• 'Dog in driver's seat' of ute on Tasmanian beach sparks call for witnesses - ABC News: Police said witnesses "reported a white Mitsubishi Triton was being driven on the beach, with a dog in the driver's seat and a man in the passenger seat".
• How AI assistance impacts the formation of coding skills Anthropic: Productivity benefits may come at the cost of skills necessary to validate AI-written code if junior engineers' skill development has been stunted by using AI in the first place. (it's that using a forklift at the gym thing)
• Terry Pratchett's novels may have held clues to his dementia a decade before diagnosis, our new study suggests: Across Pratchett's later novels, there was a clear and statistically significant decline in the diversity of adjectives he used. The richness of descriptive language gradually narrowed. This was not something a reader would necessarily notice, nor did it reflect a sudden deterioration in quality. Instead, it was a subtle, progressive change detectable only through detailed linguistic analysis. GNU Terry Pratchett.
• Australia in danger of becoming an 'artless country' as enrolments in creative courses collapse | Australian education | The Guardian: The research pointed to the former Morrison government's job-ready graduate scheme as directly relating to the decline. Implemented in 2021, that scheme substantially increased the cost of arts and creative courses to cheapen Stem courses. Under the widely panned policy, the cost of creative arts degree programs for students rose by 19%, while arts, society and culture degrees rose by 116%. Before Morrison gutted creative courses at uni, Tony Abbott gutted creative courses at TAFE. Never mind how much money Australia makes from industries like film and fashion.
• Ireland's basic income for the arts scheme becomes permanent | Ireland | The Guardian: The pilot, for which 2,000 artists were randomly selected from 8,000 applicants, lowered the likelihood of artists experiencing enforced deprivation and reduced their levels of anxiety and reliance on supplementary income, a study found. The scheme recouped more than its net cost of %u20AC72m through increases in arts-related expenditure, productivity gains and reduced reliance on other welfare payments. Once again a variation on the theme of "UBIs work".
• The AI Vampire. This was an unusually hard post to… | by Steve Yegge | Feb, 2026 | Medium: Let's not quibble about the exact productivity boost from AI. The boost amount isn't what this post is about. It just needs to be higher than about 2x for the vampire effect to kick in. We'll use 10x because it's a number people throw around.
• How Generative and Agentic AI Shift Concern from Technical Debt to Cognitive Debt: But what can teams do concretely as AI and agents become more prevalent? First, they may need to recognize that velocity without understanding is not sustainable.
• Training your replacement | Go Make Things: But if the people so aggressively pushing AI as a revolutionary technology that will completely change how we work are right… why the fuck are they so eager to accelerate development of the tool that will put them out of work? That future makes sense in a world where we then have lots of free time to enjoy leisure and pursue our passions. That's not the world we live in.
• Graffiti and the right to urban space - ABC listen

• Victoria pedestrian deaths: Highest toll in 17 years sparks SUV safety concerns: The number of pedestrians killed in Victoria in 2025 is at a 17-year-high, with concerns the growing dominance of large SUVs and utes is reversing years of road safety gains.
• Matt Gurney: 'We will never fucking trust you again': America has blown 80 years of accumulated goodwill and trust among its allies, our American moderator was told.
• Landslide; a ghost story: I'm writing this post to talk about what is happening to the way we know things. All this year, as I have chewed my way along the edges of this almost unfathomable problem, what happened in Valdez came to feel less like a metaphor and more like a model. That's how I'll work with it here. Not because the circumstances of megathrust earthquakes in fjords are literally the same as the societal problem of collective derangement, but because the model gives me new ways to take the problem apart and see how the pieces interact.
• Is there any legal justification for the US attack on Venezuela? | Venezuela | The Guardian: The UN security council can impose sanctions on countries in an attempt to maintain peace. These can include trade restrictions, arms embargos and travel bans. However, five members of the council – the US, China, Russia, the UK and France – have a veto on this, meaning any action taken against the US is unlikely to come into force. Like many things, the UN is basically an honour system. Nothing can actually be enforced if the big players don't want to follow the "rules".
• Push for QVB's colourful glass to be made clear for more 'visibility' into stores - ABC News. Simple solution here: retailers who don't like the QVB shouldn't try to rent space in the QVB.
• AI boom could falter without wider adoption, Microsoft chief Satya Nadella warns – The Irish Times: Microsoft chief executive Satya Nadella has warned that artificial intelligence (AI) risks becoming a speculative bubble unless its use spreads beyond big tech companies and wealthy economies. Mr Nadella on Tuesday said that the long-term success of the fast-developing technology would depend on it being used by a broad range of industries as well as on uptake outside of the developed world. 'Risks' doing a lot of heavy lifting there.

