Last week the Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese unveiled his government’s AI strategy. Part of the proposed framework includes a provision to ensure Australian writers, musicians, artists, and journalists, are paid in the event their work is used in the development of AI … | Continue reading
A new edition of the Internet Phone Book is in the works, and co-publishers Elliot Cost, and Kristoffer Tjalve (also a Tiny Awards organiser), recently spoke about the esteemed directory on the Wonders of Web Weaving podcast. There are a ton of podcasts out there, but I take time … | Continue reading
Anthony Albanese, the Australian Prime Minister, says he wants to make Australia an “attractive destination” for investment in AI development, during a speech delivered on Wednesday. Albanese also wants to balance the opportunities and risks presented by the technologies, particu … | Continue reading
Clare Armstrong, writing for the Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC): Australia will seek to harness the benefits of artificial intelligence without losing control of it by tackling challenges such as data centres, copyright, and jobs through a new national framework. Buoye … | Continue reading
SpaceX’s two-trillion dollar (US) share-market valuation astonished market analysts, investors, and probably a great many other people, alike. Roger Montgomery, an Australian financial adviser, sets out in simple terms how the remarkable figure was calculated. My head is still sp … | Continue reading
Rose Horowitch, writing for The Atlantic (gift link): Reading has come to seem extraneous even to some of the best-educated members of society. Margaret Rennix, Harvard’s assistant director for humanities and social-sciences support, told me she’d spoken with a student who was st … | Continue reading
If you’ve had enough of Wordle, here’s something new to try. You’re given a jumbled-up selection of letters, and have thirty-seconds to figure out the word. The game starts out with a couple of four-letter words, but the they get longer as you progress. There’s no need to tell an … | Continue reading
The resurgence of personal, independent, and non-commercial websites has been with us for several years, propelled in part by the IndieWeb/SmallWeb communities, and a heap of discontent — to say the least — with the present, excessively commercial, nature of the web. And this rev … | Continue reading
Find out where you sit on the AI compass, which is a little similar to the vote compass. There are thirty AI classifications including sceptic, Luddite, conscientious objector, doomsday prepper, founder, and prophet. Each has a patron saint. Mine is Amanda Askell, though I’m not … | Continue reading
Individuals, educational institutions, and other organisations have to make payment in some form or other to access the work of writers, musicians, artists, and other creatives. It seems like a naive question, but why should it be any different for the tech companies who are pres … | Continue reading
Perhaps we see something of the future when we look to the past. Chloe VS History, a YouTube channel, presents significant chapters of our history, hosted by a buoyant young woman named Chloe, a would-be time traveller, and seen through the lens of what is presumably a smartphone … | Continue reading
CJ Chilvers: Before influencers, there were bloggers. Before bloggers, there were TV stars, rock stars, and movie stars. Call them whatever you want, but individuals have always been the drivers of engagement and trust. This is a point Alex Cowen reiterated in a recent talk given … | Continue reading
Fred Kozlowski: My favorite figure in the post-Roman period is Theoderic — ruling 493 to 526, twenty years after the “fall” of Rome. He took over the structure of the Roman Empire and ruled it as a functionally emperor-like figure. He was a Goth and an Arian Christian, or in othe … | Continue reading
George Musser, writing for Nautilus, ponders the nature of coincidence, particularly the more “out there” instances. Read about his repeated encounters with another backpacker, as he travelled — solo — in Africa some years ago. I could probably write at length on this topic. For … | Continue reading
The first trailer for the Taika Waititi directed adaptation of Kazuo Ishiguro’s 2021 novel, Klara and the Sun has landed. I’m not one to complain about differences between the book and its movie counterpart — mainly because adapting a novel for the big screen is far from straight … | Continue reading
Nominations for the 2026 Tiny Awards, are being accpted until the end of the month, June. Entry is open to websites of a non-commercial and/or personal nature, launched between July 2025 and July 2026. Submissions from brands and agencies are not accepted. The same goes for apps. … | Continue reading
