Hannah Story, writing for the Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC): Authors including Miles Franklin winners Michelle de Kretser and Melissa Lucashenko will boycott Adelaide Writers’ Week (AWW) to protest the cancellation of an event featuring Palestinian Australian author, … | Continue reading
Anil Dash: The trillion-dollar AI industry’s system for controlling their most advanced platforms is a plain text format one guy made up for his blog and then bounced off of a 17-year-old kid before sharing it with the world for free. You’re welcome, Time Magazine’s people of the … | Continue reading
Most Australia states, with the reported exception of Queensland, are in the grip of a heatwave. Temperatures in our part of the world, the NSW Central Coast, are expected to reach the high thirties, Celsius, on Saturday. That’ll be a little too warm at our place here, which does … | Continue reading
A website to destroy all websites, by Henry Desroches. Hand-coded, syndicated, and above all personal websites are exemplary: They let users of the internet to be autonomous, experiment, have ownership, learn, share, find god, find love, find purpose. Bespoke, endlessly tweaked, … | Continue reading
Simon Willison’s third annual review of the AI space, for last year. I read someone saying somewhere that Willison has become expert in AI and LLM since ChatGPT arrived in late 2022. He’s not the only one (obviously), but in late 2022 and early 2023 I was having conversations wit … | Continue reading
But that’s what Instagram’s (IG) owner wanted of course. Put another way, this means anyone using IG is expected to behave like an influencer, even if they only have a handful of followers. The comment was made by Mosseri, Head of Meta owned IG, in a year-end presentation (Instag … | Continue reading
Fernando Borretti: I will often find a blog post on Hacker News that really resonates. And when I go to check the rest of the site there’s three other posts. And I think: I wish you’d write more! When I find someone whose writing I really connect with, I like to read everything t … | Continue reading
Test matches in cricket are generally meant to last the best part of five days. Fans of the game expect to see individual batters clock up scores of one-hundred plus runs. Maybe two-hundred plus, if they get on a roll. Brian Lara, a West Indies cricketer, once made four-hundred r … | Continue reading
Rami Kaminski, a New York based psychiatrist, has identified a new personality type, the otrovert: An Otrovert is someone who feels like an eternal outsider in groups, even when they are friendly and socially capable. Media descriptions of “otroverts” commonly emphasize emotional … | Continue reading
Sydney based Australian journalist and speech writer Brigid Delaney, writing for the Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC): Arriving, a friend asked me how I was. I was OK, I replied, but still disorientated from my time on X. “I don’t know what’s real anymore,” I said. It wa … | Continue reading
Chris Shaw, writing at uncountable thoughts: The IndieWeb is, as far as I can tell, a community of people who advocate certain digital principles and support each other in working towards those. The most famous principle is Publish (on your) Own Site, Syndicate Elsewhere. There a … | Continue reading
In a land were people (still) do not generally expect to pay a tip at food and beverage venues, a practice called automatic tipping is sure to be poorly received. Industry workers are reasonably well paid in Australia (or are meant to be), so customers see little need to offer ti … | Continue reading
Actors, filmmakers, writers, and show runners, are among Hollywood creative professionals who have formed an industry group called the Creators Coalition on AI (CCAI), says Chris Gardner, writing for The Hollywood Reporter: CCAI’s rallying cry states that the group is not against … | Continue reading
Melbourne based Australian artist Jarrod Grech, has painted a mural (Instagram link) of Ahmed Al Ahmed, who heroically wrenched a rifle out of the hands of one of the shooters during the terrorist attack targeting the Jewish community, at Sydney’s Bondi Beach, on Sunday 14 Decemb … | Continue reading
From a post on the Firefox for Web Developers Mastodon account: Something that hasn’t been made clear: Firefox will have an option to completely disable all AI features. We’ve been calling it the AI kill switch internally. I’m sure it’ll ship with a less murderous name, but that’ … | Continue reading
Ivan Mehta, writing for TechCrunch: Over the last week, several users have spotted Meta’s test, which impacts link posting. Social media strategist Matt Navarra noted that users part of the test can only post two links unless they pay for a Meta Verified subscription, which start … | Continue reading
