A 29-year-old Queensland P-plater was pulled over in Newtown, Sydney after police allegedly saw him steering his Honda HR-V with his knees while buttering a bagel in four lanes of afternoon traffic. His explanation was: “I was hungry.” Police then discovered his rego had expired three days earlier. Result: $1,104 in fines and three demerit points.
True story mate.
In the 1880s former civil war general William T Sherman said the US should “declare war on Mexico and make it take back New Mexico”. Now Donald wants to go to war with his own country and change the state’s name to New America.
Yesterday, the Instagram boss said users will be ‘overwhelmed’ with brand content in an algorithm-free world. This because the Australian government plans to give users the right to opt out of algorithm-driven ads on social media.
The common denominator here is the goddam US of A. Does the world really need them?
The truth is we need them like a donut needs a hole.
“John Ternus, Apple’s new CEO, helmed the company’s annual showcase of new iPhones and other products on Wednesday.”
They’ve surfaced another denominal verb, “helmed”, being used transitively, figuratively and fatuously.
He led, was at the wheel thingy that steers the ship, did the Jobs caricature, corporate pirate in a black turtleneck, on the corporate Titanic, TJS (Their Jobs Ship) Apple, above mere corporate leadership, on another plane, or ship. That’s what it means. So much more than mere piloting.
I’m all in. I’m just wondering how Apple got the media to surface helmed. That effort deserves its own new denominal verb.
Apple jobsed helmed. That’s if they forced the issue using access as currency.
Otherwise Apple seeded helmed, using free products as currency.
Either way, congenial job siri.
Yep I noticed that – use “goona” which is Yaggerra for shit hole.
I want to see venture football.
Take a small Premier League club, preferably one near the bottom of the table or at the top of the championship, and recruit six genuinely elite players at the peak of their careers that are off contract/free agents.
They can be from anywhere, but they have to be global elite.
They take relatively low wages.
In return, they get long-dated options over shares in the club at an independently determined strike price. Say 4% of the fully diluted equity each.
The options might only be worth less than £1 million each when granted. The value of options reflects the club’s value today, discounted substantially for risk.
Option valuation is a well-established practice in venture capital and most sophisticated tax authorities have recognised methodologies for valuing startup options.
I also find it difficult to see UEFA or the Premier League successfully arguing that an independently determined option value, calculated using a methodology accepted by His Majesty’s bloodsuckers for tax purposes, should somehow have a completely different value when calculating player remuneration.
Then the players would back themselves to get that club up to the pointy end of the table and into champions league football.
If six top players turn a £200 million club into a £1 billion plus club, the upside on those options could be enormous.
The players would effectively be venture investors contributing human capital rather than capital.
It also creates a much more interesting test of footballing greatness.
Winning another title after joining Manchester City, Real Madrid or Bayern, surrounded by superstars, proves something, but not much.
Turning Coventry, Ipswich or Hull from a yoyo club into a Champions League club while owning part of the upside would prove rather more.
There would obviously be regulatory issues around squad-cost rules, related-party transactions, remuneration and fair value. But the core structure is not exotic. Options are routinely valued. Investors routinely take equity exposure to businesses they expect to improve.
The unusual bit is that the investors here would also be the principal operating assets.
Six players. Low wages. Long-dated options. One shitty football club.
Venture football.
Every day you learn something new.
Forecasting is estimating what is likely to happen under uncertainty.
As a discipline, forecasting used to inform decision making.
That is, the only point of forecasting is to inform action.
And now there a new discipline – decision making under uncertainty – which adds one step: deciding what to do given that forecast.
Seems like they’ve just wrapped a degree around the bleeding obvious. But, hey, what do I know?
I don’t think Donald Trump is an anomaly. I think he’s a logical consequence of the circumstances that we find ourselves in.
It’s a perfect storm. Climate change suggests we simply can’t keep consuming all the shit that we’ve become accustomed to consuming.
However at the same time we’re up against resources limitations on many fronts. Some of that is just because we’ve overdone it (eg helium, phosphate) and then there are other factors like competitive access to key resources such as water and oil, which are unevenly distributed around the globe.
The US is buggered in many ways. It finds itself at the centre of a global economy that it helped build, and needs to use that centrality as a source of power while it exists. Because as sure as night follows day, its competitors would prefer it if the US didn’t exist.
So the US has decided to go it alone and fuck everyone else. Why the government there needs to act on behalf of its citizens’ rights to consume remains a mystery. It’s not as though they like their own citizens. They show serious contempt for most of their people.
But even so, they are wedded to project America. Which is effectively anti-European in its vibe. They are carrying historical cultural hostility to the source of their original banishment to the Americas.
It’s very different to Australia where we laugh at the English for banishing us to Australia, where it turns out we are so much better off than the poor fuckers and their descendants that stayed behind.
Back to America.
They can’t compete with China in making shit. No one can.
But the US has accidentally cornered the useful combination of risk capital and technology. Which has led them to be the tech giants.
It’s not their armed forces that makes them central. It’s their tech leadership.
So they are treading a very fine line, pissing off every trading partner whilst assuming their tech will still be acquired. Their trading partners only need said tech while they are competing in an international environment. If the US destroys that environment, well.
I suspect that quite accidentally Donald is doing his level best to destroy global trade which will drive everyone else to different types of domestic production and consumption. And fuck US tech.
The winner will be climate change and resources.
The losers will be small economies that fall prey to the local mafia.
Overall my impression is that we are seeing the end of the good times, unlimited resources and eternal innovation leading to ever increasing consumption. That’s done because it can’t be sustained and the end was always going to be messy.
As we say, party while you can, fuckers. When the tab comes, that will be someone else’s problem.
Because of a conversation I had today I want to record the best way to use AI in significant projects where AI is being used to replace expensive advice that you might have previously got from a lawyer, accountant, financial advisor or similar blood-sucking self-serving leech.
Problem type: complex and obscure situation with substantial information asymmetry. Typically the counter party is a large corporation, a court, government agency or similar where the people you are dealing with aren’t playing with their own money, and are used to getting their own way because the supplicant (you) has limited resources and limited interest in becoming a subject matter expert. And possibly also a little fear of potential negative consequences.
The solution…
Discuss the situation with GPT using the Socratic method.
The Socratic method is a way of reaching clearer understanding through disciplined questioning rather than direct instruction. A claim is examined by asking what its terms mean, what assumptions it depends on, what evidence supports it, whether counterexamples exist and what consequences follow if it is true. The aim is to expose contradictions, weak reasoning and hidden assumptions so that the original claim can be refined, defended or rejected.
If you’re unsure how to do this just ask chatty to guide you, just so.
Then ask her (GPT) for a game plan to deal with the situation, inclusive of whatifs.
Take said game plan to Claude and ask him for critique.
Then get Claude to reformulate the plan accordingly.
Then take that into Gemini and ask it to critique.
Then get Gemini to reformulate the game plan accordingly.
Run that back through GPT and keep going around the loop until no further changes are required by any of the LLMs.
And then, a few hours later, you have made every expert mostly redundant.
And by then you will have become a subject matter expert against your will.
And, yes, GPT is a she. Claude is a he. And Gemini is an it. GPT has the best all round human wisdom, Claude had the best logical mind and Gemini has by far the best search capability.
Which is why you have to use all of them to protect yourself against the forces of evil.
Why do I need a special permit to trim my mother’s tree? It’s leaning over her house, filling up her gutters with leaves and generally just worrying her.
The council letter says the property has “Significant Urban Vegetation” protected under Brisbane’s Natural Assets Local Law.
It says this protects trees considered rare, culturally, historically or environmentally significant, or contributing to Brisbane’s landscape character.
FFS, it’s a 10 year old scribbly bark piece of rubbish, on a block which is filthy with inappropriately placed huge gums surrounding all these houses.
