My 1999 self would weep at how totally broken the internet has become. AI slop, social media walled gardens that rot the brain, surveillance pricing and advertising, every single goddamn website has an endless cloudflare captcha loop before you get to read anything. Burn it all down.

motherfucker I will take my computer out back behind the barn first

Sure, 'that meeting could have been an email' but there also exist cursed email chains that could have been a 10 minute meeting.

I am old enough to remember when remarkably prolific people were just on cocaine

Memo journalists: reporting Government denial of absurd opposition hyperbole is not the cracking story you think it is.

This whole thing of the entire global economy now being based solely on gullible fascists selling each other magic beans would be much funnier if the global economy wasn't how I feed, clothe, and house myself.

I’m old enough to remember when this was just called malware

Really impressive how he keeps finding new depths to plumb. www.abc.net.au/news/2026-05...

I’ve dealt with several thousand cyber incidents over the past 5 years, and currently lead a global emerging threat team. Amount of those being GenAI incidents: zero. Amount being foundational causes: every single one.

Is the hold music on the Sydney Water customer support line designed to reduce wait times by inducing customers to commit suicide? I mean, there’s no *good* hold music, but I want to hunt down this flautist and do nasty things to them.

You wouldn't even catch Caligula saying half the shite that Peter Theil comes out with on the regular.

No one in govt is talking about before the budget, but just FYI, the level of Jobseeker is now 42% below the poverty line - worse than it was during the Howard years... live.thepoint.com.au

Very good from Kos… open.substack.com/pub/redbridg...

And property values for a lot of people are now linked to the deposit people have to pay to get into an aged care facility Most of the value of my dad’s villa unit was his aged care place deposit

This 1952 memo from the Pentagon UFO files is superb There is no point preparing for aliens ‘because no one of consequence is going to take this rubbish seriously unless it happens. At that point, our policy will be determined in the traditional manner of grand panic.’ 🤣 www.war.gov/medialink/uf...

That’s a live bird on her arm while she’s driving. Good thing traffic on King St doesn’t move fast.

Very good interview, worth your time.

So, not Planet of the Apes. Planet of the Mice. phys.org/news/2026-05...

I still love the theory a Year 6 child proposed to me that David Attenborough is actually God and he got fed up with people not noticing the amazing things he'd created, so he made documentaries to show off.

Because of course they are. We live in the very stupidest of times.

Morning Bluesky

Despite the temperature it’s actually quite a lovely day today. The magpies are caroling, the sun is shining. Our yard is sufficiently sheltered from the wind that it’s a very pleasant place to have a mid-morning coffee.

Most mastodon instances feel like a lifeboat full of people who all remember different ships

This is a REALLY good music video. www.youtube.com/watch?v=lhBd...

It would be emblematic of Australian defence procurement for us to manage to contract with a fourth different country to get submarines (and still somehow manage not get any.)

Another beautiful sunrise, but rather than look to the horizon, I peered down into the inky depths of Sydney Harbour and delighted at the play of bright sunlight orange and yellow battling the dark waters.

I am a terrible person. I don’t know if I will remember Giuliani but I will always remember Four Seasons Total Landscaping.

Wow, they actually *retracted* this so-called meta-analysis about ChatGPT effects on learning performance, though it got massive metrics and social media attention before that. www.nature.com/articles/s41...

lol. ABC News Radio breathlessly reporting that tasers carried by police can be detected by people nearby over Bluetooth. This, says the ABC, includes undercover police officers. How many undercover cops carry tasers?

My dear friend Tex Perkins sang for me at my party. Most people don’t know Tex as a soul singer but I do and I have never met a man with more soul or a bigger heart.

I present Turtrucken

My better half is watching Idiocracy in the living room. I just can’t - it’s too depressing.

I read a very compelling argument that when this weasel chewed through a cable and unexpectedly shut down the Large Hadron Collider’s 17-mile particle accelerator in April 2016, that’s when our reality went haywire. I have yet to hear a more persuasive explanation. Not even really joking.

Every journalist at the Alice Springs press conference should be ashamed of themselves. Standing idly by while a bunch of right wing hacks attempt to turn a tragedy into a culture war moment. Awful.

Just send an actual card to: Sir David Attenborough BBC UK That should get to him.

🙃 This sucks. I see everyone talking about how AI empowers to build better software. But I haven’t seen better software, I’ve just seen services I use for work start to break more often 😭

Nothing at all to worry about. Normal stuff. arstechnica.com/ai/2026/04/o...

"You hear theyre using chickens as camera gimbals now?" "What?" "Chickens. Strap a camera onto their head. No shake. Chicken camera gimbals"

Whitlam: "It's Time" Albanese: "Not the Time"

I don’t want to jinx it, but Sydney’s autumn has been (as a local would say), beaut. Just south of Bondi Beach is Squid Bay, and while there was early mist about, looking across the Tasman Sea at dawn, it was clear as a bell.

Serkis is a genuinely great actor (and not just in his mocap roles -- he was wonderful as Ian Dury and Martin Hannett too) but clearly being able to act doesn't make you able to understand a fairly simple book.

A friend of mine runs the Nick Drake estate and he regularly gets invitations for Nick to play festivals, appear on podcasts and also offers to help "boost his profile" on "the socials". His replies are masterful.

RIP to Sora, OpenAI’s AI-generated social media network, which closed its doors today and loads this message when I open the app. Indeed, Sora cost OpenAI millions a day in its attempt to subsidize cheap AI video generation in a way that did not attract advertisers because it did not attract users.

“They can be as young as 10? Being shackled?”💥 David Shoebridge shocked as Sandy Leonard (NAAJA) describes the “incredibly humiliating, distressing experience” young Indigenous kids go through as they’re flown 1500km from Alice Springs to Darwin for lock up Gobsmacking. #auspol

Corellas being corellas.

WIDOW'S BAY is enormously entertaining so far! "What if the mayor was the protagonist of JAWS?" is a killer hook. And Hiro Murai never misses.

*Very peculiar economics here, especially when you throw in a fossil-fuel crisis and a collapse in trust in Trumpistan Big Tech companies www.404media.co/the-ai-compu...

Some Sheep vs No Sheep Map of Australia in the 1920s 7 more maps in the same series: brilliantmaps.com/new-oxfor...

"Sooner or later, everything turns into television." J.G. Ballard

At least those people at the #WHCA now a bit more about what it’s like to a school kid in the US