Sarah Perez, writing for TechCrunch: Elon Musk’s X is updating its Terms of Service to indicate it still lays claim to the “Twitter” trademark. The move to add this detail to the company’s terms follows an announcement from a Virginia-based startup, which recently filed an applic … | Continue reading
Steve Buttel, a former NSW police officer, speaking to Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC) reporters Lia Harris and Pablo Vinales: A former NSW Police sergeant claims he repeatedly warned his superiors years ago that local officers would not be equipped to respond to an act … | Continue reading
The poll will probably be closed by now, but New York City based software developer Rafael Pérez was asking other Mastodon users what their preferred non-work operating system (OS) was. Perhaps it will come as no surprise to learn that GNU Linux or UNIX OS’s, were, as of the time … | Continue reading
Brian Merchant has been collecting stories from copywriters who have lost their jobs to AI powered technologies, as part of a series, AI Killed My Job, that he has been compiling this year. I’m a writer. I’ll always be a writer when it comes to my off-hours creative pursuits, and … | Continue reading
Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese has flagged more restrictions on gun ownership. At present, to legally possess a gun, a person must, among other things, be “fit and proper”, have a genuine reason for ownership, belong to a gun club, and undertake to store the weapons s … | Continue reading
Social news aggregator Reddit has filed a lawsuit in the High Court of Australia, claiming the ban preventing Australians aged under sixteen using social media intrudes on free political discourse. The Australian Constitution does not protect free speech as such. In fact, the doc … | Continue reading
While making the Elvis biopic, which was released in 2022, Australian filmmaker Baz Luhrmann succeeded in finding unseen, but rumoured to exist, footage of American singer Elvis Presley. The reels, located in a Warner Bros. archive in the US state of Kansas, featured much unused … | Continue reading
Terrible news from Bondi Beach, this evening. As of the time I type, twelve people, including one of two perpetrators, are dead. Some sixteen people, including two police officers, have been injured. Here’s hoping there are no further causalities. | Continue reading
An American startup called Operation Bluebird is hoping to take ownership of the defunct Twitter name, the term “tweet”, and famous blue bird logo, and relaunch Twitter anew. Operation Bluebird’s backers believe the old micro-blogging service can be restored to its former glory, … | Continue reading
Not that I’m under the age of sixteen of course. But say what you will about it, the social media ban for Australians under the age of sixteen is now in force. Already some of those effected are claiming to have circumvented the restrictions. That shouldn’t surprise anyone. If an … | Continue reading
American economist Tyler Cowan writes about the educational impact the Australian social media ban for people under the age of sixteen could have: YouTube in particular, and sometimes X, are among the very best ways to learn about the world. To the extent that the law is effectiv … | Continue reading
The term has been in use since 2002, and originally expressed a driver’s frustration towards another driver, who had indicated they wished to overtake them, by flashing their car headlights. Certain types of web content have seen the term’s context change somewhat: Rage bait is d … | Continue reading
Nathan Powell writing for Mumbrella: A social media ban for under 16s will have six uncomfortable realities that policymakers will not tell you. But they matter, because they determine whether this decision actually protects young people, or simply creates new risks in new places … | Continue reading
A reader contacted me a few days after I mentioned blogging resource Problogger, and founder Darren Rowse, in a recent post. They were wondering if I knew anything about what’s happened at the site, or to Rowse himself, as no new content seems to have been posted since June 2024. … | Continue reading
The suggestion, made by The Daily Aus (TDA), is that few Australians listened to local music in 2025. On Spotify at least. Zero local acts featured in Australia’s most listened-to artists, tracks, and albums on Spotify in 2025. You’ll have to go to Instagram (IG) to read the slid … | Continue reading
Kurzgesagt making sense of a non-sensical universe: For decades, we’ve had a beautiful theory of the cosmos. One that explained how the universe began, what it’s made of, and how it’s supposed to behave. It matched our observations astonishingly well and made us feel like we’d al … | Continue reading
