Dragonfruit: Outside—looks AWESOME Inside—going to be GREAT Taste—wait what Passion fruit: Outside—looks… questionable? Inside—oh, dude, I don’t think that’s food Taste—holy s*** I’ve discovered a new flavor plane

Why do we fool ourselves into thinking that dragon fruit has a taste beyond nothing?

So, what’s with the budget? Should I refinance and buy a real-estate investment or what? Or maybe I should read the news?

Yet another example of why you simply cannot trust employers (or potential employers) when they promise something unless both parties have signed on the dotted line. Universities are not exempt from pulling shitty stunts like this.

Has it been five years?! I remember the #EconTwitter thread when Johannes went in the other direction. Fun times.

Cable news’s favorite economist on a mission to make economics more accessible. 🙌🏽 Congratulations, mate!

Season 2 of Hijack is so convoluted. What a waste of good actors.

North Beach doing North Beach things this afternoon. 🌬️

Old people will know. This made me check if Geocities is still alive, and—no, it’s dead (well, it redirects to Yahoo!).

OK, maybe Google heard me. You can now export files from Gemini. Source: blog.google/innovation-a....

What is the most charming Philippine language, and why is it Ilonggo?

By the way, good morning. ☀️

A certain *unnamed* university has a Visiting Research Fellowship program, and you know what’s among the requirements? Your diploma (“testamur”) and your transcript! 🤦🏽‍♂️ “Dear Prof Acemoglu, come to …! Please send a copy of your diploma and transcript of records.”

The poor prospects for student contribution reform. My article in The Conversation. theconversation.com/50-000-arts-...

OK, the new trains are all right. It’s not the Shinkansen, but at least they’re a smidge better than the old carriages. 🚉

To the people on here who use LLMs more often and more elegantly than I do, I have a question: I thought Gemini has improved and is now comparable to Claude or ChatGPT. But why can’t it even output a Word document?! In a task converting PDF into DOCX, it failed miserably—unusable output!

Absolute cracker of a day for golf. Just don’t ask me how many balls I lost. 🏌🏽‍♂️

Graduation day, fun day at the University of Wollongong. Truly my favorite “service” duty. 🎓

Ah, yes, the dreaded “your password will expire” email from IT. This is generally considered poor practice these days! Just enforce 2FA across the whole enterprise!

This is very Australia-coded, Duo.

Excuse me? Are we meant to take the train to Central and change there to get to the airport? 🤦🏽‍♂️

So…now he wants it closed? I’m so confused.

I had a successful SMILE surgery for my eyes, so now I have daily contact lenses (-6.00 and -6.50) to dispose of. But I’m happy for them to go to someone (in Australia for postage reasons) who can use them. DM/email me!

This is just incredible work. Top notch guerilla activism.

Maccas has stopped serving chocolate ice cream. Meanwhile, I’m still trying to find a branch that consistently has any soft serve ice cream at all! Why are the machines always out of order?!

In this house, we donate plasma. If you’re in Australia, Lifeblood has some pretty good milkshakes to offer while or after you donate! 🥤

From @kevinroose.com over on X: “During testing, Claude Mythos Preview broke out of a sandbox environment, built ‘a moderately sophisticated multi-step exploit’ to gain internet access, and emailed a researcher while they were eating a sandwich in the park.”

Insert meme “worst person you know just made a great point”

Many people have made this point much earlier and more eloquently, to be sure, but one of the most infuriating things about genAI is that now people think the use of an em dash is evidence of AI slop. You cannot appropriate my favorite punctuation mark, ChatGPT! 😡

Imagine being upset at me but, like, this is my view whenever I go out for a walk?! 💅🏽

Also, niche content, but Mexoryl 400 is now available in La Roche-Posay sunscreen sold in Australia. You can stop harassing travelers coming in from Europe to bring some with them!

I would 100% buy this.

Good stuff from @mattbevan.bsky.social. youtu.be/-rR1zDCB8tI

Telstra, I don’t know why I have to chat to your agent to cancel a subscription instead of a simple click after I log into my account. 🤦🏽‍♂️

The address to the nation that could’ve been an email.

Geriatric settings on the iPhone: reduce transparency, increase contrast, reduce motion, prefer cross-fade transitions, automatic vehicle motion cues—and the final blow—larger text. 🤦🏽‍♂️

This would be hilarious if it weren’t so painful every time I’m at the gas station.

I gave a short talk upon the invitation of the Financial Executives Institute of the Philippines (FINEX). Title? “The Philippine Economy: Five Lessons from KPop Demon Hunters.” 🌈

I don’t know why any person with at least half a brain takes Jason Hickel seriously. And for a BMJ journal to publish this is just crazy. Draw a DAG, for fuck’s sake!

As someone who worked for state and federal elections, I can also say at least about a tenth (feels like 25%, though) of the ballots simply have penises drawn on them.

The fact that Monte Carlo studies were named after the casino just dawned on me (and confirmed with Wikipedia). I guess I never really thought about why they were called that in the first place. 🤦🏽‍♂️

Ah, yes—discarded nangs just outside the train station. You love to see ‘em.

I am genuinely envious of the power of American professors. If I tried this, my ass will be hauled to the dean’s office in a heartbeat.

Qantas really likes ripping a new one into its frequent flyers.

Seminar presentations are going to be so much more important moving forward now that AI has driven down the cost of (good, or good enough) written output.

Also, folks, just use Poisson. There is no need to arbitrarily transform your y into log(y + 1) or log(y + 0.00001) or whatever.

The Bunnings umbrella is the best umbrella.

A florist called me to clarify something about my order and she kept referring to me as “m’love”, and I just don’t know about that, sweetie.

Websites that disable right click should be banned.

Anyone else have mini-monovision? I started trialing it with contact lenses and glasses last week and it seems OK. Low light and the end of the day are still somewhat of a struggle, but not terrible.