People need to stop calling websites, apps and services like ManageMyHealth ‘platforms’. Not everything is a platform. It’s not an accurate way of talking about things.

Let me guess. Our dependence on cloud and its evil owners is so consequential that it's a national security risk to point it out in public.

Also, the 2010s/2020s decline of technical knowledge in management and cloud hosting mania leads to multiple layers of outsourcing between an organisation’s understanding of its privacy requirements and their capability to take action to support those requirements.

If anyone has been following along with the ManageMyHealth breach, this 2024 inquiry into its security (including integration into Te Whatu Ora's health identity portal) may be interesting. Disappointing that the request was only partially satisfied, and late. fyi.org.nz/request/2638...

If ‘pixels aren’t people’ then tokens aren’t language.

What’s more, govts and media orgs, all and sundry are still using this sewer of slop and abuse as a primary channel for announcements and media releases.

I think the AI angle of this is obscurant. It doesn’t matter that grok is “an AI” whatever you take that to mean. Suppose X hired a team of guys to photoshop the clothes off of women and children whenever anyone asks. That’s functionally identical what happening here. It’s not complicated.

Same as name suppression. Everyone in NZ has the same right to purchase a fair trial.

Just realized that Emperor Qin Shi Huang's "Terracotta Army" of clay soldiers he kept in a vault in like 200 BC make him the first Warhammer Guy. he got some disposable income and started painting minis. totally get it

The centre of the moral rot is accountability and criminal responsibility falling on individuals doing one-off bad things while organisations manufacturing bad things at industrial scale can avoid severe consequences.

Yes

Ultimately the objectionable imagery isn't the problem; you can make objectionable imagery with a pencil. The problem is the ability to very trivially aim that at someone else in public like a weapon.

Plenty of Maaori Mamdani's tbh but this country is too racist for that convo.

datacenters are gonna be abandoned malls that never had anything in them to begin with

Similar crazy curve for adoption of selling personal data

Expected behaviour.

If you have ever posted, or liked, anything objecting to AI slop or supporting the idea that misinformation is bad, please don't spread the coat story. And if you do want to donate to a school for its students, I suggest talking to the school, not abandoning goods of unknown provenance nearby.

One of the last side projects of 2025, nearly finished (for now). Have been riding it around today, trying to avoid the thunderstorm. It rips…

"Did you see what Mark Cuban posted? Oh did you see the clapb—" You shake yourself awake in the cold North Atlantic water. You are not online. It is July of 1858. You are a baleen whale, and you have changed your mind. The future most not come to pass. The telegraph cable must break.

There are two hard problems in distributed systems: 2. Exactly-once message delivery 1. Message ordering 2. Exactly-once message delivery 2. Exactly-once message delivery 2. Exactly-once message delivery

Kevinismus

My core EV hot take is that car manufacturers are incentivised to sell deadly and oversized vehicles because it makes them more $$, but consumers hate and can't afford them The delusions of capitalism mean car companies will always fail. Active and public transport become vital, core pathways then

Another thing with the collapse of forest ecosystems is that understorey plants like kohekohe are highly fire resistant. A disturbing array of positive feedback loops entangled here. newsroom.co.nz/2025/12/22/w...

New Zealand just recorded its first-ever day of zero coal- or gas-fired electricity. In fact two days, 20 & 21 December. (Still some co-gen, about 1.8%.)

How much worse can it get? Way mo’!

Mr. Beast, all my friends and I were saying how good at boxing you’d be

I wish discourse about AI in game development would distinguish between "making new kinds of games that couldn't exist without this tech" and "making the same kind of games as before but cheaper and worse with fewer humans involved"

State of the NZ boardroom: utterly cooked. Boiled harder than a 1950s three veg dinner.

Congratulations 👏🏽🎉 to FAFSWAG artists Tanu Gago & Moe Laga on becoming round2 recipients for the New Zealand Writers Guild SEED Grants 2025. We're happy to see your feature film 'Shopping for Bullets' get the support it deserves! Can't wait to see what this dynamic writing and directing duo create.

we have to decide what we want to do (or not) with automation and what kind of society we want to have through our choices and actions. there is no law coming to save anyone about this.

Zohran Mamdani scares the ADL more than these guys and I think it's fair to ask why

A long one, but we barely had time to scratch the surface. A lot more to be said about the process of embedding free market ideology in govt, the differences between North Island and South Island, urban and rural, Iwi vs Hapū level engagement, failures of the NZ building industry and deregulation—

Various economists and policy agenda lobbyists from the NZ Initiative also frequently appear on this network, which further works to normalise the far right as center right in NZ.

Nyika is one of many who we (that's we as in the country) are not paying properly while they do research for us (the country). It is nothing less than exploitation by the crown. In 2026, this is my number 1 issue in the public research system to work on. Amplify if you will join in this mahi. #NZPOL

Focussing on this from a pure security perspective, it’s wild that an IS-linked attack was just carried out in Australia and we’re barely talking about it - the focus is on protestors and universities. www.afr.com/policy/forei...

Messed up how ‘prominent’ has become a placeholder term for ‘wealthy abuser paying for name suppression‘ in NZ. Media headlines are such a warped way of compressing information when you think about their overall social impact.

looking for a Sims-related anecdote for something I’m writing so I fire up the game. rich guy having a midlife crisis proposes to an *ahem* mercenary actress who immediately disappears into the bathroom to do ketamine. their wedding goes so badly that he gets so mad he almost dies

It’s helpful to distinguish between symbolic AI and statistical AI (at the broadest possible level, differentiating ML vs NN vs LLM is important but less relevant here). One of the reasons symbolic AI is favoured in procgen is the constructive aspect—it supports the authoring and creative process.

Computer scientists: "So with machine learning we can extract subtle patterns from massive datasets. What shall we do with it?" Business school professors, every single time: "You know, I think phrenology got a raw deal in the late 1800s."

Of course the real issue here was that workers were finally getting a slightly bigger slice of the pie. That is basically what GDP is - how much money is made domestically: business profits + salaries paid. As you can see nature is healing - worker's cut of the surplus is back below profits. [2/2]

The reckonomists and ghouls work hard to mask this reality - they want you to think that Govt has to beg rich people to lend them money to spend, or that Govt raises cash from the feted 'taxpayer'. Bollox. Govt gives money to the private sector when it spends and then taxes some of it back. (5/n)

Remember when every news article about anything to do with gay marriage seemingly HAD to include a quote from Brian Tamaki? I think it's easy to say most New Zealanders look back on that with distaste. That's where we'll be with trans rights too in a few years.

Making a new browser from scratch is a serious multi-year engineering effort given the complexity of web platform specs (and users expect all of it to work all the time for free). So reskinning existing corporate engines is near unavoidable. Main differentiators in the near future are adtech and AI.

I think it's important not to misunderstand what these social media platforms are. They are not public arenas where we bravely take on reactionary forces in honorable combat. They are apps that expose you to stress and thereby simulate the feeling of having done something useful

There’s a Canada Street in Auckland and it recently got bike lanes!

We need a moral panic over car bloat

New project alert -- me and @annapendergrast.bsky.social having fun and learning things in 2026 www.everyobject.org