another robot highlight for 2025: man wearing humanoid mocap suit kicks himself in the balls

Christmas with my in-laws this year. Just remembered that the last time I had Xmas with them, my MiL abruptly and obliviously burst out after xmas eve dinner: "who wants to see my succulent ring?" Almost died laughing. It was a wreath, folks. Will take photos if she's made another one this year.

AUSTRALIAN AI: G’day! I’m Bonza, the LLM trained on dinky-di Aussie lingo! What can I do for you tod- ME: Potato cake. AUSTRALIAN AI: [sparks fly out of computer, explodes]

evergreen

hey, did we ever get an update on how this turned out

Am 27 weeks pregnant and have the actual real-life flu and it is *horrendous*. Nurse just told me it would be so much worse if I hadn't got the flu booster a few months ago. 😱 Get vaccinated folks.💪💉

An Australian, tasked with explaining this to people from another country: "Yeah, nah. Can't."

Now do Australia next

Yesterday received an email from an ex-boyfriend from 20 years ago with the subject: are you still alive? 💀

PSA for anyone else suddenly inundated with unwanted baseball content: > Settings > Moderation> Add muted words> "baseball"

Just discovered this guy. Thought you all might enjoy him too. youtube.com/shorts/oWjOF...

Just a reminder that no politician or bureaucrat has ever faced any charges for Robodebt

Just learned that notion of an “individual carbon footprint” came from oil giant BP in 2004 ad campaign designed to place blame for the environmental impact on consumers, not corporations. Not surprised, but feel like I should've known this a long time ago.

You can't be a centrist under a fascist regime. You're either fighting, or facilitating. There's no secret third thing. Except dead, I suppose.

Some good news in these dark times

We were very pleased to get the news today that the Australian National Dictionary Centre will be saved, thanks to an anonymous donation and the halt on involuntary redundancies under the Renew ANU plan. We thank everyone for their generous support through these difficult times.

Finished job interview slightly before time and panel chair commented that we could finish early to which I gave 2 thumbs up and yelled "bonus points". 👍🤡👍 ☠️

I'LL JUST LEAVE THIS HERE FOR ANYONE WHO NEEDS A REFRESHER: medium.com/extra-extra/...

"The main misjudgment was to persist in using the organisers’ description of the rallies as 'March for Australia' and 'anti-immigration' after it had become obvious the emotional dynamo behind them was racism." Legacy media needs to call a spade a Nazi. #auspol theconversation.com/neo-nazis-an...

“It was essentially a hate on arts degrees. It was always based on a lie.” Mike Seccombe on the derided Morrison-era Job-ready Graduate program, and Labor’s lack of action to reform it: satpa.pe/HWzzamt

Get in on it folks!

NO SHIT 🙄 Planned fascist demonstration turns out to be run by fascists www.abc.net.au/news/2025-08...

Old Australian proverb

Just a reminder to JOIN 👏 YOUR 👏 UNION👏 www.abc.net.au/news/2025-08...

He said this? Out loud, where people could hear him? #auspol

FINE AND NORMAL www.abc.net.au/news/2025-08...

Here's me. 'In a sick world, centrism makes monsters of us'

some fine photos for Friday night (including this one from Carly Earl www.theguardian.com/artanddesign...

Given no one has been held accountable in the 2 yrs since Robodebt RC the sobering takeaway is: If you're a member of the elite & you screw over innocent people there'll be no consequences for you. Robodebt RC reforms ‘pronto’ independentaustralia.net/life/life-di... @michellepini.bsky.social

Just realised that from today (July 2) it’s now closer to the year 2050 then it is to 2000.

Probably a good time to remember that Harvey Norman only paid back $6 million of the $22 million it took in Covid JobKeeper subsidies. #MasterChefAU www.sbs.com.au/news/article...

“I was punished for my political opinion” - broadcaster Antoinette Lattouf after winning her unfair dismissal case against the ABC. The judge found the public broadcaster bowed to “an orchestrated campaign by pro-Israel lobbyists.”

“How dare you justify a genocide on the Palestinians?” This is the moment Belgian politician and member of the Flemish Parliament, Jos D'Haese, slammed Israel’s ambassador to Belgium and Luxembourg, Idit Rosenzweig-Abu, over the war on Gaza.

"The announcement was 782 words, followed by a nervous clarification of 731 words. The page featured 48,320 words of comments in just 24 hours" Here's a new one for @crikey.com.au trying to figure out why the presence of backlash to "AI" is so weirdly uneven -> www.crikey.com.au/2025/06/23/i...

Hi everyone I was denied entry, detained, and deported from the USA over the last 48 hours because of my reporting on the Columbia student protests I arrived back in Melbourne hours ago and had my phone handed back to me upon landing

Scott Morrison — whose legacy includes robodebt, multiple ministries and habitual lying — is to receive Australia's highest honour.

I hosted my first kids' party this weekend. Holy shit. I somehow invited 16 2-year-olds. It was °~*CHAOS*~° The women's weekly koala cake was good though.

the history we’ve been told was a lie “In some cases, human communities developed systems that curbed the concentration of wealth, using governance and cooperative institutions as ‘leveling mechanisms’…But high degrees of inequality are not inevitable in large societies.”

Hope everyone had a nice Easter break. Mine involved the group chat blowing up when one person outed themselves as a libertarian. Insults flew. Side chats popped up like mushrooms. Me and 2 other vocal critics were dubbed the "bullshit triumvirate". My eggs remain uneaten, such is the drama!

Partner just referred to a friend's near constant stream of insta posts and memes into our group chat as "digital diarrhoea" 😂

"Excuse me. My eyes are up here"

"...everything that came before this has led us here by virtue of its inadequacy. A fascist like Trump is not an aberration, he is an inevitability of the neoliberal rot we knowingly walked into because it made a few of us rich enough to buy a portfolio of houses..."

What can be done about car bloat? Look to France and Norway, which tax new vehicles by weight. At the local level, the District of Columbia ties registration fees to vehicle weight, and cities like Paris and Montreal require SUV and pickup owners to pay more to park.

I'm hiring! 2 x PhDs and 1 x PostDoc, to work with me at Uni Zurich on a project investigating how semantic patterns differ by geographic region. Linguistic typology, data science, spatial analysis, phylogenetic methods, potential fieldwork... REPOST 🙏 www.comparativelinguistics.uzh.ch/en/jobs.html