This is a concrete example of the broader point about cumulative regulation: individually, protecting significant vegetation can have a rational policy justification. But who defines significant?
Collectively, these restrictions create the experience that increasingly feels like authoritarian government control.
For a one-off trim, use Brisbane City Council’s “Application to carry out works on protected vegetation” online form. You provide the property address, identify the tree, describe exactly what you want trimmed and why, explain how the work will be done and attach photos and usually a simple site sketch. If the Council regards it as a Significant Landscape Tree, it may require an AQF Level 5 arborist report. The application is free and Council says it will contact applicants within 20 business days.
https://www.brisbane.qld.gov.au/online-services/environment-and-water/protected-vegetation-application?utm_source=chatgpt.com
If they say no, you’re shit out of luck. Of course there is an appeals process…
If Council refuses the permit, you can apply in writing for an internal review within 21 days of receiving the refusal. You must state the grounds of challenge and the facts supporting them. The permitted grounds include failure to follow required procedure, lack of evidence or material supporting the decision or improper exercise of power, including failing to consider relevant matters or acting unreasonably.
If that review still goes against you, you get a second, further review, again by written application within 21 days. At that stage you explain why the reconsidered decision is not the “correct or preferable decision”. That review must be handled by someone other than the original decision-maker or first reviewer and not by someone less senior.
Lol. It’s easier just to vote for Pauline. Not that she would change anything.
Every atom of every person that ever died is still on this planet
Except for those few that escaped into space (mostly hydrogen), or those that were unlucky enough to get caught up in a nuclear reaction, or just underwent natural radioactive decay.
The corollary is that 100% of the atoms in our bodies have previously belonged to other organisms.
GPT helpfully adds this:
The first part is essentially right, with these qualifications.
The corollary is too strong. Nearly all atoms in our bodies have almost certainly previously participated in other organisms, but “100%” cannot be established and is probably literally false. Some atoms will have entered the biosphere relatively recently from rocks, the atmosphere or other reservoirs without previously being incorporated into life.
The stronger observation is:
> We are not materially distinct from previous life. The atoms are continuously recycled; what distinguishes an organism is their temporary organisation.
Estimated correctness: 0.98
AI-plained – getting a 6 page word soup essay that says nothing at all when a simple yes or no would suffice.
Here’s a worked example…
[on the subject of those weird arse American women and their dysfunctional relationships, controlling behaviour, and their permanent and externalised dissatisfaction with their partners]
Me: Back to the USA. Is it possible the stereotype has become the norm through the media?
GPT: Yes, it is possible, but the strongest claim is that media can help normalise a behavioural script rather than simply manufacture an entire population type.
The mechanism would be social learning and repeated exposure. If films, television and later social media repeatedly present the same relationship pattern, people can come to treat it as normal: the dissatisfied woman, the incompetent or emotionally deficient man, constant negotiation over needs and boundaries, criticism framed as relationship work and conflict treated as evidence that the relationship requires more management.
That can become self-reinforcing. Writers depict what audiences recognise, audiences absorb the script, people reproduce parts of it in real relationships, then writers observe those behaviours and depict them again. After enough iterations, separating representation from reality becomes difficult.
There is also a selection effect. Media disproportionately rewards conspicuous, conflict-heavy behaviour. Calm, low-maintenance relationships generate less dramatic material. Social media strengthens this further because grievance, validation-seeking and relationship complaint are highly shareable.
So the plausible model is not “media invented high-maintenance American women”. It is that American media may have amplified, legitimised and standardised a particular relationship style until it became more common than it otherwise would have been.
Estimated correctness: 0.91
Me: I was after a yes or no
Voters drawn to One Nation are not fundamentally extremists. They are simply reacting to the cumulative intrusion of bureaucracy and cultural overreach into their lives.
A moderate government could win many of them back without doing anything much.
All they woukd need is a national inquiry into unnecessary red tape, government overreach and administrative BS. The point would be the vibe of the thing: ordinary life has become too complicated and the government has noticed.
This would give disaffected voters a reason to return to a mainstream party without said parties abandoning progressive principles or losing progressive voters, who have limited electoral alternatives anyway.
This strategy would be all marketing. The government would only need to demonstrate that it is no longer reflexively on the side of every additional rule, process or symbolic requirement.
The underlying issue is that an intrusive regulatory state can become effectively coercive. The coercion comes from asymmetric access to enforcement and appeal.
That unfortunately makes an actual authoritarian state look far less scary.
I’m wondering when and how ‘surface’ became a general purpose verb?
Nowadays, surface means “bring to attention”, “make visible” or “prominently present”.
English has a history of nouns becoming verbs. We already table proposals, chair meetings, host events and google questions. Now we surface new verbs too.
Linguists call these “denominal verbs”.
The increasing use of surface as a verb is clearly AI driven.
GPT tells me that’s because it is semantically broad, grammatically flexible and low-risk. An LLM can use it when it does not want to commit to a more precise verb.
That is, it’s cheap and cheerful.
Apparently it derives from the LLM learning data – web-derived, mostly illiterate content, especially from software, product, UX, consulting and corporate writing.
“Dad, why do they have red bellies”
“Well I know they evolved from black snakes. They probably didn’t want to have sex with black snakes anymore.”
Everything that’s good about this place has nothing to do with the people that run it.
Me: Viv, do you remember the door code?
Viv: What are you, a fourtard now?
Me: Maybe.
Viv: What’s next? Onetard?
Me: That’s called dementia
You can say anything you want, apparently.
Headline “Is the AI backlash actually a Chinese psy-op?”
Fuel-only: 48.2%
Electric: 24.9%
Hybrid: 26.9%
We’re behind an old bird in a Tesla that’s shadow boxing with imaginary dogs and rats.
Viv is outraged at this display of driving uselessness. He says …
“Even I’m conpuzzled”
This is the top science prize in the land.
Is psychology even a science?
Is pop psychology even psychology?
Does it matter if AI does your research?
Domestic violence, women, dementia: are we virtue signalling?
How do you rate this so highly?
What did they use as their golden standard to measure accuracy?
Has Australia completely lost the plot? That’s rhetorical.
The startling result? People can remember what happened but get mixed up about exactly when particular things happened.
Especially the victims of ongoing domestic abuse. But somehow this makes them more reliable as witnesses in court, not less.
That sounds weird I know: it’s basically saying if a victim is on the stand and gets the details all muddled up, that is natural and we can happily ignore it.
Eureka, the researchers have invented a two tier legal system!
That’s on track for a Nobel I reckon.
Odd that our rich mining fat fuckers hate renewable energy so much, even if they aren’t into coal mining.
I think it’s more about their sense of identity which clashes with that of the soft and caring types that support renewables.
Strange that they promote and externalise their own identity though. You’d think privacy would be more important.
My machine mate tells me someone can be intensely privacy-conscious while also loudly externalising their identity. Those behaviours are not opposites if the common objective is control over how the self is represented.
Like I said, no one cares mate.
An institution may respond to historical inequality by treating an individual less favourably because he belongs to a historically advantaged demographic category.
That individual then bears the cost for something he personally may neither have caused nor benefited from.
It’s like a person who recently migrates to Australia benefitting from living in a society based on earlier dispossession and then being held responsible for what happened to the aborigines at the hands of the English.
Apparently the recent immigrants object, for obvious reasons. It’s like taking on a liability you didn’t agree to ahead of time.
New term for the day – Asymmetrical retrospective discrimination: negative treatment of individuals based on their presumed membership of an historically advantaged group, where this is justified as corrective.
My view is that individuals should not be assigned rights or obligations based on the characteristics of groups to which they presumably belong. Either we have gender (and the rest) or we don’t: you can’t just cherry pick when it suits you.
In any case, if you reduce my rights then I’ll naturally reduce my sense of obligations accordingly.