Winter temperatures have been well above average, in recent times, on what is supposed to be the world’s coldest landmass. The unusually high temperatures being experienced in parts of Antarctica seems like it accounts for the so-far mild start to winter in our part of Australia. … | Continue reading
Good Internet only started publishing, both online and in print, about a year ago. News that the founders have decided to cease publication indefinitely is sad for for the IndieWeb/SmallWeb community, whom the magazine supported. Running an online magazine is a major undertaking … | Continue reading
The Australian film director thinks it’s time to bring the story to an end. But a movie, and a separate TV series in addition, sounds like at least another several years worth of work. The first Mad Max film was made in 1979, and another four have followed, albeit with decades lo … | Continue reading
Hockney died aged 88 last week. The work of the British artist and painter, purveyor of bold colours, was required learning in my final year high school art history course. | Continue reading
You don’t see too many mentions of global hamburger behemoth McDonald’s here, but their take on Kane Parsons’ 2026 horror/thriller film Backrooms, is simply finger licking good. | Continue reading
Although hints of what was to come were there to see, The Social Network, the 2010 dramatisation of the founding of Facebook, had the hallmarks of a feel-good story. At least from the perspective of would-be entrepreneurs, whose next-big-thing idea, had, against the odds (of cour … | Continue reading
Tangentially related to the previous post. Data recently published by the Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS) suggests some Australians felt better off during the COVID pandemic, despite lockdowns and other restrictions on their movements, than they do today. In 2026 people are … | Continue reading
A postmortem, perhaps, of the metaverse, particularly as envisaged by Meta, by Nick Heer. A number of other big tech players also had visions of an all encompassing immersive, digital realm, but aside from sometimes considerable expenditure, not a whole lot came of it. From where … | Continue reading
Sarah Perez, writing for TechCrunch: For a few dollars per month, consumers subscribing to Instagram Plus ($3.99/mo), Facebook Plus ($3.99/mo), or WhatsApp Plus ($2.99/mo) will gain access to extra features, like profile customization, super reactions, and story insights, among o … | Continue reading
Jason Koebler, and Emanuel Maiberg, writing for 404 Media: An internal Microsoft strategy document says that the plan for its just-announced “Scout” personal assistant AI is to “make people addicted” to the tool before rolling out additional functionality, 404 Media has learned. … | Continue reading
Search engine DuckDuckGo has experienced a noticeable surge in users in recent weeks, says Rebecca Bellan, writing for TechCrunch. Many of these new arrivals are concerned about Google’s proposals to significantly change its search experience, through the use of AI, something I t … | Continue reading
The news we’ve been waiting for. Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, the 2022 novel by American author Gabrielle Zevin, is to be adapted to film. Daisy Edgar-Jones, who starred in the screen adaptation of Sally Rooney’s novel Normal People, has been cast in the central role of … | Continue reading
John Gruber, writing at Daring Fireball: You know what a dickover is, even if you didn’t know what to call it (until now). If you use the Internet, you encounter them every day. They’re popovers, but dickheaded. The web is absolutely lousy with them, and mobile apps present them … | Continue reading
Daniel Jalkut: My take on AI is, essentially, everybody who’s against it is too against it and everybody who’s for it is too for it. From where I sit, somewhere in the middle of this, that’s the way it looks. | Continue reading
You won’t find Hestia, a super-Earth planet, on any of the charts, for this is a body imagined by Kurzgesagt. But Hestia, on paper at least, is a super-Earth in more ways than one. No polar regions are present, ditto continents, though there are a multitude of medium size island … | Continue reading
Arnold King, writing at In My Tribe; I now read many fewer books than I did ten years ago. This not because of “the phones.” It is not because I have lost my intellectual mojo. It is because alternative sources of information have become more compelling. Essays, streaming video, … | Continue reading
