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 year, The Architects of AI. Their...

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 doesn’t have AC. We’ll go into Sydney,...

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, eternally redesigned,...

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 with people about ChatGPT and AI. At the...

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 (Instagram link), a few days ago. That...

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 they have written, or at least a...

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 runs in a test match. Last week,...

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 independence from groups, original...

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 was dawning on me that this feeling of...

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 are a variety of initiatives such as...

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 tips. This is not the case for all...

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 AI use in Hollywood — “this is not a...