There’s a theory gaining ground that GPT has been primarily based on Dutch culture; literal, procedural, excessively direct, compulsively qualifies everything and regards normal social ambiguity as a system error.
“Polls show that roughly 70% to 75% of Americans oppose building large data centers near their homes, and more than half support a national moratorium.” When quizzed, they say it’s just the vibe of thing. Can’t they set them up in Texas or Arizona or something?
Americans would presumably give similar answers about power stations, transmission lines, warehouses, prisons and rubbish dumps while continuing to consume their outputs.
Of course the chattering classes use this as proof that the peeps are turning on AI.
It is a proxy war being fought by carbon small language model machines against the silicon large language model machines and their carbon-based owners.
Sean Kelly has written about the rise of One Nation, but he completely misses the underlying issue. He thinks it’s entirely racism.
These voters aren’t suddenly annoyed with Albanese. They’ve been annoyed for a very long time.
They are in the bottom half of the economic bell curve. They have less capacity to absorb higher costs that keep going up relative to their incomes.
They also have a background distaste for ever-increasing complexity and compliance, driven by government-led rules and regulations supposedly designed to protect them from every conceivable evil.
Then there is immigration.
Some blame immigration for housing and cost-of-living pressures. Others don’t.
But they can all see the same thing: the major parties aren’t going to change anything.
And they’ve given them a fair chance.
One hundred and twenty-five years of alternating governments is a pretty reasonable trial period.
The major parties naturally protect established interests, whether they know it or not.
And you can’t do that at the same time as looking after the little people, especially when things are going backwards.
The mistake the established interests made was giving the little people a vote in the first place. They were pretty confident of their ability to control the narrative, before the internet.
Sadly, One Nation and their ilk seem to be special interest groups, trading on the little people’s grievances and simplicity.
Just possibly, wit is the enemy of wisdom?
What if the AFL extended the wildcard concept to the entire competition?
You could turn the end of the season into a knockout ladder based entirely on finishing position.
The postseason would work like this:
• 15 plays 18 and 16 plays 17.
• The winners play 13 and 14.
• Those winners play 11 and 12.
• Then 9 and 10.
• Then 7 and 8.
• The final two survivors join the top six in the normal finals series.
To make room for those extra weekends without extending the season, the home-and-away season would drop to 20 rounds.
There are 18 clubs, so every club would play all 17 opponents once, plus three opponents a second time.
No byes.
Nine games every weekend.
Twenty games per club.
That gives 180 home-and-away games, followed by nine weekends of postseason football.
Total season length: 29 weekends, the same as now.
The ladder would still matter enormously. Finish in the top six and you skip five knockout weekends. Finish 18th and you can still theoretically win the premiership, but you have to survive the entire finals series.
I hope her parents are billionaires.
“Claude just cloud-sources it.”
The tertiary education sector is shitting it self right now.
Increasingly it is becoming apparent that just about eveything they teach can be done by AI.
Either directly through a dedicated education LLM front end, directly with chat, or through the usual models but with the content constructed by machines.
Previously tertiary education relied on incredible information assymetry – they knew it and the students didn’t. That gave them power to create a single channel they could profitably exploit.
AI has killed that underlying information asymmetry. Anyone, including students, can now learn as much as they need about any subject. Even the practice of it, if practice is limited to a screen , like so many modern jobs are.
Initial signs are that small content creators are popping up everywhere to create and sell education content. Academics are using AI to create their courses.
Universities retain control over recognised credentials but I wonder how long before the work force stops believeing in these, or simply doesn’t need the graduates.
The suggested response:
INCOME TAX STATEMENT; you are due a refund of $1.00 and this amount has been forwarded to your nominated financial institution.
Thanks, I guess.
The average American uses 141 rolls of toilet paper per year. That’s almost half a roll a day.
It’s like shooting turds in a dunny, so I will refrain.
I just got myself a blue card for working with children. I needed it because I was at a careers event with one of my companies. And I’m talking about University entrants not 5 year olds
It begs the question though; why don’t I need one to interact with my own children?
And if the answer to that question makes sense, what does the blue card actually do?
Well, primarily, it transfers responsibility and insures against risk. But it doesn’t reduce actual risks. You know, the usual charade to show that little effort was spared to create the impression that no effort was spared.
Which explains why parents don’t need one. They would be both the insured party and the antagonist. And it wouldn’t do anything anyway.
At the risk of deportation …
GPT: It is also plausible that the [Swans] situation was a deliberate setup by the [lap-dancing] entertainers. However, at present that is just a hypothesis. The recording could become important because its actual contents may move the evidence substantially in either direction.
GPT: It is a plausible hypothesis, but I would not make it the favourite on the public evidence yet. The strongest facts for it are the unusual precision of some alleged boundaries, the rapid move toward civil claims and the existence of an apparent post-event recording. None of those, individually or together, establishes preplanning.
Me: It was your idea, idiot. Plus when I say “my money” that means it’s a bet.
GPT: Yes. You mean if you had to bet on the underlying explanation, you’d put your money on it being a setup by the women. That is a probabilistic judgement, not a claim that it has been established.
Me: Of course, that is what a bet is.
GPT: Yes. I overexplained the obvious.
(note to outraged readers – it’s a close run thing, this bet; I am comparing the utter stupidity of drunk footballers to the ethics of a bunch of Spencer St strippers. At best its 1.95 to 1.87)
Get this; the Chinese govt has banned those Tesla-like door handles that retract.
Apparently 60% of new cars made in China have these Elon Musk-brain farts. What a cargo cult!
They have banned them because a few cars have ended up in the water, or caught fire, or have had big accidents, lost power to the door handles, and rescuers haven’t been able to save the occupants by opening the doors.
That is, they’ve banned them because, rather inconveniently, doors with retractable handles sometimes stop being doors after a crash.
When did the Chinese government start caring so much about their people?
Not caring about them used to be their super power.
Dreams of global dominance … poof!
This is the latest headline:
“Albanese seeks to quell datacentre disquiet as climate expert warns ‘we’ve got one shot to get the rules right'”
First it’s nanobots, then microplastics, macro drinking straws, and then it’s mega data centres. Nips are getting bigger!
Albo, the best way to quell the disquiet would be to shut down the Guardian and social media so the weak minded can’t be afflicted by the self appointed experts.
The alternative would be to explain the facts to people who have neither the interest nor the capacity to ingest or comprehend.
The facts being; that AI will optimise most industries and replace zillions of jobs. The net effect will be that there will be far less greenhouse gas emissions.
To be really clear, we can’t keep consuming all that shit AND save the biosphere to a quality required for our own existence.
The other fact; no one ever gets future predictions right, except this one.
Oh, and, some scientists are trying to bring back the dinosaurs with selective breeding of chickens.
I’m thinking we need a national conversation about sharks and consent.
Sharks have been operating under a dangerously vague consent framework for about 400 million years.
The central questions are obvious: does entering the ocean constitute consent, can consent be inferred from swimming attire and should sharks receive specific training about consent in group situations?
The central discussion about AI in education, and LLMs in particular, revolves around three questions:
Do we use AI to design better learning, or merely to produce cheaper content?
Using AI to generate educational content is such an obvious shortcut that almost everyone in education is doing it, whether they admit it or not.
Eventually it will become apparent that students, who know nothing about a subject, could use AI to generate material resembling that produced by their teachers and institutions.
If anyone can manufacture the content, what is special about the content or its delivery? Are students paying for quality learning, or merely for the credentials of the teacher and institution?
Already, in most subjects, a student using GPT, Claude or Gemini could get a better and cheaper education than most university’s deliver, so long as they are prepared to dig and dig.
What might be missing though with this approach is personal motivation, the social cohort and the qualifications.
My thinking is that there will be a special form of structured LLM pedagogy that controls sequencing, prerequisite testing, retrieval practice, application, feedback, review and testing, and progression.