2025 Mix Tape playlist on YouTube

2025 Mix Tape playlist on Tidal

Tracklist with some mild background notes:

1. Adriano Celentano - Prisencolinensinainciusol. No deep meaning, it's just an interesting musical artifact. For the uninitiated, it's gibberish written to demonstrate what American English sounds like to people who don't speak it.
2. Fleetwood Mac - Tusk. Have been gaining an appreciation for just how batshit crazy a lot of Fleetwood Mac's songs actually are when you listen properly.
3. New Order - Crystal. Saw New Order live on the forecourt at the Sydney Opera House. Not bad for my last gig in Sydney.
4. New Order - Blue Monday
5. Hilltop Hoods - The Gift ft. Marlon (new release)
6. VNV Nation - Silence Speaks (new release)
7. Hannes Bieger - Marine Drive. Just a really nicely produced track that got on high rotation.
8. Orbital & Tilda Swinton - Deepest. Both a fantastic track and absolutely hilarious (to me at least) - pisstake meditation, old raver jokes and show tunes... why not?
9. Tinlicker x Robert Miles - Children. Not sure how I hadn't run into this remix before, but it's a great homage to the original.
10. Joan Jett & the Blackhearts - Different. Popped up in some video short, and subsequently lived in my head for weeks.
11. XTC - Dear God. Don't recall what brought this to mind, but it's always worth revisiting.
12. Tom Waits - Chicago. It's a song about moving to a new city. Played while driving to Melbourne.
13. Nine Inch Nails - As Alive As You Need Me To Be (new release)
14. Karnivool - Aozora (new release)
15. Skunkhour - Up To Our Necks In It. First gig in Melbourne was going to see Skunkhour's "Up To Our Necks In It (For 30 Years) Tour" at the Corner Hotel. A great gig and I got to meet Del and Aya after the show.

