The Mighty Milkshake Ducks

Announcing the launch of the Sydney STS network, bringing together more than 50 science and technology scholars across the city - thanks to @sonjavw.bsky.social Friday March Feb 27, 3-5 pm, at USyd, + reception events.humanitix.com/sydneystsina... @aussts.bsky.social @4sonline.bsky.social #sts

Of all the bad choices in iOS 26 UX, putting ‘Find On Page’ into the ‘Share’ menu in Safari is a real doozy.

I don't understand this juice but I like it.

IDENTIFICATION DIVISION. PROGRAM-ID. IDSAMPLE. ENVIRONMENT DIVISION. PROCEDURE DIVISION. DISPLAY 'GREAT POST GLENN'. STOP RUN.

This is obvious in reality -- there is a generational barrier for entry to the market without already having family in the market. But also good when experts say it out loud so that some media feels compelled to point it out a little more broadly.

I mention in some bios that I was once a yo-yo expert. Now it also turns out it's a great filter for weird AI cold pitches. It's started to come up as an equivalent reference to having been writing about tech and digital culture for two decades. "Love your writing and your yo-yo skills". Do you?

My fave genre of schadenfreude of our era has been people getting angry that other people 'steal' their AI prompts, and now I can add AI companies getting angry that other AI companies 'steal' their AI by talking to their AI too much.

Some amazing cloud iridescence at Jones Beach on Sunday. Lasted about 20-30 minutes. Much more vibrant in my eyeballs than in the camera too.

It really is fascinating how overt it now is that there are certain - really not controversial - ideas that you aren’t allowed to say on television.

As predicted by every privacy professional in Australia - age verifiers make a tempting target and their data sets are a valuable honeypot.

FOOOOOTY 🏉   Watch the new trailer for PRO JANK FOOTY with commentary from Broden Kelly!   Releasing across all major consoles including PlayStation (PS5), Xbox (Series X|S), Nintendo (Switch 1 & 2), PC and Steam Deck in 2026.   🏆 Play the demo for free this Feb 23 on Steam!

Some of you will appreciate my wife’s amazing new mug. Burleigh collab with William Morris Gallery for a Strawberry Thief mug. So good.

www.abc.net.au/news/2025-02... That’s the party surging in the polls. Thats who they are.

this made my soul ache

Kids are playing Overwatch again so I scored some solid nerd Dad cred when Ms17 wanted to show her friends my box of Lucio-Ohs from 2018 Blizzcon.

All this love for curling yet we still can’t get lawn bowls into the Olympics.

all the doubters who thought substack couldn’t find a business model must be feeling PRETTY SILLY now that they’ve partnered with THE upscale predatory gambling application 😏

cant wait for all the aussie substacks that end up getting in trouble for doing this considering it would be advertising an illegal gambling service

I’m doing part-time mat leave cover at legendary design firm Arup this year. It’s been great to see how they genuinely work hard to live strong values in all their work and in their support for staff. This three story flag in the Sydney office is pretty great.

I wrote a tribute for BYTE Magazine's amazing cover artist, Robert Tinney, who died Feb 1st Tinney painted 80 vivid and surreal covers illustrating various concepts in early personal computing from 1978-1990, usually airbrushed with gouache. May he RIP ❤️ arstechnica.com/gadgets/2026...

I've asked about removals as part of my reporting (which I hope is out soon) though never received a response. If there are old authors that see this and want to chat, they can ping me.

There was a time when we thought that getting paid to write for a website would mean that site would exist long into the future. That there was a kind of custodianship agreement of a sort. That our moral rights as writers with bylines wouldn’t just be sold off with a domain sale. So naive.

The utter sham of offsets, yet again... “Destroying the equivalent of 40 MCGs worth of greater glider habitat and then attempting to relocate all hollows and claim this somehow offsets the harm to greater gliders is genuinely deluded, and contemptuous.” - me www.theguardian.com/environment/...

It’s been a good and busy week at an academic conference. My brain is almost used up though.

You can't... repeal... a scientific finding. At that point it's just called lying about it.

I speak as an Australian Jew when I say: What a completely FUCKED thing to say Albo.

Just a giant reminder that Gamergate never ended, it just normalised and deeply embedded itself into culture at every level. Cool. Great. So good. Yes.

Johannesburg’s Nyamakop Studios turns African artifact repatriation into a bold heist game. Protagonist Nomali and a crew of ordinary citizens reclaim 70 real-life artifacts taken during the colonial era. The 30-person dev team includes people from Zimbabwe, Ghana, Nigeria, Ethiopia and Tanzania.

We knew from the moment we heard it that “social cohesion” would be one of those Orwellian terms which would be used to cover all manner of state sanctioned abuse and deprivation of civic freedoms. It fuels the very unrest it pretends to seek to quell.

Last night we tried to watch Super Bowl commercials on YouTube. A search led to dozens of random compilations, AI fakes, old years, and low res rips. It took visiting a real website that curated the links to watch them without an extra half an hour of frustration.

Mmmm…. Drafts…

But the whistles mean more than that. Group members told me they know many of these whistles will never get blown — but wearing one, handing one out, shows that you're here for your neighbors. "I see you. Here, have a whistle. We're in this together."

It seems to take 20+ seconds now for the Sonos app to just show me my stuff. Getting harder by the year to recommend anyone buy into this formerly awesome ecosystem.

A very good thread on Bad Bunny’s Very Good Show.

Jon Kudelka, much-loved Australian political cartoonist, dies aged 53

Kudelka 2024

Pure celebration of culture. Great show. #superbowl

Consistently terrible male hosts and commentators on the Olympic coverage from Nine. Just awful. Expert insights from the women and then just blokey blather and bad puns and metaphors from the dudes.

"Tell me you know nothing about the Muppets without telling me you know nothing about the Muppets."

While reporting this, I had something happen that's never happened. A comms rep for one of the co's disputed my reporting and said what I was telling them was untrue because it was not in Grok, xAI's chatbot. I was looking directly at the files. And this person was using AI to challenge the truth.

ok, whoa. the DOJ just told me that the unredacted version of the document in question contains an image of a victim’s face overlayed on the face of the Mona Lisa image. so, that's why it's redacted. jesus christ

The CIA just stopped publishing their World Factbook and took every page, including the archived copies of previous versions! This sucks. It was public domain, so I recovered the 2020 edition (the last one published as a zip file) and shared it to GitHub simonwillison.net/2026/Feb/5/t...

The kids have a saying: “Someday you’ll place your last block.” What an excellent memento mori on childhood play and being in the moment with friends while it lasts.

Could AI make it harder for women to get a loan? Women already face discrimination when securing finance – AI banking tools are expected to make this worse. My latest investigation for CHOICE. www.choice.com.au/money/bankin...

We gotta come up with a better system than “everything rests on whether these twelve billionnaires are nice”

Can’t be said too often: Having the power to restrict protest indefinitely creates a very specific definition of “social cohesion”.

🆕 Hi everyone – please help my @qutdmrc.bsky.social and @admscentre.org.au colleague @ashwinnag.bsky.social map the landscape of decentralised and prosocial digital platforms ! Please share widely: