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  For the love of all that’s holy, WHY WERE THESE CHUCKLEFUCKS RETAINING ALL THIS DATA? ARE YOU FUCKING KIDDING ME? https://www.abc.net.au/news/2026-09-23/quest-tells-customers-to-replace-passports-amid-security-breach/107177222 There needs to be hard, enforceable, EXPENSIVE privacy protection legislation. This keeps happening, and there’s no change, no consequences, no mitigations.

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  I would not own a new car now without knowing where its SIM is, and what I need to unplug to remove/disable it. https://www.abc.net.au/news/2026-09-21/byd-hacked-by-cybersecurity-expert-vehicle-sabotage-surveillance/107139482 “China is a special risk because its government can compel access to data,” is a racist trope. The US government carries the same risk. If we built cars in Australia, the Australian government behaves exactly like the Chinese government, and the risk would barely be differ...

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  I don’t understand why we need AI companies to train their models in Australia. How does that help ANYTHING? How does that make anything better for anybody? https://www.abc.net.au/news/2026-09-16/top-ai-firms-meet-albanese-ministers-copyright-law/107160498

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  Japan's central bank has increased their interest rate to a 25 year high, bringing it to a massive (gasp) 1.25%. Can an Australian get a Japanese mortgage? Asking for a friend.

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  RE: https://cosocial.ca/@dyckron/117289888625308741 Oh yes, for fuck's sake don't do what we did or you'll surely regret it. #avgeek

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  Off the scale GLORIOUSNESS on this lovely springtime day in Sydney today. Get outside. #gloriousSydney

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  Zuck wants to release creepy surveillance glasses with microphones only, no cameras. Which is arguably worse, because it's harder for normal people to figure out that they're being secretly recorded. https://www.reuters.com/business/meta-plans-launch-camera-free-smart-glasses-fall-information-reports-2026-09-15/

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  OpenAI IPO won’t happen this year (or next year, or the year after) because all their executives are bailing out and they have no new ideas and no runway to profitability with the old ones. https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026/sep/12/openai-delays-ipo-sam-altman-ai-safety-concerns (Sam Altman is an inveterate liar, no need to listen to the reasons he’s shitting out) Everyone who has invested in OpenAI so far is waiting on tenterhooks for an IPO payday that won’t come; They’re actually don...

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  Very weird headline. Policy is the domain of voters, not politicians. We've always wanted a say in policy, we've always wanted the hired help in Parliament to do what they're fucking told. https://www.abc.net.au/news/2026-09-09/voters-want-greater-say-over-national-policy-cpd-report/107125250

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  It’s impossible to mock this. https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2026/sep/07/australias-top-bureaucrats-want-to-block-sharing-of-clips-from-parliament-on-social-media-to-save-them-from-ridicule

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  Labor doesn’t want to stop doing #robodebt for old people. https://www.abc.net.au/news/2026-08-19/labor-stands-by-algorithm-aged-care-assessment-tool/107055252 This is a statement of their heartfelt values: with an absence of humanity, Mark Butler, with the support of the Labor Party Room and Cabinet, prefers robotically-evaluated “consistent outcomes” over tending to peoples’ basic needs. #4corners

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  Origin Energy: “WE WERE HACKED, ALL YOUR PII IS FOR SALE ON THE OPEN MARKET!” Reality: They weren’t hacked. They just did the usual Australian corporate thing of assuming they could outsource capability AND responsibility, and didn’t adequately control risk, granting access to everyone’s PII to whatever random contractors Accenture spewed up. https://www.abc.net.au/news/2026-08-18/origin-energy-hack-traced-to-accenture-manila-office/107049188

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  First one I’ve seen in the wild. Looks like dogshit.

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  Dario Amodei’s chief of economics says Dario Amodei has been lying for the last four years and AI isn’t displacing any jobs at all. https://fortune.com/2026/07/24/anthropic-peter-mccrory-dario-amodei-why-hasnt-it-killed-jobs/

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  South Australia’s PEAK electricity demand was in 2025, when it reached 3.3 GW. Ping @davidgerard@circumstances.run Firmus, a datacenter company which owns zero datacenters, has been sprinkling council development approvals around Australia like confetti. One of them asks if it can build a 1 GW facility at Tailem Bend. Not only has Firmus never built any datacenters before, but nobody in the world has ever built a 1 GW datacenter. A 1 GW facility requires scalable solutions to engineering prob...

