Very trad. Next I expect someone to be doing that whole "sword and scabbard" thing we used to make from fallen Norfolk Island Pine foilage, or making one of those little paper fortune-tellers/chatterboxes. Maybe they could figure out the future of the Coalition on it!

They have few enough sitting days as it is; are they taking the piss, sitting there playing on their phones? Particularly galling since they'll pontificate at length about teenagers in schools on phones.

I've been loving the anecdotes about Hemingway as very, very, mediocre boxer (who also sparred too hard). Jack Dempsey refused to fight him since he figured Hemingway would come out way too hard and he'd have to hurt him for real.

I'm tickled by the idea that death taxes are somehow worse in terms of reducing incentive to work than, erm, taxing people's earnings from work.

I had a couple Asian friends who metabolized alcohol that poorly (they'd go red from one drink, and practically asleep from 3). It didn't seem like a nice cheap scale-down of the Potato Europe liver since there wasn't an equivalent 'pleasantly buzzed' phase for them.

"Nirvana" shirt

I hope you got her this one

Good piece. These "centrists" don't notice how little respect the right wing has for their ludicrous notion of compromise and will happily move the goalposts. In 2007, Labor tries to compromise with Turnbull, but "compromise" on climate in 2025 means trying to compromise with "No Net Zero" Canavan.

I first read about hGH in Fred Hatfield's "Power" back in 1990 (which was the very first book I'd seen on any kind of lifting; insane beginner guidance book). He had chapters on various substances and his chapter "hGH: Breakfast of the Sasquatch" began:

"Sasquatch. Big feet. Lordy me, what next?"

I'm still laughing at the "You shot my brother in the name of justice" sequence. Insanely good stuff.

The *do* need a vote from an LNP senator to pass the kind of laws that they want to pass, though.

I think of this quote when I think about the idea of AGI meaning "human and artificial intelligence have reached functional parity". Many effects of AI will help achieve this; unfortunately, most function by lowering effective human intelligence (e.g. hollowing out education).

Sam Altman: We made ChatGPT pretty restrictive to make sure we were being careful with mental health issues. We realize this made it less useful/enjoyable to many users who had no mental health problems, but given the seriousness of the issue we wanted to get this right. Now that we have been able to mitigate the serious mental health issues and have new tools, we are going to be able to safely relax the restrictions in most cases. In a few weeks, we plan to put out a new version of ChatGPT that allows people to have a personality that behaves more like what people liked about 40 (we hope it will be better!). If you want your ChatGPT to respond in a very human-like way, or use a ton of emoji, or act like a friend, ChatGPT should do it (but only if you want it, not because we are usage-maxxing). In December, as we roll out age-gating more fully and as part of our “treat adult users like adults” principle, we will allow even more, like erotica for verified adults.

“The junk merchant doesn't sell his product to the consumer, he sells the consumer to his product. He does not improve and simplify his merchandise. He degrades and simplifies the client.”

― William S. Burroughs, Naked Lunch: The Restored Text

seem determined to move further and further to the center-right (and not even a principled center-right, but sort of an intellectually slovenly mix of authoritarianism, state intervention and corporatism).

I agree - he is the Thatcher/Reagan for Australia (delayed, since Labor's 1980s run was comparatively balanced given the neoliberalism sweeping the world at that point). Labor's complicity is somehow worse - they've been in power for a full term plus and are in with a huge majority yet ...

I think this is a matter of where you start counting. If we stick to 20 years, it's pretty even. Of the 8 elections starting in 2004, Labor and the Coalition have each won 4. As the climate crisis worsens, it's notable that Labor has been in power since 2022 and done absolutely nothing for Scope 3.

Strangely selective list given that Labor has been just as keen to subsidize fossil fuels as well. After watching them wave through *every single* project in their first term I've come to the conclusion that there's no practical difference, particularly on scope 3 emissions.

Using AI for education is like thinking you're going to make champion powerlifters by introducing a forklift to the gym.

We *know* you can parrot basic stuff with an AI in writing/coding - that's cause the training corpora are full of samples. There's only so many 1st year assignments that work.

I guess that's why ICE doesn't do anything in gang neighborhoods; they're afraid of all the non-violence and humor.

Back when we were a struggling startup (Sensory Networks, acquired by Intel) we had a server room that was about 60% loaner/ES boards from a big range of different companies. They'd often get us to run a few benchmarks and then never ask for it back.

Sitting it out until it stabilizes, but watching with interest. It's hard to take seriously the proliferation of different "profiles" (a recipe for bad software imo).

Yes! And given how rapidly AI coding companies are losing money on their product, you'd think that *any* model that could make money would be appealing, even as a stop-gap.

Once again, this perfect @zeboydgames.bsky.social post comes to mind:

Sort of the a "West Wingization" of Dem politics. Glib neo-liberals who regard it all as a game. They've taken over our nominally more left-wing party here in Australia and something very similar has happened in Britain (although at least our less-right-wing parties win elections!)

Doctorow on the impending economic collapse when the AI bubble bursts. pluralistic.net/2025/09/27/e...

situation where "too much sophistication" (chasing every last optimization, building incredibly potent middleware layers that sprouted their own interpreted language, etc.) created a codebase that was difficult to understand and maintain.

This seems like a simple fallacy. I'm saying if you jump off a cliff you will die. This does not mean that if you refrain from jumping off a cliff you will live forever.

It's possible to build a bad codebase with any level of sophistication. However, I'm specifically referring to a ...

It's a vexed problem with Hyperscan. The circumstances under which it was built tended to encourage the "win at all costs" approach (i.e. 'let's go write another few thousand lines to get 5% more performance').

You tend to pay the cost much later - e.g. when there is "turnover" of staff.

The danger is that persistently operating at a very high "skill level" in terms of sophistication/complexity, even if successful at the time, leaves you with a codebase that will be hard to operate on by anyone else - a "haunted graveyard".

I still occasionally wear a (sadly very faded) version of your Internet Federation of Lifting Judges t-shirt. Goes to show that what they said was true: "in the future, everyone will be famous to 15 people".

quote from Richard Russo's Straight Man: " “I know it runs deeper than that. You think we defend incompetence and promote mediocrity.” ... “I wish you would promote mediocrity, Mediocrity is a reasonable goal for our institution.”

Agreed, but mediocrity is a fuzzy target. A lot of Australia's problems lie from a pretentious fixation on excellence over competence (too many Nth tier unis, too little TAFE).

When Australians complain about mediocrity, I think of this quote from the excellent book Straight Man (Richard Russo).