around the traps

• '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