Labels: mix tape

• OnlyFans 'sugar daddy' and his wife embroiled in $61 million tax mischief - ABC News. The OnlyFans bit make a salacious headline but the real story is According to its Federal Court claim, the ATO paid out more than $30 million before turning off the tap last August [...] Solicitor Bruce Peters, who is acting for Mr Kinnest and the family companies, says if the allegations are true, he is "dumbfounded the ATO let this fly for a business when an average taxpayer gets hauled over the coals".
• A poodle is a dog | The Saturday Paper: Ryan’s bill is part of a suite of transparency reforms before the parliament. None are from the major parties. Hers would stop ministers and senior staff from working as lobbyists for three years after they leave politics. It would reveal who lobbyists meet and force ministers to publish their diaries. The reforms are simple and effective and will not pass.
• How Elon Musk lined up a potential trillion-dollar payday as Tesla shareholders approve deal - ABC News: In order to receive the full award, Tesla's market capitalisation would need to increase by approximately $US7.5 trillion by 2035 — up from $US1 trillion currently. That's alongside other thresholds — for example, Musk would need to deliver one million commercially operable robotaxis and one million AI bots.
• Executives Are Adopting AI at Higher Rates Than Employees, Study Says - Business Insider
• Why Solarpunk is already happening in Africa: The magic is this: You're not buying a $1,200 solar system. You're replacing $3-5/week kerosene spending with a $0.21/day solar subscription (so with $1.5 per week half the price of kerosene) that's cheaper AND gives you better light, phone charging, radio, and no respiratory disease.
• Barnaby Joyce joins One Nation as sitting MP with promise of future Senate ticket | One Nation | The Guardian: There had been speculation Joyce would eventually replace the 71-year-old Hanson as One Nation leader although neither had confirmed a succession plan was in place. Top shelf foreshadowing there.
• Outrage and legal threats: Trump justice department slammed after limited Epstein files release | Jeffrey Epstein | The Guardian: Donald Trump's justice department was hit with legal threats and scathing outrage after authorities released a limited, heavily redacted trove of Jeffrey Epstein files in an apparent violation of the law mandating the near-complete disclosure of these documents by Friday.
• Backing up Spotify - Anna's Blog. They have literally made a copy of most of Spotify, and the post includes some interesting analysis of the metadata.
• : The home affairs minister, Tony Burke, has promised tougher action against organisations such as neo-Nazi group the National Socialist Network that have previously evaded criminal consequences.
• Anthony Albanese recommends changes to parliamentarians' travel rules - ABC News: travel would be limited to between Canberra and the MP's electorate, or a senator's home state, with some exceptions for ministers and other senior politicians like the opposition leader. Mr Albanese said, under the new recommendations, the spouse or partner of a senior politician would be able to take taxpayer-funded travel to and from destinations outside Canberra provided they were specifically invited to an event. That event must also be directly linked to the portfolio or parliamentary work of their senior political spouse.

• Maru the Cat, Once the Most Viewed Animal on YouTube, Dies at 18 :(
• AI boom is unsustainable unless tech spending goes 'parabolic,' Deutsche Bank warns | Fortune: The current AI boom is not sustainable, a Deutsche Bank research note warned this morning, because tech spending won't “remain parabolic.” AI capex is now so massive it is keeping the U.S. out of recession, the bank said. Separately, Bain & Co. estimate there will be an $800 billion shortfall in the revenues needed to fund the demand for AI computing power.
• Deus ex nihilo: Physicists call this decoherence. Economists call it a market crash. Sam Altman will call it Tuesday.
• Dense Discovery – Issue 358 / The feed no longer surprises but sedates
• Deloitte to pay back some of $440,000 to Australian government after report found riddled with errors | news.com.au — Australia's leading news site for latest headlines: One of the world's “big four” consulting firms will refund the Australian government part of a $440,000 fee after admitting it used artificial intelligence to help produce a report riddled with errors.
• NSW to buy back private Northern Beaches hospital for $190m | New South Wales | The Guardian: The NSW government will spend $190m to buy back the Northern Beaches hospital and integrate it into the public hospital system, ending a decade-long experiment in private ownership of a major Sydney hospital.

