• John Deere to Pay $99 Million in Monumental Right-to-Repair Settlement: The ag manufacturing giant will also make digital diagnostic, maintenance, and repair tools available to third parties for 10 years. [...] Ripple effects of this battle have been felt far beyond the sales floors at John Deere dealers, as the price of used equipment skyrocketed in response to the infamous service difficulties. Even when the cost of older tractors doubled, farmers reasoned that they were still worth it because repairs were simpler and downtime was minimized. $60,000 for a 40-year-old machine became the norm. With that second quote in mind, ten years isn't long for farm equipment so this is arguably a win for John Deere who just had to kick the can a little. Also John Deere had a bit over $5b revenue in 2025, so $99m is 'rap on the knuckles' stuff.
• The AI Great Leap Forward: In 1958, Mao ordered every village in China to produce steel. Farmers melted down their cooking pots in backyard furnaces and reported spectacular numbers. The steel was useless. The crops rotted. Thirty million people starved. In 2026, every other company is having top down mandate on AI transformation. Same energy. [...] A drag-and-drop canvas makes it trivially easy to chain ten LLM calls together and impossibly hard to debug why the eighth one hallucinates on Tuesdays. The people building these workflows have never designed an evaluation pipeline, never measured model drift, never A/B tested a prompt. They don’t need to — the canvas looks clean, the arrows point forward, the green checkmarks fire. The complexity isn’t avoided. It’s hidden behind a GUI where nobody with ML expertise will ever look. The backyard steel of 1958 looked like steel. It was not steel. Today’s backyard AI looks like AI. It is not AI. Interesting take on the impact of top-down AI mandates.
• 3 sentenced after bear costume used in $142K luxury car insurance scam | AP News: Three people in California have been sentenced for insurance fraud in a bizarre scam that involved someone dressed in a bear costume damaging luxury cars. (if it wasn't on AP News...)
• Today in history, April 19: Good News Week premiered 30 years ago - ABC News: That April 1996 episode kicked off nine seasons. In 1997, the show picked up an average of 750,000 viewers nationally. In 2010, McDermott even landed a Gold Logie nomination as the show copped an average of just under a million viewers a week. I still miss GNW.
• ARN reveals $22m drop in advertising because of Kyle and Jackie O Show content | Radio | The Guardian. Everything about this situation is bizarre. They were losing so much money, ARN must have been looking for any possible way out.
• Yindjibarndi people win $150m compensation after Andrew Forrest's Fortescue mines built without permission - ABC News: The four huge open-pit mines were built without the agreement of the traditional owners and have generated tens of billions of dollars in revenue for the company since production began in 2013, with billions more expected before the mine is set to close in the mid-2040s. ...meaning $150m is truly nothing to Fortescue.
• Tesla recalls some Cybertrucks over fears the wheels will fall off: report - EVSHIFT
• Tribunal's first refusal of a pet in rental since Tasmanian laws changed - ABC News: The tribunal found that even if the landlord approved the request to keep an animal on the premises, it would have "no practical effect" because the body corporate had denied permission. [...] Acting principal solicitor at the Tenants' Union of Tasmania, Alex Bomford, said he wasn't surprised by the tribunal's ruling. He said the union warned the government about the potential of this outcome when it was consulting with the public about the new laws. Anyone familiar with landlords or body corporates could have told you this is how it would go.
• Pizza Hut Faces Lawsuit From Franchisee Over AI System - Business Insider: Chaac alleges Pizza Hut failed to adequately train operators on the system, refused requests for support, and ignored worsening delivery metrics after sales began plunging in key markets. In New York City, the franchisee says year-over-year sales growth swung from positive 10.19% to negative 9.78% after the rollout.

• Moltbook was peak AI theater | MIT Technology Review: Moltbook looks less like a window onto the future and more like a mirror held up to our own obsessions with AI today. It also shows us just how far we still are from anything that resembles general-purpose and fully autonomous AI.
• Photos Capture the Breathtaking Scale of China's Wind and Solar Buildout - Yale E360
• US Supreme Court declines to hear dispute over copyrights for AI-generated material | Reuters: Plaintiff Stephen Thaler had appealed to the justices after lower courts upheld a U.S. Copyright Office %u200Bdecision that the AI-crafted visual art at issue in the case was ineligible for copyright protection %u200Bbecause it did not have a human creator.
• 'A very dangerous person': alarm as Pete Hegseth revels in carnage of Iran war | US military | The Guardian: With machismo, Christian nationalism and callousness toward the lives of US troops, they say, Hegseth's puerile displays on TV are aimed at sating Trump's desire for a warmonger worthy of the manosphere. This was reinforced by a lurid social media video that intersperses clips from Hollywood blockbusters such as Braveheart, Gladiator, Superman and Top Gun with Hegseth and real kill-shot footage of the attacks in Iran.
• How Donald Trump and Pete Hegseth are selling the Iran war to Americans - ABC News: Part of Mr Trump's challenge in selling his actions to the American public stems from his previous criticisms of US involvement in lengthy foreign wars and his promise not to start any new conflicts.
• Effort Without Improvement - Kristie De Garis: We're told that health, like success, is something you earn through discipline, restraint, and the right behaviour. If you work hard enough, comply closely enough, optimise carefully enough, improvement will follow. Chronic illness disrupts that extremely saleable, inspirational narrative. It produces people who do everything right and still don't get better. In fact, I have never met a group of people who are doing more right than the chronically ill. And society, rather than question the belief, questions the person.
• BuzzFeed Nearing Bankruptcy After Disastrous Turn Toward AI: [After announcing their AI pivot the] company’s stock price jumped aggressively, from around $3 per share to north of $15. But longer-term, neither insiders nor the public were particularly compelled by the move. [...] After the initial spike in enthusiasm, the company's stock took a massive beating; as of this week, its shares are hovering around 70 cents. Now, three years after its AI pivot, the writing is on the wall.
• Endgame for the Open Web - Anil Dash: Tim Berners-Lee is no billionaire, but none of those guys with the hundreds of billions of dollars would have all of their riches without him. And the thanks he gets from them is that they're trying to kill the beautiful gift that he gave to the world, and replace it with a tedious, extortive slop mall.
• Traders placed over $1bn in perfectly timed bets on the Iran war. What is going on? | US-Israel war on Iran | The Guardian: On the night of 27 February, the day before the US and Israel would carry out strikes on Iran, an unusual influx of about 150 accounts on Polymarket placed bets that the US would strike Iran the next day.

• '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