Dylan McConnell

University of Sydney argues academic’s article not racist against Jewish people as ‘Zionism is a political concept’ Case taken by academics against two colleagues and the university is considered a major test case for hate speech in Australia

Solidarity with @nickriemer.bsky.social, @professorjkeane.bsky.social and @sydney.edu.au for standing up to another Zionist attempt to silence opposition to their genocide.

in 2011, the president of antifa hired me to give fashion consultancy to the organization. i recommended everyone wear navy suits with tan shoes, dress sneakers, and golf polos with slim chinos. if you arrested everyone today wearing these things, you'd destroy antifa

..they have committed $1.6 billion to something Electricity Maintenance
Guarantee (for safe, reliable and efficient operation of the stated owned plants)

after millions of views and shares of my Portland Frog art. (thank you all🙏🏾) I got requests to highlight priests, and chickens, and Chicagoans, and T-Rexes, and more… all of us who refuse to bend the knee. so this is for US.
𝚂𝚝𝚊𝚗𝚍 𝚃𝚊𝚕𝚕.
𝚆𝚎 𝚆𝚒𝚕𝚕 𝚆𝚒𝚗.

This is just such an incredible figure for the QLD Gov to highlight and basically celebrate in the year of 2025

One curious thing on this site about speaking out against the encroachment of LLMs is that inevitably you get accused of being anti-tech. I don’t hate technology. I’ve used machine learning in my own code before. But I also recognize that oligarchs are so hellbent on pushing this tech for a reason.

australia's transport emissions rising consistently until 2020

look at what covid lockdowns did to Australia's transport emissions

Former Wallabies star David Pocock booted from parliamentary sports club Exclusive: Senator accused of bringing social club into disrepute after raising concerns about its association with betting lobby

This is utterly … what’s the word? Oh yes … fucked.

www.theguardian.com/australia-ne...

a chart shwoing price impacts near data centres

a photograph of a man sitting on some stairs o nthe street

So late to this, but this @bloomberg.com piece on the impact of sudden surges in power demand from new data centres on local electricity prices is really, really good - lots of original analysis.

So many still shrug this off as a non-issue. Tell it to these ppl

www.bloomberg.com/graphics/202...

Scoop: Dominion Voting sold to company run by ex-GOP election official Dominion is one of the biggest election equipment providers and was used by 27 states during the 2024 election.

Nothing to worry about here, no sir.

Please use the sharing tools found via the share button at the top or side of articles. Copying articles to share with others is a breach of FT.com T&Cs and Copyright Policy. Email licensing@ft.com to buy additional rights. Subscribers may share up to 10 or 20 articles per month using the gift article service. More information can be found at https://www.ft.com/tour. https://www.ft.com/content/5ba8caec-61d3-4aa9-a877-9b200ef4b5b0 Will Jordan, chief legal and policy officer at EQT, a leading US gas producer, also thought that any glut would be temporary, and said US demand was also rising on the boom in power-hungry artificial intelligence data centres. Recommended Oil & Gas industry BP’s new chair signals more asset sales and demands faster restructuring “Supply leads demand — you put the supply on the market and demand gets created.,” he said. “Over the long term we’re very bullish.”

Please enjoy this executive at one of America's biggest gas companies openly admitting that expanding supply leads to increased demand for fossil fuels

He is not wrong: frantic expansion of fossil fuel supply worsens climate change. Tax it, cut subsidies, wind it down

www.ft.com/content/5ba8...

It's like reverse Poe's Law or something

Nuclear-powered villages could be on the moon within 10 years. Where do we fit in? The world is also firmly in the grips of Space Race 2.0 as the US and China battle to occupy the moon – and beyond.

Thought this was going to be a parody piece, based on the title

www.smh.com.au/national/nuc...

The internet suggests she did

This is incredible news, and shows the incredible power of collective action. The fight against the neoliberal university (my own included) goes on, but its nice to hear some good news for a change.

Incredible.

Jack Posobiec references the earliest version of antifa -- the anti-fascists in the Weimar Republic who were opposed to the Nazi Party -- as the bad guys.