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  RE: https://rssfeed.media/@abcfeeds/116949162635227689 Jailmaxxing.

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  Sydney. Each dot is the geotag coordinates extracted from the EXIF data on a photo. Blue dots are photos taken by people whose photos have EXIF data which predominantly indicates they live in Sydney. Red dots are photos taken by people whose photos have EXIF data which predominantly indicates they’re visiting. Yellow dots are where it’s not possible to conclusively determine whether the photographer is local or a tourist. Red patches on the map are places where tourists take lots of photos....

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  Absolutely not. I'll just have to try to struggle on without reading your substack while you ram it firmly up your ass. Thanks.

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  Having a negative impression of Israel is not antisemitism, my dear antisemitism royal commissioner. I have a very negative impression of Israel, a country that has spent decades voting for a government of genocidal maniacs who have attempted to eradicate the Palestinian people and who, due to their actions against Iran, threaten global stability. Is that antisemitic? My suggestion for parts of the Jewish community who are suffering from this "perception": Grow up.

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  First hone buyers aren't biting *yet*. https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2026/jul/04/australia-property-market-transforming-first-home-buyers-cold-feet It's actually okay to wait until landlord-investors feel pain. Nobody needs to rush, the houses will still be there next year.

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  Australia is unfathomably wealthy, and anyone who claims our society can’t have all the good things it wants (even Melbourne airport rail!) should be laughed out of the room. https://www.abc.net.au/news/2026-07-02/ubs-global-wealth-report-australia-millionaires/106869298

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  It is not antisemitic to publish news coverage of a genocide without also covering the genocider’s emotional state. This is one of the clearest examples yet of the conflation of anti-Zionism with antisemitism: Jews weren’t annihilating Gaza, Israel was. Why on earth should it be necessary to sympathize with the State aggressor to avoid charges of antisemitism? https://www.abc.net.au/news/2026-06-29/bondi-antisemitism-social-cohesion-royal-commission-resumes/106819456

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  The Golden Barley is charging $2 extra for mash and veg if you order steak. Does that pass the pub test?

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  RE: https://mastodon.social/@arstechnica/116821762943906148 A golf cart is a street legal electric buggy designed for luxury resorts which costs less than US$25,000. They’ve reinvented the golf cart, but made it worse.

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  What a curious headline. Who else would pay it? https://www.cnbc.com/2026/06/24/ai-data-centers-tech-companies-congress-energy-costs.html When I’ve built datacenters, I’ve had to budget for upgrades to nearby substations and transmission lines needed to get power to them. In Australia we call it the “augmentation fee.” It would surprise me if there wasn’t a similar principle in North America.

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  If the only thing that made them valuable was tax policy, maybe they weren’t as successful as you think, fellas.

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  I’m sure they got all of it. https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2026/jun/22/almost-three-tonnes-of-cocaine-found-buried-under-sydney-property-in-australias-biggest-ever-seizure-police-say

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  This project was a stupid Turnbull thought bubble. Everyone with an ounce of engineering clue knew it was doomed before it was announced, but Turnbull had a rationality distortion field around him that made politicians and journalists (only) think it was a good idea. Nobody who isn’t a politician or journalist has ever given a flying fuck about Snowy 2.0, and the fact that it’s a failed project that’ll cost gazillions isn’t even making the public genuinely upset. The best thing we can do with...

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  RE: https://mastodon.social/@arstechnica/116782160610816863 Get the calipers out, the UK is doing phrenology again. The last shred of British decorum and modesty only continues to exist because nobody has drawn a pseudoscience link between criminality and dick and ball size.

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  Can we stop pretending Victoria is a “progressive stronghold?” It’s basically a police state. It’s exactly the kind of environment One Nation will thrive in. (If Labor could stop building the enforcement and sustainment infrastructure for future fascism, that’d be AMAZING, thank you) https://www.abc.net.au/news/2026-06-12/one-nation-rise-hung-parliament-possibility-victorian-election/106787500