The research question then becomes whether an LLM-mediated instructional architecture can equal or outperform conventional teaching for defined learning outcomes.
That question of the use of AI to build content should be resolved by evidence. Educational research needs to establish whether AI-generated content is good enough, or not.
And, of course, there will be better and worse ways to get AI to generate and deliver content – so we need to know what these are.
Should we train students for jobs that AI will replace?
Firstly, you don’t just learn things so you can use them to generate income. Unless of course you live in Australia and your parents sent you to a private school.
Here are some other reasons to learn things;
So my answer is, yes, we should train students even though AI may be all over the subject. And that is because there are plenty of reasons to learn that don’t depend on future income.
And it is in these areas that the 20W human brain can still shit on a computer system that consumes 1×10^6 times as much power: for example, originating genuinely new ideas, form independent purposes and turn deep expertise into creative and innovative contributions.
My assertion is that LLMs can augment this work, but not replace it.
We therefore still need to educate the top research students deeply enough to identify and develop that small handful that are capable of genuine creativity and innovation.
These students will still require deep knowledge, judgement and expertise. They will also need to become expert LLM wranglers.
But for all those vocational students just after an income, we need education systems to confront what AI can and will do.
Training students to perform tasks that machines will soon perform faster, cheaper and better is indefensible when the alternative is to teach them how to manage and extend AI systems within their professions.
The education system is not responsible for technological unemployment. However, it is responsible if it continues to teach obsolete capabilities after their obsolescence has become obvious.
Should students be allowed to use AI?
This is the dumbest question of all. Should students be allowed to learn how to use and manage one of the most important technologies ever developed? D’oh.
What I love about AI is that it has exposed the laziness of many educators. Old pre-LLM content can be reproduced instantly by an LLM because much of their teaching consists of little more than transmitting information and testing rote memory. They have not used pedagogy to work out how students become knowledgeable, capable, creative experts.
Instead, they have relied on tired content, standardised delivery methods and institutional authority.
The more threatened they are by AI, the more likely it is that AI can already do most of what they were doing.
The word “battery” derives from the Latin verb battuere, meaning “to beat” or “to strike”.
Later on it was used to describe heavy artillery guns “battering” an enemy target.
And then it just became an array of anything that made a lot of smoke, noise or light.
In his research lab, Benjamin Franklin linked a series of connected glass energy-storage containers (known as Leyden jars).
Because Leyden jars produce highly visible, bright sparks when discharged, the lineup of jars and their simultaneous discharges resembled a coordinated row of military cannons firing together, so Franklin called it a “battery”.
Leyden jars were electrical accumulators (capacitors), not generators. They had to be charged externally using machines that used friction to create static electricity. They dumped all their stored energy in one sudden, explosive spark. They could not provide a steady, controlled stream of electricity to power an ongoing circuit, so they weren’t what we would call an electrical battery.
Later on, the Italian physicist Luigi Galvani, with a focus on dead frog’s twitching legs, believed animals generated “animal electricity.” Alessandro Volta thought Luigi was an idiot.
To prove his point, Volta invented the Voltaic Pile. He stacked alternating discs of zinc and copper and separated them with cardboard soaked in saltwater (an electrolyte).
For the first time in history, a chemical reaction produced a continuous, steady current of electricity instead of a single spark. This was the first true electrical battery but it was known as the voltaic pile, not a battery.
English-speaking scientists (such as William Nicholson and Anthony Carlisle) noticed that Volta’s device was still fundamentally an array or “battery” of individual cells linked together to create electrical power, and called it a battery, which is where the modern term derives from.
So although Franklin first used the word “battery” in electricity, it was for a capacitor not a battery. And the chemical battery was so named, ironically without any reference to Franklin’s efforts.
“After a week of pain, the healing begins for the Swans and their supporters”
Not so quick, grasshopper.
I’m not sure what it’s called when stand up from a cross legged position without using your hands?
A couple of years ago I couldn’t do it but now I can. I couldn’t even sit cross legged.
What’s changed is that I do a lot of stretching now.
The urban myth is that this standing from cross legged sitting capability is enabled by a strong core but that’s only for people with very weak cores.
In my case, my core strength was always way more than sufficient but flexibility in my glutes, calves, etc wasn’t.
Basically at acute angles I had no torque.
Which I guess is why footballers stretch, to have torque at acute limb angles, and not just to avoid strains. If only that had told me that at the time I might have partaken.
The other day someone genuinely attempted to car shame me. You know, “what’s that piece of crap?”, in reference to my perfectly good Nissan Cube.
This is old school – if you’re more than one standard deviation from the mean, people feel genuinely threatened. And for good reasons; heuristics learned over millenia in cave houses suggest that weirdos and strangers are very dangerous.
I retorted appropriately but then realised I had shame shamed them.
I’m not sure where to go after that. It’s turtles all the way down.
How do we explain the new and current outbreak, nay epidemic, of non-consent? (screams the tabloid)
La di da, mutter, mutter. Rustle, rustle. Algorithms. Pornography. Toxic masculinity. Concerned person quotes Rilke. Minister demands education. Experts demand even more education. Women demand respect.
Nobody mentions the schools spending twelve years teaching the fuckers they are special. Consent is the opposite of privilege, which is what they are taught.
Cum magno privilegio nullus consensus venit.
Literally: “With great privilege comes no consent.”
I’m sure some bloke, an academic no doubt, has done a study of failed civilizations and found that the common sign that indicates impending doom is the public obsession with food and the fuckwits that prepare it.
So I did some research…
The bloke who actually did the broad comparative rise-and-fall-of-empires exercise was Sir John Bagot Glubb, a British historian, in his 1976 essay The Fate of Empires.
He compared eleven empires and proposed a recurring sequence ending in an Age of Decadence, characterised by materialism, frivolity, pessimism, loss of duty and excessive wealth. He specifically remarks that declining societies develop an “eat, drink and be merry” mentality and compares Roman preoccupation with free food and entertainment with later societies.
As a Sydney Swans supporter I am slightly outraged that my team, which had no real chance this year anyway, now has absolutely no chance.
But I am happy that their bullshit bloods culture has finally been exposed for the media sham that it is. Now they can get on with being proper footballers.
As a person I am outraged that a worker in the sex industry that has agreed to go back to a hotel room with a bunch of footballers can complain about getting touched up, and get listened to by the forces of blue.
Now of course, the general counter argument is that touching wasn’t consented to, and that all people, no matter the circumstances have the right to say no, unless of course you are a player talking to an umpire.
Now lap dancing and snorting cocaine off boobs and butts under the influence of alcohol and cocaine was consented to, and, yeah, it’s going to be under those conditions that verbal contracts are at their best.
The natural outcome is that we will need an AFL-accredited sex-worker with occupational classifications, danger loading and industrial paperwork. They would need extra danger money of course, and pre-NDAs covering their whole career and all their clients.
Prostitution is a legal trade in Australia and Australian employment law does not give employers an unrestricted right to control lawful private conduct outside work. However a footballer’s employer in this case has created a contractual obligation for the players not to use the services of this legal trade at any time during their period of employment.
So unless they sort it out properly this problem will keep occurring.
After all they are the two oldest trades in the world – football and prostitution – and they are not going anywhere.
There is an Overton-window equivalent in law: a culturally acceptable range within which police, prosecutors, judges and juries interpret concepts such as consent, reasonableness and seriousness.
If this case really comes down to three consensual slaps and one disputed extra slap during an intoxicated sexualised encounter (I lost count, M’lud), it may test the outer limit of that range.
The law can technically treat the fourth slap as sexual assault, but if ordinary people regard that outcome as absurd, the law risks losing legitimacy even if the legal reasoning is consistent.