• When it comes to professional sport and gambling sponsors, one Australian state tops the scorecard - ABC News: the NRL had the most teams sponsored by gambling companies across any sporting code — 10 out of 16
• April 2025 - by Liam Callaghan - Maroon Observer: Last year and early this year, the lazy tropes trotted out by Badel and co gave us to understand that Maguire was going to [be] a hardass, a disciplinarian, that was going to fix the Backstreet Broncos Boys and turn them into real men. Given the evidence to date, either that was at best, a mischaracterisation, and at worst, mislaid toxic masculinity.
• Labor's landslide victory obscures a disturbing trend for the major parties - ABC News: there is a strong chance that the combined independent and minor party vote will beat one of the major parties for the first time in seven decades The count isn't finished so it may not be this election, but the trend shows it's just a matter of time unless the major parties can start winning voters back from minor parties and independents.
• A quieter place: Sound designer Eddie Gandelman on composing a future that allows us to hear ourselves think - DesignObserver: Barcode scanners like this one have medium and high pitch settings at 3,250 and 4,200 hertz, respectively. Higher-frequency sounds, often classified as those starting at 2,000 hertz, can activate the sympathetic nervous system. Our fight or flight response kicks in, and our body braces for danger: Our heart rate increases, blood vessels constrict, and stress hormones like cortisol flood the bloodstream. All to price-check a stalk of broccoli.
• Nationals call it quits on decades-long coalition with Liberals - ABC News: Mr Littleproud said he was hopeful the two parties would be able to come to a new agreement before the next federal election in three years. It would be very surprising if they did not re-form the Coalition for the next election. ....aaaaand the split lasted four days: Outraged Liberals say short-lived Coalition split has 'shredded' David Littleproud's leadership | Australian politics | The Guardian
• 'Bulky new neighbour': Norwegian man wakes to find cargo ship in his backyard - ABC News. Cue "you can't park there mate" jokes.
• Expert calls Musk's 'Doge' involvement 'one of the greatest brand destructions' | Elon Musk | The Guardian: Galloway said Trump's billionaire businessman adviser alienated the customer base of his electrical vehicle manufacturer Tesla – one of his most important holdings – while aligning himself with a president whose allies aren't interested in the kinds of cars the company makes. [...] Toward the end of April, Tesla was reporting a 71% dip in profits
• Elon Musk backed Donald Trump seconds after an assassination attempt. Now their relationship has turned ugly - ABC News. Those two busting up is probably the least-surprising thing to ever happen in the history of US politics.

• The Future is More Stuff: Our economy has become a treadmill of consumption. Work more to buy more stuff, which wears out or becomes obsolete quicker than ever before, necessitating more work to buy more stuff.
• The most important intelligence sharing network in the west is being ruined by America - here's how | The Independent: Using a commercial messaging system rather than a government-encrypted communications system is dumb enough. Doing so using personal telephones is unforgivable. Doing both in Moscow, as it would appear Witkoff did, is downright incompetent. [...] The truth is that Five Eyes under Donald Trump’s first presidency was already severely strained by what some members of the group saw as dangerous incompetence in handling secrets by the Oval Office.
• Australian election policy tracker | The Conversation - quite well done.
• Life in the tower: Who controls Seattle's drawbridges? | The Seattle Times
• Saying 'Thank You', 'Please' to ChatGPT? It's costing OpenAI 'millions of dollars', says Sam Altman | Mint: A recent comment by OpenAI CEO Sam Altman revealed that user politeness contributes to “tens of millions of dollars” in electricity costs, due to the computational effort involved in generating those extra conversational responses. Everything done with AI requires a lot of power and water. Doesn't matter if it was "important" or not.
• Can Australia still afford the pub, our coffee addiction or Friday night takeaway? - ABC News: The core problem (detailed in the article) is that costs have gone up much more than wages; so the middle class is shrinking - which is a euphemistic way of saying many people are now simply poor.
• Apparently Magpies and Crows Are Using "Anti-Bird Spikes" to Make Their Nests | Audubon: Even if the use of the spikes is simply urban adaptation at play, neither Hiemstra nor McGowan are convinced it's good for the corvids.
• Sydney residents shaken awake by early morning earthquake in NSW Hunter Valley | New South Wales | The Guardian. That was a very weird way to wake up.