Abstract: Under the banner of progress, products have been uncritically adopted or even imposed on users — in past centuries with tobacco and combustion engines, and in the 21st with social media. For these collective blunders, we now regret our involvement or apathy as scientists, and society struggles to put the genie back in the bottle. Currently, we are similarly entangled with artificial intelligence (AI) technology. For example, software updates are rolled out seamlessly and non-consensually, Microsoft Office is bundled with chatbots, and we, our students, and our employers have had no say, as it is not considered a valid position to reject AI technologies in our teaching and research. This is why in June 2025, we co-authored an Open Letter calling on our employers to reverse and rethink their stance on uncritically adopting AI technologies. In this position piece, we expound on why universities must take their role seriously toa) counter the technology industry’s marketing, hype, and harm; and to b) safeguard higher education, critical thinking, expertise, academic freedom, and scientific integrity. We include pointers to relevant work to further inform our colleagues.

Figure 1. A cartoon set theoretic view on various terms (see Table 1) used when discussing the superset AI (black outline, hatched background): LLMs are in orange; ANNs are in magenta; generative models are in blue; and finally, chatbots are in green. Where these intersect, the colours reflect that, e.g. generative adversarial network (GAN) and Boltzmann machine (BM) models are in the purple subset because they are both generative and ANNs. In the case of proprietary closed source models, e.g. OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Apple’s Siri, we cannot verify their implementation and so academics can only make educated guesses (cf. Dingemanse 2025). Undefined terms used above: BERT (Devlin et al. 2019); AlexNet (Krizhevsky et al. 2017); A.L.I.C.E. (Wallace 2009); ELIZA (Weizenbaum 1966); Jabberwacky (Twist 2003); linear discriminant analysis (LDA); quadratic discriminant analysis (QDA).

Table 1. Below some of the typical terminological disarray is untangled. Importantly, none of these terms are orthogonal nor do they exclusively pick out the types of products we may wish to critique or proscribe.

Protecting the Ecosystem of Human Knowledge: Five Principles

Finally! 🤩 Our position piece: Against the Uncritical Adoption of 'AI' Technologies in Academia:
doi.org/10.5281/zeno...

We unpick the tech industry’s marketing, hype, & harm; and we argue for safeguarding higher education, critical
thinking, expertise, academic freedom, & scientific integrity.
1/n

Learning to live with curtailment Rising curtailment is playing havoc with the economics of new wind and solar projects

Lot's of RE curtailment in the NEM - just ticked over 6TWh for the last 12 months

Not every electron is sacred - but there's plenty of room for improvement!

More words and lots of figures in the piece below -

💡🔌

theenergy.co/article/lear...

Learning to live with curtailment Rising curtailment is playing havoc with the economics of new wind and solar projects

💡🔌A new article from Ben Potter explores curtailment of renewable generation in the NEM with the help of CEEM's Dylan McConnell and some illuminating charts, as spring rolls on and curtailment reaches new peaks. ☀️

🔗 Check out the full piece here: theenergy.co/article/lear...

Customers in 7 PJM states paid $4.4B for data center transmission in 2024: report Transmission lines built for data centers fall into a "regulatory gap,” with utility customers on the hook for the costs, the Union of Concerned Scientists said.

Union of Concerned Scientists report out with some nice recommendations for how to avoid captive residential customers paying for the infrastructure needs of data centers owned by tech giants (which is currently happening):

Data center boom sparks sticker shock for PJM ratepayers New analyses show that costs passed on to utility customers to guarantee future electricity demand are rising rapidly.

$16 billion. That's how much the PJM market monitor estimates that electricity ratepayers will pay via increased utility bills to subsidize interconnection of data centers owned by Big Tech. A massive give-away to some of the most profitable companies in the world.

www.eenews.net/articles/dat...

Elon Musk Gambles Billions in Memphis to Catch Up on AI xAI aims to win the tech arms race with its “Colossus” data centers, thrown up at lightning speed. The city is divided over the massive power and water demands.

