Forget Scott Farquhar‘s BS about Australia needing sovereign AI. We need sovereign computing, full stop.

I have a new resolution for 2026: make it to this list.

I suspect that at a certain level of business it is difficult to assess if LLMs are bullshit because you’re already surrounded by sycophants and yes men.

My kingdom for a journalist who will ask “If we need military patrols of Bondi does that mean ASIO has no idea what is going on?”

This is admirably detailed reporting on the erasure of Palestinian life, from the NYT of all places. But I notice that the comments on this article are turned off. I wonder why that would be? 🤔 www.nytimes.com/interactive/...

Bari Weiss paid $1B to produce a historical re-enactment of Falwell Snr. v Flynt (1981). Comfort TV for the over-60 undiagnosed dementia set. Thats “innovation.”

I know everyone is on the schadenfreude train with Jake Paul but the Guardian reports he’ll probably make $70M for that broken jaw, which severely limits how much pleasure I can take in his self inflicted suffering.

Future generations will talk about the poisoning of Google Scholar the same way we talk of the Library of Alexandria burning. www.rollingstone.com/culture/cult...

The roads analogy here is perfect because the wealthy deployed capital to make roads, a previously public space, a wholly private one. Cars were given “right of way” legally and pedestrians criminalised so that cars ultimately become a necessity. But it wasn’t inevitable.

Always amazed that people are okay with moving services wholesale to expensive and fragile digital infrastructure that imposes monetary and privacy costs on the end user, as opposed to cash which is very cheap for the end user but imposes the costs on the people who want you to pay the fees.

My current theory is that 80% of the hype around 'AI' is a kind of Gell-Mann amnesia effect where people see outputs that are blatantly nonsense for fields in which they have expertise, acknowledge it is garbage, and then ask a question outside their circle of competence and accept the answer.

36 Months being run by gambling ad agency staff makes total sense now.

Next week the headline will be: “Why are there gangs of kids loitering everywhere?“ With a picture of a horde of goths outside the Queen Street Hungry Jacks like its 2005.

It's time to complete the Alan Sparhawk triangle and get BJ Burton to produce a Trampled by Turtles album. I demand banjos and a huge decaying wall of sound.

The Albanese govt cuts CSIRO jobs on advice from Treasury & Finance; now seems determined to create robodebt from scratch with their AI-managed NDIS plans. Maybe we were wrong to assume the problem was the Morrison government; maybe the problem is the senior leadership of the APS.

Last night west BNE got hit with the worst storm I’ve seen in a decade. 100mm in 15 minutes. Flash flooding everywhere. New BOM site said it was moderate rainfall the entire time. Their new data design will kill people.

More like land of the oppressed and home of the cowardly, am I right?

My apparently most controversial opinion working in tech is that we should maintain cash as a viable form of payment, regardless of cost, in order to ensure the robustness of our payment systems and the Australian economy. Digital payments are exponentially more complex.

Bandcamp Clubs seems like a great addition to their product lineup. I love Record Clubs but I struggle to justify the cost when there are a) already so many records I know I love that I'd like to own and b) the cost of vinyl makes getting albums you don't enjoy more painful (1/?)

Academics (including the journal’s founder) told Wiley to pound sand, started an open access journal, and Wiley just surrendered. I think more academics should tell academic publishers to pound sand. They are vampires.

I read a paper 3 years ago that predicted based on trends we'd hit $50/kWh wholesale around 2030. We're five years ahead of schedule. If we can get this kind of pricing for home batteries we'll transform our energy economy.

Good god. Meta is using their AI licensing deals with John Cena, Disney, and others to peddle sex chat bots to kids. Burn this company to the fucking ground. www.wsj.com/tech/ai/meta...

The student paper at the college at which I teach reports a "tsunami of takedown requests" from international students terrified of being targeted for innocuous, legitimate op-eds & opinions.. Many ask in person--leave no trace in writing. Reminds me of my father's account of studying in the USSR.