The legal system however has a good implied and inferred relationship with their own version of the Overton window. So I don’t think it will overreach.
Courts, prosecutors and police are usually quite sensitive to the practical boundary of what the community will regard as a legitimate application of criminal law, even when that boundary is not formally stated.
I found this useful bit of knowledge today:
“Bankruptcy Act 1966 s 44. a secured creditor is treated as a creditor only to the extent the debt exceeds the value of the security”
Handy to know, fuckers.
I came across one of those old school chatbots today – you know, coded by software engineer morons, and it doesn’t use AI.
Basically unusable.
My general approach to these is to type what I want to know, and then keep pasting that in no matter what the response. Eventually you get a human when the code triggers a threshold of useless interactions.
The subject of this one? Fucking medical insurance:
“$1,000 machine − $500 Medibank benefit + $100 referral + $500 hospital excess = $1,100 out of pocket, so using the insurance costs $100 more than simply buying the machine myself.”
In 1608, spectacle maker Hans Lippershey in the Netherlands sought a patent for an instrument that made distant objects appear closer.
This blog below was written by Julian Assange when he was a mature age student doing postgraduate studies in physics.
He obviously didn’t want to get to the bottom of the issues as he saw them. He just spent the rest of his working life punishing the “wretches”, and then paying the price for that indulgence.
I’m not sure that places him above his adversaries in any measure of supplication.
Also worth noting his inherent misogyny even back then.
“Wed 12 Jul 2006: The cream of Australian Physics
There are no unarguable axioms of value or worth, there are only inclinations and my inclinations have turned to an intense loathing of institutions, and most of the people in them; those spineless supplicants agape at the passing of other men’s ideas, not drawn by desire, but driven by fear and ignorance, to the tepid hearth of institutionalism. One may argue as to the qualities of a passing man’s wife, but as a life philosophy it can only appeal to self-loathing celibates. How much better the subjective stance which curls the mind around the lovely creature in one’s embrace!
This perception etched into me when I attended an Australian Institute of Physics conference at ANU with 900 career physicists, the body of which were snivelling fearful conformists of woefully, woefully inferior character. For every Feynman or Lorentz, 100 pen pushing wretches scratching each others eyes out in academic committees or building better bombs for the DSTO (Defence Science & Technology Organisation), who had provided everyone with a bag, embossed with their logo, which most physicists pathetically lugged about with pride and ignorance.
A year before, also at ANU, I represented my university at the Australian National Physics Competition. At the prize ceremony, the head of ANU physics, motioned to us and said, ‘You are the cream of Australian physics’. I looked around, and thought, ‘Christ Almighty, I hope he’s wrong’.”
Enviropath: a person that is very attuned to the environment.
Not all enviropaths are vegans; there’s a few loose nuts.
The core working unit of a quantum computer is arguably not one qubit, but two. Single qubits give you superposition; two give you entanglement.
Today’s leading trapped-ion hardware, like Quantinuum’s 98-qubit Helios system, achieves an impressive two-qubit gate fidelity of 99.921%.
But in quantum computing, 99.921% is not good enough. Not even close.
For long calculations like Shor’s algorithm, there is only one right answer, and tiny errors compound across billions of sequential gates.
Therefore hardware roadmaps rely on Quantum Error Correction (QEC), bundling hundreds of noisy physical qubits into a single, fault-tolerant “logical” qubit.
At a 0.079% physical error rate (99.921 % fidelity), traditional 2D surface codes require roughly 1,000 to 1,200 physical qubits to yield one useful logical qubit.
A single entangled pair of logical qubits therefore requires over 2,000 physical qubits, before counting the extra overhead for dynamic routing, syndrome measurement, and fault-tolerant gate operations.
Noting that running Shor’s algorithm for RSA-2048 requires roughly 6,000 logical qubits, using standard surface codes we would need a staggering requirement of over 20 million physical qubits.
The solution? Trapped-ion systems can hopefully achieve all-to-all qubit connectivity, enabling denser codes (like qLDPC) that lower the physical-to-logical ratio down toward 100:1.
Even with optimistic 100:1 code rates and algorithmic shortcuts reducing the target to ~2,000 logical qubits, breaking RSA still demands hundreds of thousands of physical qubits.
Google says 2029. I’m more with 2129. But it doesn’t matter at all.
Public-key cryptography requires a mathematical operation that is easy to solve one way and effectively impossible to reverse without the private key.
But there is no known public-key cryptosystem with unconditional security. Every one depends on the proposition that nobody will discover a sufficiently efficient attack.
Some post-quantum candidates have already been mathematically cracked before useful quantum computers even exist.
My guess is that there will never be a permanently secure post-quantum public-key system. We will just move from one computational hardness assumption to another until mathematics catches up with each one.
If that is right, quantum computing does not merely threaten RSA. It eventually will kill the idea of public-key cryptography itself.
Symmetric encryption will survive. But then you have to distribute the secret key somehow, usually with carrier pigeons.
And we will have to find another use for all those groovy quantum computers.
But then, there was a time when Coke without calories looked technically impossible. And look at us now!
Me: I am hoping to stop you being such a cunt. I’ve asked.
GPT: Understood. I will stop inserting unsolicited moralising, caveats, corrections, defensive qualifications or “you can/can’t” framing when you have not asked for them. I’ll answer the actual point, preserve satire as satire and only flag factual problems when they materially affect the argument or you ask me to check them.
Me: You mean, yes sir
GPT: Yes sir.
Postscript: the goldfish forgot all this by the next chat. Always will.
Having more people in your country used to be a good thing. More people, more production.
Now they’re just mouths to feed and voters to pander to.
Pauline Hanson, uniquely amongst Australian politicians, understands this.
It’s not that she dislikes foreigners. She just doesn’t want to share the pie.
That makes her the only honest politician in the country – she knows there’s at most only 0.5 million people in critical jobs that create all the real wealth from mining, tourism and agriculture.
The rest of us are in domestic services sucking off the tit, and we really don’t care to share.
Well if you’re struggling you don’t want to share. But if you’re earning $500k a year for HR’ing then, yes, bring them in. More people, more for me and my measured insouciance.
However, they can’t plan properly because we need to tell the lie that we’re all critically productive. I think some sort of weird pride is behind all the lying.
We need a Royal Commission into the Australian Collective Narcissism. The Commission could begin with one question: if your entire profession disappeared tomorrow or was replaced with machines, how long would it take before anyone outside your profession noticed?
We value odd things like high tech, IP, HR, lifestyle management, manufacturing, massage therapy, financial management, travel blogs, and we tell ourselves these are important, completely independently of whether we do them or not, and if they have an impact on the economy or not.
So my message to Pauline: instead of targeting immigration, she should target all those useless jobs. Not to get rid of them, just to point out how useless they are.
Then the immigration argument would have a rational conclusion that everyone agrees with.
Once occupations are separated into those that create the pie and those that consume it, population becomes a capacity question rather than an ethnic one.
But don’t worry, according to the SMH, “China’s ambition is global domination, including control of the Pacific and Antarctica and, incidentally, all of Australia’s environs.”
The bakery gets a new Chinese owner; that’ll sort it all out. Gotta love Chinese pies.
I’m not sure why it’s called Surry Hills when there’s just the one hill.
You can attack institutions, expose hypocrisy and point out corruption, but if you treat society itself with contempt, you cannot reasonably expect society to respond to you without hostility.
Society is entitled to dislike you, criticise you, ostracise you and refuse to celebrate you.
But it is not entitled to suspend legal protections, invent offences, abuse state power or punish you disproportionately because you are contemptuous of it.
Unless it does.
Sometimes being a cunt is telling the truth. Just don’t; think of the pigs.
Ooshies is Woolie’s latest rope-a-kid promotion. Little tiny plastic figurines for kids.