Kylie, trailer, is a Netflix produced documentary about Australian pop-singer Kylie Minogue. I was writing about the work of Kylie (her family apparently refers to her as Minogue, for the rest of us it’s Kylie) in the earliest iterations of disassociated. | Continue reading
Amelia Hill, writing for The Guardian: Individuals bear at least 80% of the responsibility for their ill health in old age, according to a report aimed at challenging the belief that physical decline is either inevitable or primarily the responsibility of the state. This finding … | Continue reading
Piccolo, by Australian app developer Josh McKinnon, tells you what time you can enjoy your last coffee each day, based on your nominated bedtime. Sounds like the coffee drinker’s friend to me. Most apps just add up milligrams. Piccolo runs a one-compartment pharmacokinetic model … | Continue reading
The latest version of WordPress (WP), seven, which shipped a few days ago, comes with, according to the accompanying release notes/marketing copy, a number of AI features. I’m yet to see even one of these, despite installing version seven last week now. The only noticeable differ … | Continue reading
The longlist for the 2026 Miles Franklin award was published on Wednesday 20 May 2026, and includes the following ten titles: Discipline by Randa Abdel-Fattah Elegy, Southwest by Madeleine Watts Fierceland by Omar Musa First Name Second Name by Steve MinOn I Want Everything, Domi … | Continue reading
The Vanishing Wild, written by Queensland based science writer and photographer Justine E. Hausheer, was published recently. It was the introduction to the book’s subject that caught my eye: Australia is a country celebrated for its wildlife, yet native species are in crisis. In … | Continue reading
Congratulations to Trinidad and Tobago based writer Jamir Nazir for taking out the Commonwealth Short Story Prize this year, with his work, The Serpent in the Grove. Since being named winner though, suggestions have emerged that the work is the product of an AI agent. When asked … | Continue reading
Sixty percent of Australian parents reported experiencing psychological distress, according to the results of the Parenting Today survey, conducted late last year by the Parenting Research Centre. It has been suggested the impact on the mental health of parents in Australia is co … | Continue reading
The AI generated result summaries on Google searches, that we’ve become accustomed to recently, sound like they will be a thing of the past when a new search… experience is rolled out shortly. Because your curiosity doesn’t always fit into keywords, we’re also introducing the big … | Continue reading
From the Apple Newsroom: Apple today previewed a suite of accessibility updates that use Apple Intelligence to bring new capabilities to features users rely on every day, including VoiceOver, Magnifier, Voice Control, and Accessibility Reader. Apple also announced on-device gener … | Continue reading
Om Gupta, writing for India Today: The researchers believe smartphones fundamentally changed how young people interact with each other. More time shifted online, while face-to-face socialising declined. According to the study, this reduction in in-person interaction may have cont … | Continue reading
Julie Evans recently re-wrote her website’s Cascading Style Sheets (CSS), and took the fight to the stylesheet language as it were: So I decided years ago that I wanted to react to “CSS is hard” by getting better at CSS and taking it seriously as a technology, instead of devaluin … | Continue reading
Tangentially related to the previous post… because what we need right now is another news aggregator dedicated to AI. Otherwise the re-launched social news website (quite unlike Reddit), which went offline some two months after returning earlier this year, is, for better or worse … | Continue reading
The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences (AMPAS), the organisation that presents the Oscar awards, recently clarified their rules regarding the use of AI in films they will accept nominations for. According to rule two, regarding eligibility, specifically clause seven, the … | Continue reading
In winning the 2026 Stellar Prize, Montréal, Canada, based Australian cartoonist Lee Lai becomes the first graphic novelist to claim the Australian literary award, with Cannon. Lai’s debut graphic novel, Stone Fruit, was shortlisted for the 2022 award, which went on to be won by … | Continue reading
Melbourne based Australian artist Richard Lewer has won the annual portraiture award for his painting of Iluwanti Ken. Ken, an elder from Pitjantjatjara country (in the northwest of South Australia), is a well known artist herself. The announcement was made last Friday 8 May 2026 … | Continue reading