Neocities, kind of born out of the ashes of once popular personal website hosting service Geocities, and Nekoweb, are on a mission to restore weird personal websites. With over one-point-three-million sites on their servers, Neocities, which was established in 2013, has made a su … | Continue reading
Bring Back Doors. A hopefully growing list of hotels where there are doors to the room’s bathroom. I’ve emailed hundreds of hotels and I asked them two things: do your doors close all the way, and are they made of glass? Everyone that says yes to their doors closing, and no to be … | Continue reading
The Irish author, whose titles include Intermezzo and Conversations with Friends, wants United Kingdom royalties from her novels, and any screen adaptations made there, to go to Palestine Action, a British pro-Palestinian organisation. The British government however considers Pal … | Continue reading
Dave Winer, an American software developer and blogger, is working on a blog discourse system. In short, this is a blog commenting system, allowing you to comment on someone’s else blog post, potentially this one you’re reading right now, but via your own blog or website: The fir … | Continue reading
I started writing about newer blogs and personal websites earlier this year, and then somehow stopped. A busy year at work has been getting in the way of things as ever. Let’s try and get this going again, since there can’t be enough sharing of links within the blogosphere. Havin … | Continue reading
The Australian dictionary’s word of the year committee were scathing, to say the least, of their pick: We understand now in 2025 what we mean by slop — AI generated slop, which lacks meaningful content or use. While in recent years we’ve learnt to become search engineers to find … | Continue reading
The manufacturers of Zorin OS, a Linux distribution, or operating system (OS), similar to Linux Mint, which I use, claim there have been nearly eight-hundred-thousand downloads from Windows devices in the last month. This approximately coincides with Microsoft effectively ceasing … | Continue reading
Stevie Bonifield, writing for The Verge: In an interview with Laurene Powell Jobs at Emerson Collective’s 2025 Demo Day, they [Altman and Ive] said they are currently prototyping the device, and when asked about a timeframe, Ive said it could arrive in “less than” two years. We o … | Continue reading
For another point of view, sorry POV, which I suggest you should read in full, Germany based linguist and writer, Burk: People stopped typing URLs. Entirely. No one goes to “juliawrites.com” anymore. They go to TikTok. Or Substack. Or Medium. Or Twitter. Or anything that has a fe … | Continue reading
John Gruber, writing at Daring Fireball: Uni Watch, to me, epitomized a certain mindset from the early web. To wit, that there ought to be a blog (or two or three) dedicated to every esoteric interest under the sun. You want to obsess about sports team uniform designs? Uni Watch … | Continue reading
Megan Greenwell writing for Talking Points Memo, AKA TPM: When Vice News stopped publishing in February 2024 — nearly eight years after Gawker’s demise, five after OG Deadspin’s — it marked the final nail in the coffin of the era in which any media outlet was thought of as cool. … | Continue reading
A provider of adult video content — I’ll refrain from naming them, in the hope of stopping network content filters getting upset — is suggesting the age of their audience be verified through the operating system (OS) of their device. Note: the link is to a blog post by the provid … | Continue reading
When it comes to blogging there are few rules. Write content that is somehow meaningful might be one of them though. I think it’s down to the individual to determine what constitutes meaningful. In the hey-day, the so-called golden age of blogging, there were plenty of people pre … | Continue reading
OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, posting on X: If you tell ChatGPT not to use em-dashes in your custom instructions, it finally does what it’s supposed to do! It finally does what it’s supposed to do. Am I to think AI agents were not supposed to include em-dashes in their input (and here I … | Continue reading
Made by Las Vegas based software developer Pablo Enoc, who’s also behind indie RSS aggregator powRSS, lettrss will send a chapter of the book you’re reading to your RSS reader each day. Here’s an idea with merit. Reading novels is just about the last thing I get to each evening, … | Continue reading
The Booker Prize, which recognises English language novels published in the United Kingdom and Ireland, has unveiled a new award: the Children’s Booker Prize, which will be awarded for the first time in 2027. The Children’s Booker Prize, which will launch in 2026 and be awarded a … | Continue reading