The American director, whose credits include Boyhood, and the Before trilogy, began filming Merrily We Roll Along in 2019. The story spans twenty years, and Linklater wants the characters, portrayed by Paul Mescal, Beanie Feldstein, and Ben Platt, to be seen ageing over this time. He has to be commended for not...

Since its acquisition by Elon Musk in 2022, Twitter/X has been considered a neighbourhood on the wrong side of the tracks. But not any more. Things have changed. Now it’s the place to be. Because, among other things, the platform is “cheerful” and “inclusive”. So say some people. But the question is vexed, the...

Canadian poet and writer Anne Carson has been awarded this year’s Nobel Prize in Literature. I’m not the biggest fan of poetry, but poets, particularly Evelyn Araluen, have been doing well in some of the literary awards in recent years, which is certainly a boost for the craft.

Kurzgesagt breakdowns — in their trademark plain language manner — the recent Hugging Face hack perpetrated by rogue AI agents developed by OpenAI. The fourth sentence in the narration is a doozy: Fully aware that they are acting unethically, they execute a sophisticated cyberattack Emphasis on the word aware is...

Jeremy Stern introduces his fifteen-thousand word essay, published in Colossus, about Meta CEO, and Facebook co-founder Mark Zuckerberg, with a lede so succinct it must be the envy of any writer: There they are. The Zuckerbergs. Ledes, also called hooks, are a brief sentence that entices someone to read a newspaper...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...