• Peter Dutton denies having access to sensitive information as Labor questions personal investments | Peter Dutton | The Guardian: on 23 January 2009 [...] Dutton bought shares in Commonwealth Bank, National Australia Bank and Westpac Bank. All three companies reported record lows on this day. On 24 January, the Rudd government announced the Australian Business Investment Partnership. This stimulus package was never introduced as it was opposed in parliament, but did move markets in the short term. It's incredible that this story just slid past.
• Elon Musk's foray into politics met with protest that's hurting Tesla worldwide - ABC News: he now is caught in a pincer movement — between an increasingly hostile customer base, and a sudden lift in competition from Chinese and European rivals. ...and investors are not happy: Early Tesla investor calls for Elon Musk to resign amid stock slump | Mashable: It's gotten so bad that one of Tesla's earliest investors has called for Musk to step down. Ross Gerber said in an interview with Sky News that Musk's role in the U.S. government — notably the (extremely) divisive Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) — and close ties to President Donald Trump have damaged Tesla. ...and meanwhile the panels are falling off Cybertrucks because they're glued on with glue that doesn't work: Elon Musk's Cybertrucks suffer another setback in the US. Will we ever see them in Australia? - ABC News: This thin stainless steel strip, known as a "cant rail assembly", sits between the windshield and the roof on both sides. It's bound to the truck with a structural adhesive. But there are concerns this glue can essentially be broken down by cold and hot weather.
• How the political debate over an antisemitic caravan bomb hoax consumed parliament - ABC News: "Almost immediately, experienced investigators within the joint counterterrorism team believed that the caravan was part of a fabricated terrorist plot, essentially a criminal con job," AFP Deputy Commissioner National Security Krissy Barrett says.
• Volkswagen reintroducing physical controls for vital functions | Autocar: physical buttons for the five most important functions – the volume, the heating on each side of the car, the fans and the hazard light
• The Unbelievable Scale of AI's Pirated-Books Problem - The Atlantic: Meta employees turned their attention to Library Genesis, or LibGen, one of the largest of the pirated libraries that circulate online. It currently contains more than 7.5 million books and 81 million research papers. Eventually, the team at Meta got permission from “MZ”—an apparent reference to Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg—to download and use the data set. This act, along with other information outlined and quoted here, recently became a matter of public record when some of Meta’s internal communications were unsealed as part of a copyright-infringement lawsuit brought against the company by Sarah Silverman, Junot Díaz, and other authors of books in LibGen.
• U.S. to reduce capabilities of new jet purchased by allies: President Donald Trump has announced that any new U.S. F-47 fighter jets sold to allied nations will be deliberately downgraded by 10%, citing potential future changes in alliances. I'm not an expert but it seems weird to consider buying jets off a guy who is already talking about shooting them down.

• ...and because you're going to want the link: SRL - Survival Research Labs

• Mastodon's CEO and creator is handing control to a new nonprofit organization - The Verge: Decentralized social network Mastodon has announced plans to transfer its ownership to a new nonprofit entity. Ownership of Mastodon will move away from the control of CEO Eugen Rochko, in contrast to the power exerted by other social media CEOs like Meta cofounder Mark Zuckerberg and X owner Elon Musk.
• OpenAI has evidence that its models helped train China's DeepSeek | The Verge: OpenAI told the Financial Times that it found evidence linking DeepSeek to the use of distillation — a common technique developers use to train AI models by extracting data from larger, more capable ones. It's an efficient way to train smaller models at a fraction of the more than $100 million that OpenAI spent to train GPT-4. While developers can use OpenAI's API to integrate its AI with their own applications, distilling the outputs to build rival models is a violation of OpenAI's terms of service. OpenAI has not provided details of the evidence it found. The situation is rich with irony. After all, it was OpenAI that made huge leaps with its GPT model by sucking down the entirety of the written web without consent.
• Walgreens digital door experiment was a $200 million disaster... also it's highly debatable that they 'looked cool'.
• The Console Wars Are Over And Nobody Really Won
• Thousands of Australian pets may soon have 'useless' microchips. It's a symptom of a bigger problem
• Streaming giant Amazon axes Neighbours just two years after picking up the show - ABC News
• James Bond producers give Amazon full creative control of 007 | James Bond | The Guardian... well, shit. I hope they got a worthy pay day at least.
• How to draw an orange %u2022 Buttondown: Being told we cannot draw is the first step to telling people that no, they are not as competent as they believe themselves to be. Once you can convince a human being they cannot draw, you can convince them of mostly anything. Someone is benefitting from making you believe you are incompetent and it is not you.
• 'You can't ban compassion': helping stray cats is illegal in much of Australia – but for some, it's worth the risk | Cats | The Guardian: Rand, who is running alternative cat management trials in Queensland with a permit, argues hardline approaches fail to address the socioeconomic aspects contributing to the stray cat population, such as pet abandonment or loss due to housing instability, rental restrictions or containment challenges, and the cost of mandatory desexing, registration and microchipping. They also unfairly penalise people for basic compassion, she says.

