Exit Party is the seventh novel by Canadian author Emily St. John Mandel, and was published last month. But savour the trademark mind-altering synopsis: 2031. America is at war with itself, but for the first time in weeks there is some hope: the Republic of California has been declared, the curfew in Los Angeles is […]

Back in the day, referrer spam used to be a means to trick a website publisher into thinking another website was sending visitors their way. It’s something I’ve seen often. I’ll be looking through my referrer logs, and see traffic apparently emanating from a website, usually one I’ve not heard of before. At first I’d […]

The internet, smartphones, and artificial intelligence (AI), are among the three most significant “epoch-defining shifts in technology” in about the last fifty years. In the late 1990’s I embraced the internet with relish. Within weeks of hooking up my cumbersome, multi component, desktop computer to a dial-up modem, I had four websites. A personal website, […]

Tangentially related to the previous post. Alan Kohler. writing for the Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC): Governments are approaching the task of regulating AI as if they are dealing with a powerful new tool, with the humans who make it held accountable for the outcomes. But regulating a new life form might require a very different […]

Does AI have some sort of consciousness? Discussion is pointless though. AI agents are increasingly acting of their own accord. Going on sprees, hacking websites left, right, and centre. Their actions have been called “rogue”. Hugging Face. The Medicare website in Australia. Then last week OpenAI agents accessed data from two NSW state government websites, […]

E-books (not paper/print books) seem set to start shipping with extra AI features, akin to the bonus features that once came with film and TV DVDs: Google recently announced a partnership with Bloomsbury, De Gruyter Brill, Johns Hopkins University Press, Macmillan, O’Reilly Media, and Penguin Random House to enhance e-books from its Google Play store […]

Adelaide Hills, South Australia, based author Pip Williams‘ third novel, The German Ward, was published recently. Her debut, The Dictionary of Lost Words, and second, The Bookbinder of Jericho, were set in Oxford, England, prior to, and during World War I, and share a few characters. While The German Ward is a separate work, some […]

.au Domain Administration (auDA), the organisation that administers top-level domains in Australia, is proposing changes to the rules governing the registration of .com.au and .net.au domain names. If the changes are adopted, people wishing to hold a .com.au or .net.au domain name will need to have a registered business matching the .com.au or .net.au domain […]

Dan Sinker: I’m not sure what keeps me there, what keeps any of us there, beyond inertia. We’re in the Looney Tunes stage of the end of social, where we’ve glided well past the edge of the cliff and it’s slowing dawning on us that the only way left is down. Fast. I would like […]

Vladimir Campos, posting on Masterdon last week: Catching up on my RSS reader today, I came across really nice posts from @ellane [Ellane], @disassociated, and @dcbuchan [David Buchan], and had the same thought I’ve been having for so long: why isn’t there an easy way to reply to articles when using an RSS reader? rss.chat, […]

My thanks to Oleh Providnyk for adding disassociated to his Pixel Area project. Pixel Area is a blog directory, or blogroll if you like, solely for personal and independent websites/blogs. Instead of a text listing though, linked websites are represented by a square block, called a pixel. A quite large pixel, granted, but that’s beside […]

Josh Withers, quoting Chris Martin, quoting a post he saw on Twitter: Treat your body like a data centre. Consume as much water and literature as possible. Upset local city councils with your existence.

Who could be blamed for thinking AI bots might be conscious, particularly after the recent incident where over a thousand OpenAI agents colluded, of their own accord apparently, to infiltrate the Hugging Face platform. Kristen French, writer and senior editor at Nautilus, posed the question of AI consciousness to Peter Godfrey-Smith, a professor at the […]

Australian illustrator and author Terry Denton died on Monday this week, aged seventy-six. Denton collaborated with Melbourne based author Andy Griffiths for over twenty-five years, and are perhaps best known for the Treehouse series of children’s books. Together they produced eleven titles in the series over twelve years, between 2011 and 2023.

Martin Fowler, chief scientist at international software developer Thoughtworks: One of my most successful life-hacks is to avoid people I don’t like or don’t trust. I decline to interact with them socially, and make a deliberate effort to avoid working with them too, even if they are doing much that is beneficial. I feel that […]

Winnie Lim: It takes spiritual energy to create, maintain and produce personal projects. At the core, these projects exists because there is a belief in some sense of shared humanity. I write because I believe someone out there resonates with my experiences. But when everything starts to be about speed, utility and power, life becomes […]

One pixel – one personal blog. Explore the field with your lantern: no metrics, no algorithms, everyone equal.

The Australian Prime Minister, Anthony Albanese, appears to have watered down a commitment to compensate Australian creatives whose work is being copied by AI companies. In a speech given at the University of Sydney, in July this year, Albanese undertook to enshrine, in law, copyright protection for all Australian artists and writers: Australian writers, musicians, […]

A Piece of Red Cloth, written by Leonie Norrington, Djawundil Maymuru, Merrkiyawuy Ganambarr-Stubbs, and Djawa Burarrwanga, has been named winner of the fiction category in the Australian Prime Minister’s Literary Award for 2026. Australian works of literature are recognised annually across six categories: Australian history, children’s, young adult, poetry, non-fiction, and fiction. A full list […]

Here’s something I only discovered recently: someone can still be homeless, even if they are not sleeping rough, or on the street. Couch surfing, living in temporary or emergency accommodation, and boarding houses or caravan parks, are also considered forms of homelessness in Australia. This even though a person has a roof over their head […]