Australians can’t be too shocked by Salvadoran gulags when we perfected its precedent in Nauru.

Will Jordan Peterson promote the inevitable Latino Gulag Archipelago we get from this atrocity? Or is it only literature if a white guy writes it? This and other questions you already know the answer to coming up.

I don't think we can call these new genetically modified wolves direwolves. They're gattacawolves.

The #AI-2027 "report" is the farce to the Club of Rome's Limits To Growth report's tragedy.

Dutton can’t even stand for his own ideas but will *totally* stand up to Trump.

Lots of speculation this morning about how Trump arrived at his calculations of 'tariffs imposed on the US' but all you really need to know is that his list explicitly includes tariffs on two islands populated only by penguins. www.wired.com/story/trump-... #auspol #tariffs

Things you'll never see @albomp.bsky.social promote for Australia this election:

Show me the incentives and I'll show you the outcome. (hint: who does the maintenance?)

The last 20 years has shown us that both major parties in Australia will govern against the interest of the people when they're in power. I suspect the only readily available way to moderate that instinct is minority government. #auspol

I want Standards Australia to stop paywalling their content so people can see what the standards are without having to fork out hundreds of dollars.

I’m amazed that the Australian government’s travel advisory for travelling to the US is still “normal precautions” when foreign visitors with legal visas are getting disappeared. Though I’m sure there would be diplomatic consequences for actually providing said warning.

My new retconned headcanon is that @lowtheband.bsky.social 's "Witches" is actually about @algreen.house.gov and not, you know, the other one. "Cause when you've finally submitted to embarrassing capture All you guys out there gonna wish you were Al Green"

Peter Dutton runs away from Cyclone Alfred and the only media to report on it is... the financial review? Bit of a gamble if his electorate ends up copping it...

DOGE is Grover Norquist's "I want to make government so small you can drown it in the tub" but using AI so 'the government' is now a toaster.

Wasn't expecting Bonhoeffer's wrestling with the limits of pacifism to ever be more, personally, than an abstract philosophical problem. But here we are.

Eggers can’t make a movie that doesn’t have Willem Dafoe in it so he’ll obviously be playing an old, leatherbound Goblin King.

Teletext captions on morning television insist that Peter Dutton is launching his "camfeign" which is the perfect kind of subversion; now I imagine that the closed captions are all written by an underpaid Situationist.

Our gods need to be bigger, shinier, more complex, increasingly convoluted, unrelentingly intimidating. We don't have time for golden calves or fertility idols. We have to sacrifice trees and rocks and strange glowing minerals so that autocorrect becomes sentient.

It's a beautiful day with golden sunshine and blue skies all the way. Fix your heart or die.

New year. New corpses. New rubble. New bombs for newborns. New shrouds. New prayers said again & again. The misery is not new. The lies are not new. The deception is not new. The hypocrisy is not new even when new generations play along. New death toll. New prisoners. New weapons.

All I want for Christmas is for someone to leak Coyote v. ACME

Spotify clearly harbours ambitions to be the masters of musical labour exploitation, the same way Disney is to animators or Marvel with their writers/illustrators. If you care about music and you can't afford to buy physical media at least subscribe to literally any other music service.

the theory nerd in me is kinda delighted by everyone doing literal interpretive criticism on luigi mangione's Goodreads reviews. the metatext has become the text. the people do not know they long for hermeneutics.

We need to bring back the real spirit of Christmas. Stuff like "Santa discovered the children had been ground into sausages but he brought them back to life. Don't think about it." You know, just authentic Christmas stuff.

Finding things that generate economic growth is so easy! There’s even an entire industry built around finding ideas that might generate profit and they’re so good at it they call their winners “unicorns”. Which we all know are very common.

I think this is true generally -- if you want better *culture* of any kind, improving mobility and reducing rent-seeking by keeping the cost of real estate low is critical.