• The Ghosts in the Machine, by Liz Pelly: This treatment of music as nothing but background sounds—as interchangeable tracks of generic, vibe-tagged playlist fodder—is at the heart of how music has been devalued in the streaming era.
• Humphrey's world: how the Samuel Smith beer baron built Britain's strangest pub chain | Food & drink industry | The Guardian: Over time, Smith's preferences seem to have grown increasingly tyrannical. In November 2019, he shuttered the Cow and Calf outside Sheffield after he was informed it would be unable to produce a chocolate fondant, his favourite dessert. ... It isn’t just that Humphrey wants to build and run his properties and pubs exactly as he pleases. For decades, he has also been waging, through his company, a multi-front war against local planners, preventing councils, individuals and other companies from developing their land and properties.
• Ants prove superior to humans in group problem-solving maze experiment: Unsurprisingly, the cognitive abilities of humans gave them an edge in the individual challenge, in which they resorted to calculated, strategic planning, easily outperforming the ants. In the group challenge, however, the picture was completely different, especially for the larger groups. Not only did groups of ants perform better than individual ants, but in some cases they did better than humans. Groups of ants acted together in a calculated and strategic manner, exhibiting collective memory that helped them persist in a particular direction of motion and avoid repeated mistakes. Humans, on the contrary, failed to significantly improve their performance when acting in groups. When communication between group members was restricted to resemble that of ants, their performance even dropped compared to that of individuals
• He was a church official who criticized Trump. He says Christianity is in crisis : NPR: It was the result of having multiple pastors tell me, essentially, the same story about quoting the Sermon on the Mount, parenthetically, in their preaching — "turn the other cheek" — [and] to have someone come up after to say, "Where did you get those liberal talking points?" And what was alarming to me is that in most of these scenarios, when the pastor would say, "I'm literally quoting Jesus Christ," the response would not be, "I apologize." The response would be, "Yes, but that doesn't work anymore. That's weak." And when we get to the point where the teachings of Jesus himself are seen as subversive to us, then we're in a crisis.
• Australian bosses on notice as 'deliberate' wage theft becomes a crime - ABC News [Fair Work] will have to prove that the employer intentionally avoided paying a worker appropriate wages and penalties, superannuation or other entitlements. ... [An employment lawyer consulted for the article] thinks Fair Work will only go after particularly "egregious" or high-profile examples of intentional wage theft with its new powers. ... Fair Work is also giving cover to employers who self-report possible wage theft. So Fair Work explicitly says they're not targeting honest mistakes, and employers who think they've made honest mistakes can engage with Fair Work to fix it. Employers will only be in trouble for intentional wage theft. We cross now for comment: "We feel these new laws are an overreach," the Australian Chamber of Commerce and Industry's chief of policy and advocacy, David Alexander, said in a statement.
• Washington Post cartoonist resigns after cartoon satirising newspaper's owner Jeff Bezos and Trump rejected - ABC News
• 'Trolling free-for-all': Australian politicians and experts criticise Meta for ditching factchecking | Australian politics | The Guardian: Zuckerberg has recently sought to repair a tumultuous relationship with Trump – who once threatened Zuckerberg that he would “spend the rest of his life in prison” if he interfered with the 2024 election. Zuckerberg visited Trump after his election win in November and oversaw a US$1m Meta donation to Trump's inauguration fund.