"And the early dawn cracks out a carpet of diamond Across a cash crop car lot filled with twilight Coupe Devilles Leaving the town in a-keeping Of the one who is sweeping Up the ghost of Saturday night"

Went for my Bondi 10k run today. It was nice to see things returning to normal again. Not surprisingly I didn't really feel like taking photos at the site itself, but I'm glad I went.

ever since Bondi there has been this low key authoritarian drumbeat in the news that creeps me out. at every turn the news gushes about the presence of police snipers in crowds and uniformed men with semiautomatic weapons patrolling, and, like, am I really the only one who finds cops frightening?

The last week i've found it almost impossible to read the news. The level of bickering and rancour among Australian politicians after Bondi has been utterly distasteful. I don't remember it being like this after Port Arthur, and it is upsetting. #auspol

paddington reservoir gardens. no, i did not know this existed until today. god this is a stunningly beautiful city

yeah i hate this. pay your fucking staff properly, and incorporate that into the price of the service. www.abc.net.au/news/2025-12...

the view from observatory hill is rather lovely. and it only took me 10 years of living in sydney to visit 🫠

over the last couple of days i've been reading whatever comes up in the bluesky feed when you search the name of australia's most well known beach, and have concluded that i don't block anywhere near enough people

The vast majority of Australians, everyone I've spoken to, my Jewish friends, my Muslim friends, want to just be good to one another in this moment, and avoid inflaming the endless blame cycle. A loud minority want otherwise. Unfortunately they're among the loudest in the nation

This is brilliant. Well done @davidshoebridge.bsky.social www.toomanyguns.org There are 82 registered gun owners and someone in my inner city postcode with 23 bloody guns. Outrageous.

istg i am going to block every american i see making a "haha pam bondi beach" joke. go fuck yourself.

it is so strange seeing all this interpreted through a political lens. it's inevitable, i suppose. but my emotional response is something simpler. there was a mass murder in a place that forms part of my sense of home, and i am distressed by it. the emotion is raw, but not complicated

okay. yeah. i'm not handling this well. in the abstract i know that i'm not at risk, my family is not at risk, etc. emotionally it feels like a violation of home. its one of the places that forms my sense of place and safety in the world. its a core piece of my sense of neighbourhood. i'm not okay

absolutely messed up day. i keep thinking banal thoughts about the news. somehow i'd never realised there are two footbridges, one on either side of the pavilion, but ive blurred them together in my mental map of the beach. but its ridiculous that my brain just fixated on this one pointless detail

just this once i would like bret stephens to not share his opinions. he doesn't live here

it's surreal how utterly banal thoughts intrude when you're trying to make sense of something terrible. just inane "oh i was on that footbridge the other day trying to work out why there's a bridge over a parking lot rather than over campbell parade where it would be useful" level of irrelevance

the lesson here, heard loud and clear, is that you should never report your rape to your employer

Of all the tools I've ever used to collaborate online on shared files, SharePoint is by far the worst. It's truly abysmal and not fit for purpose. It is astonishing that MS successfully sold this abomination as enterprise software.

i managed to hold it together right up the "authorised by the department for rearranging deckchairs" bit

Ah fuck it. In an expression of my frustration at having been unable to focus on things I actually *want* to talk about, I wrapped up this little blog post about managing git/github configurations for multiple identities on the one computer. As always, read it or don't :)

i ran 14km before breakfast this morning fuelled only by my visceral anger towards the english.

you know, i'm starting to think that the UK might have a bit of a transphobia problem www.bbc.com/news/article...

another day, another UK women's organisation banning trans women. whatever. i don't even care anymore. maybe we'll get lucky and the whole cursed island will sink into the sea www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2025...

this one hurts. you'd think i'd be desensitised to the constant stream of announcements by organisations banning trans women and girls, but i'm not. what even is the point of this? who does it harm to let trans girls be girl guides? www.thepinknews.com/2025/12/02/g...

detente

i am getting lunch at a tediously corporate food hall and am noticing the salad bar only makes sense if you assume the average human height is about 5'10. most women are unable to see the top of the counter in order to see their bill. it's unhinged.

i like running in sydney

i really wish cishet people would stop assuming that other cishet people who act in homophobic or transphobic way must be closeted gay or trans people. it's really fucking annoying, and comes off as victim blaming. the vast majority of anti-LGBT bigots are straights. fix your own shit.