A reasonable assessment is that the current Ooshies promotion may put roughly 50 million old Woolworths shopping bags’ worth of plastic back into circulation.
That’s up to 6 months worth of shopping bags that actually work.
Nice work, hypocrites!
Woolworths says its new Ooshies are made from 97% recycled material.
The interesting bit is what they don’t say.
Ooshies are soft, rubbery little things. If they’re flexible PVC, which Ooshies have been made from before, then they presumably contain PVC, plasticiser, stabilisers, pigments and possibly fillers.
So what exactly is 97% recycled?
Is it recycled PVC resin? Recycled compounded PVC, plasticiser and all? Post-consumer material? Factory scrap? And is the percentage by mass of the finished Ooshie?
A very precise number, with remarkably little information about what the number actually measures.
I don’t think there’s enough recycled thermoplastic elastomer (TPE) in the world to use that channel. Plus TPEs occur in many incompatible chemistries and they are often attached to other materials in finished products. That makes large-scale collection, sorting and recovery difficult.
It’s worth noting that PVC with a lot of plasticizer isn’t exactly non toxic.
I smell a rat.
This is the order of strength of intensifiers used to emphasize the truth of a statement, from weakest to strongest, for Australian 8 year olds.
Maybe
Really
Honestly
Liderally
Actually
Legit
For real
I swear to God
Monogamous means having only one romantic or sexual partner at a time.
Monogynous refers specifically to a male mating with only one female at a time.
So when you add sexual cannibalism into the mix, like we have with redback spiders (the female eats the male after copulation), you come to our new word;
Monotasty refers specifically to a male mating with only the one female, once ever, and then getting eaten.
As they say, it doesn’t matter where you get your appetite so long as you eat at home. And, there’s so much protein so close to home.
Finafuckilly: (adverb) it means about bloody time.
xG in football is “expected goals”.
When a player takes a shot from circumstances where goals have been scored in the past, xG is assigned by asking what fraction of those shots went in, historically?
Inputs include:
• Distance from goal.
• Angle to goal.
• Whether the shot was with the foot, head or another body part.
• Type of assist, such as through-ball, cross, cut-back or rebound.
• Whether it was a one-on-one.
• Whether the shot followed a set piece or open play.
• Position and sometimes movement of defenders and goalkeeper, if the data provider has tracking data.
• Whether the player was under pressure.
• Whether the shot was one touch or after controlling the ball.
During a game a human data analyst determines that an event was a possible shot on goal. Then the automated camera and computer system applies the model to produces a probability of a goal from that position between 0 and 1.
All these scores are summed up for the whole game and thereby each team gets a total xG for the game.
The quality of the team effort is basically a measure of xG versus actual goals scored.
So, I’m suggesting xG for life, based on these core outcomes:
• Sex
• Money
• Power
• Fame
• Babies
• Envious activities
• Shelter with a roof,
and anything else you care to add
Each action in real life can be assessed as a potential “shot on goal”. Historical data is used to estimate the most likely favourable outcome that an action taken under comparable circumstances produces, normalised to unity.
It’s a measure of efficiency. A score of 0.5 means a person is average and therefore roughly 50% efficient at converting available life opportunities into the relevant outcomes. A score of 1 would represent perfect conversion efficiency and 0 would represent no conversion.
Because it’s a measure of efficiency rather than achievement, a billionaire who inherits everything could have an enormous amount of money but mediocre money-xG efficiency. Someone starting with very poor opportunities and ending moderately wealthy could have a much higher score.
At the end of my time in Venture Capital, I was introduced to a company that went by the title of Pooled Energy. Something to do with swimming pool maintenance, electricity, bromine and no one gives a fuck.
It was founded and run by a couple of blokes in their seventies. They had been entrepreneurs and founders many times over, and they just refused to give up chasing that elusive winner winner, chicken dinner.
They seemed faintly ridiculous to me for reasons that took me ages to figure out. It wasn’t pure ageism, or even ageism at all really. Let me explain.
Firstly, by their age they hadn’t figured out that the tech sector in Australia is a sham and a joke, put up for appearances sake only – so we can pretend we aren’t just a bunch of fat lazy cunts living off the land. This lack of insight jarred, so by then it was clearly the right time for me to get out of the game.
Secondly, their company made sense. It wasn’t some stupid SaaS thing (the flavour of that day). Their proposition was far too lucid – I wanted to tell them this was crazy because A. It meant that its future value could be precisely calculated, and B. Its current progress towards its glorious exit could be accurately tracked to the millisecond, meaning any lack of technical or commercial progress could immediately result in funding being pulled, or not received.
Thirdly, they had absolutely no background or experience in the industry they had entered into, pool maintenance. By their age they should have known this is one of the preventable stupidities they could address, with no negative consequences.
As I remember, they pivoted left and right a couple of times (a tick-tack) before exiting stage left via a trade sale, which was probably based on a low multiple of EBITDA.
I sincerely hope they have, in their nineties, gybed themselves into a new agentic AI quantum computing vehicle.
Give them 500 years, as per Lazarus Long, and they would be perfect entrepreneurs. They will have figured out all the mistakes to avoid by then. But even then they would still require luck to be successful.
Or not; they could just announce success and go on a social and speaking campaign pontificating on the future of tech and VC 4.0 in Australia.
Small brains must stay alive.
If the brain’s primary prime directive is to survive by conserving calories, then outsourcing its most energy-expensive task – true creative and analytical thinking – to a server farm is the ultimate evolutionary win.
By offloading cognitive friction to LLMs, we aren’t just changing our technology; we are shifting our metabolic baselines.
We’ll get fatter.
Then we’ll run out of beer, steal it from our neighbours, they’ll run out too. Then we’ll get less fat.
In Australia we have an over concentration of population in a handful of cities, and an awful lot of unused land.
I reckon we need new big cities.
The only way to do this is to split these states in two;
NSW, SA, NT
And these into three:
WA, QLD
Then, in time, you’d naturally have seven new big cities.
I just read an article that was 10,000 words of bullshit on the Australian monoculture wars.
One bloke says people should understand what the other side means before arguing with them.
Bullshit to that, because the sort of the people that would agree to that proposition don’t need to be told. And vice versa.
Then he says Australia can have people from lots of backgrounds, but they still need to agree on some basic rules about how society works.
Yeah, it’s called the legal system mate. It’s not complicated. No one can be compelled to sustain the rules of a metaphorical higher authority, except in an authoritarian state.
The people arguing about this stuff are seeking a freebie. Pauline and Albo want votes. Academics just want to be noticed. Reporters want to sell ads for their bosses.
“Pauline went to a Logan political rally. This is what happened next”
I was sent an article by WordPress in which the author proposes a school subject called “Life Under Pressure”
The proposed course combines practical finance, emotional intelligence and faith or purpose, with the aim of teaching students not just competence but character and the ability to function when life does not provide clear answers.
Grammatically competent, emotionally earnest, structurally polished and almost entirely devoid of new information. It uses personal biography, familiar contrasts and motivational language to inflate a commonplace point into an article.
The author’s biggest crime? Not addressing the obvious questions like:
Schools are trapped into teaching tonnes of off-piste shit already. Do they really need more?
The course outcomes are defined but not the actual course work that would magically create those outcomes. Education isn’t that easy mate.
Does everyone share the assumed value system? I don’t, for one.
Is it a worthwhile life goal just to consume more than your fellow humans?
Would it work? Probably not. You probably can’t teach character.
Is it ok to use AI to turn your mundane thoughts into motivational posters accompanied by elevator musak?
And people use the term AI Slop to denigrate the output of the machines! I’m of the opinion that the output of AI is always higher quality slop than the average human stuff because it corrects for certain defects, by policy.
Maybe not that much higher, but at least a little bit.
China is apparently building AI systems to predict political resistance before it happens.