"At its peak, Musk had around 35 natural-gas turbines at the site, capable of producing 420 megawatts of power, enough to power the roughly 250,000 homes in the Memphis city limits"

35 (!) full-sized power plants for this one data center run by the world's worst poster.
www.wsj.com/tech/elon-mu...

You can have a situation with rising renewable absolute output and percentages of total (and falling emissions intensity!), but also stagnant or even rising greenhouse gas emissions: when *demand* itself is rising fast.

This is very clearly the case in Aus, and it should trigger alarm bells

.. are you looking at Q3 to Q3 numbers?

Black coal numbers are up Q3 to Q3 (for both 2023 to 2024, and 2024 to 2025) - including on open electricity

De Brouwer made the exact same argument two years ago after the Robodebt Royal Commission report was delivered. This is how I treated it in Mean Streak: "Grow up."

Makes me wonder how many more of these can be found...

Some regional variation - for example in NSW, growth in underlying demand was greater than growth in RE

Thirst for energy undermines effort to pull back from coal A steady rise in the demand for electricity is slowing the decline of coal-fired power, even as wind and solar generation hits new highs.

Black coal up from Q3 2024 to Q3 2025

(Growth in demand partially offsetting growth on RE)

www.afr.com/policy/energ...

HEADLINE: Deloitte to refund government, admits AI errors in $440k report

Deloitte Australia will issue a partial refund to the federal government after admitting that artificial intelligence had been used in the creation of a $440,000 report littered with errors including three nonexistent academic references and a made-up quote from a Federal Court judgement. A new version of the report for the Department of Workplace Relations (DEWR) was quietly uploaded to the department’s website on Friday, ahead of a long weekend across much of Australia. It features more than a dozen deletions of nonexistent references and footnotes, a rewritten reference list, and corrections to multiple typographic errors. (photo of Deloitte Australia HQ) Deloitte Australia has made almost $25 million worth of deals with the Department of Workplace Relations since 2021. Photographer Dion Georgopoulos

The first version of the report, about the IT system used to automate penalties in the welfare system such as pauses on the dole, was published in July. Less than a month later, Deloitte was forced to investigate the report after University of Sydney academic Dr Christopher Rudge highlighted multiple errors in the document. At the time, Rudge speculated that the errors may have been caused by what is known as “hallucinations” by generative AI. This is where the technology responds to user queries by inventing references and quotes. Deloitte declined to comment. The incident is embarrassing for Deloitte as it earns a growing part of its $US70.5 billion ($107 billion) in annual global revenue by providing advice and training clients and executives about AI. The firm also boasts about its widespread use of the technology within its global operations, while emphasising the need to always have humans review any output of AI.

SUBHEADING: Deleted references, footnotes The revised report has deleted a dozen references to two nonexistent reports by Professor Lisa Burton Crawford, a law professor at the University of Sydney, that were included in the first version. Two references to a nonexistent report by Professor Björn Regnell, of Lund University in Sweden, were also deleted in the new report. Also deleted was a made up reference to a court decision in a leading robo-debt case, Deanna Amato v Commonwealth. The new report has also deleted a reference to “Justice Davis” (a misspelling of Justice Jennifer Davies) and the made-up quote from the nonexistent paragraphs 25 and 26 in the judgement: “The burden rests on the decision-maker to be satisfied on the evidence that the debt is owed. A person’s statutory entitlements cannot lawfully be reduced based on an assumption unsupported by evidence.”

#BREAKING 🚨 Deloitte to refund government, admits using AI in $440k report into mutual obligations issues.

Fake quotes from Federal Court case that ended Robodebt deleted from new report in Friday DEWR dump.

📰 AFR

✍️ @paulkarp.bsky.social

✍️ @edmundtadros.bsky.social

🗣️ @chrisrudge.bsky.social

* They are still burning some coal when they are doing this - be interesting to know how much exactly.

This is what whole power station was doing: "Peaking coal" .. ~1600MW increase in space of a couple of a couple of hours.