Yay! 🎉

I appreciate that the ABS is trying to do the right thing here but I don't love this. The questions on sex and gender aren't going to work in practice: lazy researchers will use the sex recorded at birth field only, and I have no desire to be treated as male. qnews.com.au/abs-give-upd...

i really want to see the Kaplan Meier curve for the length of time a trans woman can be on the internet before a man slides into her DMs assuming she's willing to fuck him for money

i ran to the beach this morning

"The CDC is now two distinct agencies—a house divided against itself." The staff and scientists trying to keep our basic public health infrastructure functioning are being undermined at every turn – in their work, their trust, and their safety – by these cranks, grifters, and fascists.

This is about where I am too. I used to think TDOR was the one day of the year when cis people might actually be moved to care. I don't really believe that anymore. It's a painful day for us, but politically speaking it's meaningless. Trans lives don't matter. xtramagazine.com/power/activi...

We absolutely do not 'need humility' to engage with AI. Technology tools need to be designed around user needs, and prioritise user outcomes. And if the tools don't do that, we should not use them. Embedding AI into everything is not a fait accompli. We are doing this to ourselves.

today is TDOR. my mood is bleak

As much as I'm loathe to enter into "language wars" style commentary, I think I agree with @clauswilke.com here. The lack of NSE and native missing values is really bad for Python as a data science language (as, in fairness, is the unhinged OOP situation in R)

10 years after transition and i still smile happily every time i'm included in the "hi ladies" greeting in the work chat

every word of this is worth reading womensagenda.com.au/latest/stop-...

both my children have formal diagnoses of neurodivergence based almost entirely on behavioural traits that are eerily similar to mine, and yet somehow i have not successfully convinced a medical professional to sign off on the blindingly obvious

Uh wait, really? Bluesky suspended Sarah Kendzior for making an obviously jokey reference to literally the most famous Johnny Cash song? In the context of talking about an article written about Johnny Cash? This is the dumbest website on the internet

i don't even know where to start with this, other than suggest that the guardian hire someone who knows enough about the topic to write a coherent sentence

while i can understand not wanting to comment on every case, it necessarily means that users start asking questions about why sarah kendzior cops a suspension but jesse singal does not. opaque and inconsistent moderation does not inspire trust, nor does it foster safety.

i love me a progressive social media website that suspends journalists who write about authoritarianism but bends over backwards to protect journalists who launder right wing transphobic talking points into the mainstream

cats do not believe in capitalism

in my post-academic era i have become extremely scathing of the way academia considers papers to the primary outcome of intellectual work, and refuses to give credit to academics who write software or build other tooling. in industry we very rarely read your papers; but we always use your software

i ran to the city today. first time post-covid back at my preferred 10k distance. yay me. i'm grateful to be back in the world but god i'm so skittish now. enclosed, crowded spaces freak me out. had to find a pharmacist to buy a mask just so that i could work up the courage to get on a train home

oh fuck me. i wrote "Newton-Raphson" where techncially i should have written "Gauss-Newton" and i panicked at my error when ffs literally nobody who reads the report will ever care about the distinction

there are numerous criteria upon which programming languages can be assessed. but i would like to assert that, among the languages in widespread usage, #rstats is the cuntiest. intended in both the complimentary and derogatory senses, at the same time, with anger and love

my love-hate relationship with lazy evaluation in #rstats is very much in a "hate" phase at the moment. please send flowers or at least kind thoughts