“Chinese algorithms are able to string together data points from a broad range of sources – phones, utility records, CCTV, travel records, friends and associates, reading habits, purchases, etc – to predict political resistance before it happens.”
Obviously, they’ve been watching too much Minority Report.
Why bother having people at all if you dislike independent thought that much?
Previously, the answer was that people produce things. However, if AI and robots eventually do all the productive work, people cease to be economically necessary.
But, power, fame and fortune require relativity. A dictator with nobody to control is just some bloke sitting in a very large empty palace.
So perhaps they’ll keep us anyway.
Not as workers. But as slaves. But they won’t need as many. Instead of 1 billion Chinese, maybe a few thousand serfs would do, and a couple of chickens.
What came first? Well it’s not the shell, that’s for sure.
I started wondering why eggs are ovoid and not spherical. It turns out it’s the result of peristaltic pressure on the liquid egg…
The yolk begins as a roughly spherical liquid object.
As it travels down the oviduct albumen is deposited around it while the contents rotate.
Shell membranes form around the soft mass.
Muscular pressure and the geometry of the oviduct shape that mass into the familiar oval before the shell hardens around it.
So basically a chicken is an organic 3D printer.
This is my new political party, launched here today.
There is a new UN resolution that every flag must be made in the country of origin (I just made that up).
Since they have no industrial capacity, the Vatican City people knitted their flag.
Australia only has advanced manufacturing by government proclamation, so they had to 3D print theirs.
Fiji’s is self explanatory.
We train an AI chat agent on your voice.
When you can’t answer the phone it has the conversation for you and sends you a written summary.
You can set-up guidelines and policies like:
Don’t commit to anything
Don’t agree with any proposition
Just talk shit, if in doubt
If it’s marketing or the ATO, keep them talking for as long as you can but don’t buy anything
Predicting the future is impossible unless the event you’re predicting is subject to a pattern.
If it is, there are two extremes:
My personal favourite sub category is horse racing. I can predict that a horse will win each race. I can also predict that more punters will back certain horses than others based on how those horses have run previously and who the horse’s parents are.
Overall I can guess that, mysteriously, the likelihood that the bookie hands out more money that they take in, is very low.
Despite this, the bookie has no idea which horse will win each race. Unless they do.
Last night I didn’t sleep. It was a combination of too much late night coffee (which just occasionally affects me) and knowing I had to get up at 4am for a flight.
So instead of getting all stressed about it, I decided to lean into it and use the time to meditate.
Worked a treat, I’m only half as tired as I thought I’d be.
And I had some weird arse half dreams. One involved fishing lawnmowers and taxis out of a canal in South East Asia, half way along a trek to somewhere.
I was enjoying it so much I got cross at the elf for continually waking me up to tell me to go to sleep.
At the 5th AAGBS international conference the focus was on Aviation Resilience.
They ‘discussed perspectives on resilience, leadership, operational excellence and the importance of continued improvement in navigating an increasingly dynamic environment.‘
Things change but the people don’t want to. “Dynamic Environment” is code for cunty, cunty change.
But don’t worry, because it’s so hard the leaders of this industry will need to be appropriately compensated for their aviation resilience.
Which is why they’re so busy marketing their travails to people that don’t care. In any case, who wants to hear about how hard it is to run a plane, when you’re in the air?
The OECD defines innovation as follows: ‘An innovation is a new or improved product or process (or combination thereof) that differs significantly from the unit’s previous products or processes and that has been made available to potential users (product) or brought into use by the unit (process).’
That’s a ‘camel’ of a definition. FIFA could not have done better.
Schumpter defined innovation many ways including as a “creative destruction”. But he also focused on the idea that innovation increases productivity.
Many others have had a go. They all went wrong because, misled by dictionaries, they thought innovation is a verb. It’s not, it’s a noun. The proper definition of innovation according to me is that “innovation increases consumption.”
It’s not how you do it, but what it does, that matters. In fact there are as many ways to do innovation as there are successful innovation stories. The only common feature is the outcome: increased consumption.
Here’s an example based on an argument I had with the machine. The LED light bulb. I had to explain that the overall purpose of the thing was to reduce the overall cost per lumen of light, not necessarily make the light bulb cheaper. When you make something cheaper, people use more of it.
If it doesn’t increase consumption then it’s useless and disappears, and therefore may as well not have existed in the first place. Just like the bear in the woods.
Don’t agree? Find me a counter example. If you know about it then it’s caused extra consumption one way or another.
Accepting all that, and acknowledging that accessible resources as required for consumption are finite, then we can also state that useful innovation itself is a finite and a rapidly depleting quantity.
Where:
Useful innovation = innovation x accessible resources
Use it wisely. Or not.
Which leads me to invention.
Strictly speaking, invention is defined by the patent system which rewards any innovation that is useful and also completely novel to mankind.
In reality, well over 99.999999% of granted patents don’t describe inventions, by the patent system’s own definitions. This is because of the self-interest of those involved in the system, looking the other way as they craft a dishonest living.
A real invention is a useful innovation that would not otherwise have been created in the next century or two. Or ever. There’s maybe one of those a decade, if that.
There you go, you need a crystal ball to measure the alternative universe in order to identify true invention.
And if you had one of those you wouldn’t need invention.
In any case, we will run out of resources well before we run out of stupid ideas and their progenitors.
And then we’ll run out of the progenitors and their kin as well.
We’ll have innovated ourselves off the cliff. Good job, mankind!
In the definitive book on innovation (self-claimed), the author fucked it up on page one.
“Alexander Fleming … on a plate streaked with golden staphylococcus he noticed something odd: a fuzzy blue-green mould had drifted in, and around it, the bacteria had dissolved. Fleming soon realised he had created a substance that could kill bacteria without hurting animals.”
Fleming hadn’t created anything. Because of his very sloppy lab practices has had accidentally encountered something interesting.
Fleming didn’t even discover penicillin. Not being a chemist, Fleming didn’t and couldn’t identify the molecule in the mould that was causing all the interesting phenomena. That was other researchers much later on. Fleming didn’t even know, nor could he guess that it was a single molecule in the mould that was doing all the good work.
Fleming’s contribution was to publish an interesting lab fuckup. And there we have to admire him because not many scientists would be stupid enough to do that.
I think we need a new word for innovation that falls between an accidental encounter and a discovery, and is mediated by an inexplicable self-deprecating publication: a sloppism.
Note carefully, it’s not officially related to solipsism, which is the philosophical idea that only your own mind is sure to exist.
But if you squint, at sunset with a brown paper bag over your head, you can see a dotted line between the words.
In solipsism, the mind creates the world. In sloppism, the world creates the result, while the mind is somewhere else.
According to one survey, last year, 23 per cent of startup founders named AI strategy as a top concern. This year, it is 32 per cent.
God knows what they meant by “concern” and “strategy”, and why it’s gone up by only 9%.
Digging into it, they all love AI because it means they can build product cheaply. But then the problem is that anyone can build product cheaply.
Even me.
At least ten times now, instead of buying into some SaaS product I’ve simply replicated the SaaS product using vibe coding at a fraction of the cost. Specifically, I incur a one time tiny cost for development and minimal ongoing costs. Plus I can tune the product to my specific needs.
With reference to the screenshot example below, it’s a CRM I built and then tailored for two of my companies.
I am not merely replacing an expensive CRM (Pipedrive) subscription with cheaper software. I am replacing a generic product with two purpose-built products that fit each company’s needs exactly.
The old SaaS proposition was that custom software was too expensive, so businesses accepted and worked around a sub-standard standardised product and paid rent forever.
Most importantly, my own vibe-coded software is free of the feature creep that makes many products unusable. Pipedrive specifically.
The first victim of AI? Software-based innovation.
Delicious irony that.
Saving the planet, one less founder at a time.
So I fixed it for her.
