at the top of a search for "What companies are owned by AEG in Australia" (AEG as far as I can find has never had anything to do with Moshtix, it's fully owned by Ticketmaster/Live Nation)

August 7: Stablecoin issuer Paxos reaches $48 million settlement with New York financial regulators over due diligence, anti-money laundering failures August 11: Paxos applies for national trust bank charter 🙃

Introducing everycorner.au! ✨

Not to harp on, but to flub a chart like this in a major product announcement a decade or two ago would have been a major embarrassment and an massive hit to credibility. This speaks directly to the quality of their core product AND the people that should theoretically be experts at using it. WTF!

Fucking finally bro

"When are you going national?" is a question we get asked all the time at @sydneymusic.net I'm convinced that gig guides do not scale: it's better that they're managed by people within the communities they serve. So we decided to try a different approach: an old-fashioned links directory instead.

These clowns want to run the planet with this shit

Didn’t want to believe this was true. It’s true.

Nipped out of a tedious team meeting to press the caps lock on all the unattended PCs. 11 people had their passwords reset by Tech Support

Introducing everycorner.au! ✨

Glad someone finally wrote this. TailwindCSS is a bad idea badly executed, giving the illusion of productivity because yes - you can build quickly with it. Other than that it's a bin fire: completely flies in the face of semantic HTML and, idk, conveniently forgets about the 'C' in CSS?