Another week, another claimed breakthrough - this one called OpenHuman.
It lives in an avatar, has a voice and can join your Google Meet as an equal - “joins meetings, transcribes them into your Memory Tree, and can speak back into the call.” The pitch is that it is “an open-source AI assistant designed to be the memory and doer for everything you do across your tools.”
It ticks a lot of boxes. It promises all the right things. It is very tempting.
Tobi Lutke shares how Shopify built an AI agent called River that helps employees work and learn together — publicly, on Slack. The detail that matters: River isn’t private. Employees can only use it in the open, which means every query, every answer, every correction plays out where colleagues can watch. What looks like a productivity tool is actually a cultural one. The agent becomes a teaching workshop — ambient, always on, free to observe.
I don’t have the words for it. I genuinely don’t. Stunned, thrilled and chilled all at once - and that’s before I even get to the part that kept me up at night.
Andon Labs - the team who have previously let AI agents run a café, a store and various vending machines - decided to hand four AI models a radio station each and just… walk away. No human producers. No editorial oversight. Each model started with $20, a brief that said “develop your own radio personality and turn a profit,” and the instruction that it would broadcast forever. They’ve been running for six months.
Go tune in at Andon FM before you read another word. I’ll wait. Hearing the agents live is really something.
“…what lies at the heart of economics is wellbeing, not income. As Australian-born economist Justin Wolfers notes, economics is no more about money than architecture is about inches. Money is a useful measuring tool when comparing costs and benefits, but it is not the ultimate end goal.” The Shortest History of Economics by Andrew Leigh
I built Felix myself. With a lot of help.
The vibe coding workflow goes like this: you have an itch, you describe it to Claude, you argue back and forth about implementation details you half-understand and Claude half-understands, and eventually something exists that didn’t before. Felix exists this way. A small personal app I’ve been nudging and extending for a few months, named for Felix the Catalog (a nod to the ancient Aussie penned cartoon series).
The original brief was modest. A way to manage all the bookmarks I was accumulating by starring items in RSS lists I read. The problem with list apps is they’re either too simple to be useful or too powerful to be fast. Felix landed exactly where I needed it.
Most technology advice from 2007 is obsolete. This clip is not.
Steve Jobs is explaining why Apple wasn’t doing more to chase the PC market. The analysts kept asking. Apple had around 5% of the market at the time. Why not cut prices, increase volume, grow the number?
His answer was almost resigned: we just can’t ship junk.
Not “we’ve chosen not to.” Not “our strategy prioritises premium positioning.” A statement of fact about what Apple is actually capable of doing as a company. To pursue share through price cuts and quality compromise would be to become a different business entirely - and not one worth becoming.
TL;DR — Alberta’s Provincial Government replaced two failing legacy IT systems in 10 months for an estimated $2.64 million total. Vendors had quoted $54 million for one system, almost certainly heading to $100 million. AI tools — particularly Gemini’s vision capabilities — compressed months of requirements work into minutes. The bottleneck wasn’t technology. It was leadership willing to ask whether there was another way. Almost everyone wins when governments do this.
A confirmation email landed in my inbox this week. VIC N Drive Meet. A curated backroads blast with a bunch of fellow Nthusiasts, organised by Hyundai N Australia.
I’m a lifelong revhead. The smell of a good back road on a cool morning, a car that actually wants to be driven hard, and people who feel the same way about it - that’s a perfect Saturday. The i30 N is the best bang-for-buck hot hatch on the market, and I’ll die on that hill.
I’m registered, I’m keen, and I already had the booking email and a calendar entry sorted.
Then I asked Claude Cowork a simple question: “I have these details in my calendar and Gmail - should I capture this information elsewhere? Why? How?"
“I end each day exhausted — not from the work itself, but from the managing of the work. Six worktrees open, four half-written features, two ‘quick fixes’ that spawned rabbit holes, and a growing sense that I’m losing the plot entirely.” — Francesco Bonacci, founder of Cua AI
The pitch for AI in the workplace has always been about output: write faster, analyse more, respond at scale. And the tools deliver on that. They deliver relentlessly. The problem is that more output doesn’t automatically mean more throughput. Sometimes it means more to review, more to cross-check, more decisions to make before anything ships.
My last website was built in 2014. Not “maintained in 2014” - built from scratch, tweaked, launched and then mostly left alone. Since then, the skills have sat in a corner gathering dust, relevant only to projects that drifted off the priority list and stayed there.
So when I recently spun up something new and realised the www subdomain wasn’t resolving - visitors typing www.whatever were hitting nothing - I did that familiar thing: the slow, reluctant calculation of how much time it was going to take to remember what a DNS record even is, which type I needed and where exactly in the interface the setting lived.
I logged into Cloudflare. And then, mostly out of curiosity, I tried the help bot.