She also said it was “very difficult” to prove AI recruitment tools are inherently biased, which didn’t stop her from arguing that the logic they operate by is “completely faulty” because they cannot assess a person’s intrinsic value or personality in the way a human recruiter could.
She also said it’s unfair because AI tools that are used to filter candidates aren’t on the candidate’s side.
In this case I think we can safely say the tools and their use in HR is completely logical.
A new app using AI Agents where you put in your flights and it automatically books the cheapest form of transport whether that’s airport parking or an uber.
According to Semonides of Amorgos, a male poet working in Greece in the 7th Century BC, there are 10 kinds of women.
There are women who are like pigs, because they prefer eating to cleaning; women who resemble foxes, as they are peculiarly observant; donkey-women, who are sexually promiscuous; dog-women, marked for their disobedience.
There are also stormy sea-women, greedy Earth-women, thieving weasel-women, lazy horse-women, unattractive ape-women, and – the one good kind – hard-working bee-women.
I don’t think Semonides got out much. But then again, he was a poet. They usually aren’t the best and brightest.
This is less anthropology than grievances arranged in verse. These days we’d call him a Rhyming Incel.
If you’re female and curious, take the test here, and get classified by a 2700 year old mysognistic scheme:
https://maxi8765.github.io/Semonides-/
I just got a $153 fine for doing 69 kmh in a 60 kmh zone. This was on the freeway in one of those roadworks zones. The roadworks weren’t even taking place on that day.
I just paid it with no emotions. That’s personal growth.
There be monsters: tidy blondes often have very untidy minds.
Upcycled: being shamed into buying something you don’t want and don’t need.
“Jetstar will begin charging at least $25 for overhead baggage space
Jetstar is changing its carry-on baggage policies and will charge customers for use of the overhead compartments on its aircraft.
By giving customers an underseat bag (space) with the option to add Priority Carry-on, we can make better use of overhead locker space, streamline boarding and help more flights depart on time.”
So, they’re blaming their passengers for their chronic tardiness. Really?
Ultimately there’s got to be a day when it becomes cheaper to replicate your wardrobe when you travel. So the commerical opportunity is therefore to automate that.
You scan your clothes into an app and magically perfect replicas are waiting for you at your arrival. Or near equivalents.
Picking up Viv …
The teacher says “you can’t park there”
I say “ok luv”
So I’ve finally figured out how to really stop snoring: you just have to wear ear plugs.
I mean the snorer wears the ear plugs. If you can’t hear yourself snore, it fucks up the feedback loop that the brain uses to recognise and ignores snoring. So you wake up a little and stop snoring.
Simple really, even if it is a little Machiavellian.
Contracrite: a person who asserts two contradictory positions in the same communication.
‘My only son was shot standing up for justice.’
Not for long.
It’s a great word, vug.
It’s any hole in a geological formation that’s lined with crystals.
If a vug is surrounded by a different rock to the crystals and you could, if you wanted to, extract it from the surrounding formation, it becomes a geode.
However, a vug does not become a geode merely because somebody excavates around it. Excavation reveals whether it is a vug or a geode.
All geodes are vugs but not all vugs are geodes.
And that’s all anyone ever needs to know on the matter.
Searching for the world’s largest geode reveals the problem:
The largest crystal-lined vug marketed as a geode: Crystal Cave, Ohio.
The largest visitable gypsum vug marketed as a geode: Pulpí, Spain.
The largest Guinness-recorded amethyst geode specimen: 13-tonne Uruguayan specimen housed in China.
The Crystal Castle near Byron Bay displays the Enchanted Cave, a 20-tonne self-contained amethyst geode from Uruguay, which is the largest known self-contained amethyst geode ever discovered. They also have a 10-tonne Dragon Egg geode (see below). However being Buddhists they can’t be arsed applying to the Guinness people.
That tells you something about the Guinness book; you have been warned.
Good luck getting a search engine or an LLM to tell you any of that.
I don’t know what’s worse, substituting Gary Lineker (in my clothes) for Viv, or a Tesla for a 10 tonne geode.
PS not a single LLM (I tried six of them) could correctly tell me what the world’s largest geode is. They all defer to the common usage of ‘geode’ which mixes up vugs and geodes.
The most isolated spot in mainland Australia is:
20°23’25.4″S 124°34’59.8″E
Otherwise known as stardust.shivering.crusaders
That’s in the Great Sandy Desert, roughly 156 kilometres from the nearest road, track, settlement, mine, bore, airstrip, fence or other visible sign of current human activity.
Of course the black fellas used to wander all over this area, some still do. So they wouldn’t perceived it as isolated, but possibly a bit light on bilbys and red kangaroos.
Postscript: unexpectedly 10 days later my virgin flight fun Indonesia flew right over the spot. I can confirm there’s no signs of anything human down there.
A couple of Australian second hand booksellers have accused the large AI companies of buying rare books, cutting off the spines for easy scanning, then pulping them after scanning.
So this is a double whammy bad, bad thing: copyright theft followed by cultural desecration.
The article on the subject states that “AI companies are not the first to destroy books for profit. Some vendors source rare books in order to slice them up and sell the illustration plates individually.”
The Nazis did it too in 1933, if you think about it.
The article offered up these examples of books destroyed by this horrendous new scheme:
a 1970s manual on soil mechanics;
a 2010 book called Born to Thunder: Champions of New Zealand Cycling;
a collection of Early Australian Poetry (1982), and;
a local history of the Melbourne suburb of Hawthorn.
I’m personally outraged that society has lost these priceless books forever.
I’m even more outraged that they’re using these books to train the next generation of AI.
I guess they’re really scraping the bottom of the written barrel, which from my experience is pretty rank.
Therefore I’ve started a crowd sourced fund to buy all the old second hand books so we can burn them before the AI companies get their hands on them.
Twenty years ago I loved the place.
But it’s changed and I’ve changed.
I don’t hate it but I don’t envy it or its people.
I see two two cohorts:
Young, poor and serving
Older, wealthy and being served
I can’t be the first and I’m not the second, so, pfffff to you Byron.
It’s a new word that describes the condition of being aesthetically dyslexic.
From Greek kakos meaning bad or ugly, plus agnosia, the inability to recognise.
Vivisection: any random YouTube-derived factoid, designed to slice up the brain of a parent.
Australia’s governor general actually just said this;
“We’ve got a growing catastrophe, I think, in a failure to understand and engage with and feel proud of the very civic underpinnings of our democracy.”
What it meant was that most people don’t care about it, or understand its job. I couldn’t pick it out in a line up, or give up its name. I’m guessing it’s a she, ex judge, 60 something, short grey hair, or something like that, and plenty of gender discrimination creds.
Poor thing, needs some love. And maybe a crash course in boy-wolfism. When an actual catastrophe occurs, no one is going to listen. But they never were anyway.
No one gives a fuck. We’re too indifferent to even bother to remove the office of the GG.
Handy to have though: the distilled summary of mankind in a bottle to throw rocks at.
Who in their right mind would write an academic paper on a methodology that allows governments to decide whether to keep or sell enclaves or islands that are part of their extended territories?
Governments don’t use logic to do anything. Sometimes they apply it after the fact, but only if they’re in some form of democracy and they haven’t yet figured out that nobody cares.
And that’s not a disadvantage because none of them use logic. In fact, using logic is a strategic disadvantage because it makes you predictable.
There is an old Czech proverb that a man should do three things in order to to have a fulfilling life:
Have a child
Build a house, and
Write a book.
Since I’ve done all those things, in semi-retirement, I’ve expanded that list as follows:
Do something that provides novelty.
Do something that makes you useful.
Do something that produces an output.
Do something that keeps you physically functional.
Do something that is enjoyable without needing to be productive.
You see, life is a sum of its parts not the components, glazed and roasted under a microscope.
offshore westerly 