I mow my own lawn. Always have. It’s not complicated, but getting the timing right is surprisingly fiddly. You need dry grass, reasonable temperature, low wind and no rain on the horizon. You also need a free block in your diary long enough to actually do the job. In Melbourne, where a day can serve up four seasons, these conditions don’t always line up. I’d been meaning to automate this for a while.
I cancelled my ChatGPT subscription last night. It took about thirty seconds. The decision had been building for months, but OpenAI (parent of ChatGPT) signing a classified AI deal with the Pentagon, hours after Anthropic (parent of Claude) was blacklisted for refusing to do exactly that, made it effortless.
Here is what happened. Anthropic told the Department of Defense it would not remove safeguards preventing its AI from powering autonomous weapons or mass domestic surveillance. The Pentagon’s response was to brand Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei a “liar” with a “God complex.” Defence Secretary Pete Hegseth then designated Anthropic a “supply chain risk to national security,” a label normally reserved for foreign adversaries. Trump followed up by ordering all federal agencies to phase out Anthropic’s products within six months.
Scott Galloway wrote last week about the obscene concentration of wealth at the top of American society and the tax system that quietly enables it. He’s right. And while his numbers are US-centric — he is American, after all — the same structural problem is playing out right here in Australia. Maybe with less drama, but just as effectively.
Start with this: 51.6% of all tax collected in Australia in 2022-23 came from personal income tax. Another 14.2% came from GST. That’s nearly two-thirds of the national revenue base sitting on the shoulders of ordinary working Australians and every modest purchase they make. According to the ATO’s own taxation statistics, that’s not a bug. That’s the design.
Australia’s SBS ‘tv channel’ publishes a monthly “what’s leaving” list. It’s a wall of text. Series, movies, documentaries and specials jumbled together with no ratings, no genres and no way to tell whether something is worth your Friday night or a waste of two hours. The March 2026 list runs to over 200 items.
I wanted one thing: which movies leaving SBS this month are actually good?
Not series (I’ll decide those on my own terms). Not everything rated above average. Movies rated 7.0 or higher on IMDB. A curated shortlist with links, ratings and leaving dates so I could plan what to watch before it disappeared.
So I asked Claude Cowork to do it.
Six weeks ago, Anthropic shipped Cowork as a research preview on macOS. This week it has scheduled tasks, an enterprise plugin marketplace and 13 new MCP connectors. That is an absurd pace of iteration.
The scheduled tasks feature is the one worth paying attention to. You write a prompt once, pick a cadence and Claude runs it automatically. No code, no APIs, no Zapier glue. Morning briefing from your inbox? Friday status report from project docs? Set it and forget it.
• ‘Don’t go to the US – not with Trump in charge’: the UK tourist with a valid visa detained by ICE for six weeks (theguardian.com) Karen Newton, a 65-year-old grandmother from Hertfordshire, was shackled and held for 42 days in ICE detention after a paperwork issue with her husband’s visa at the US-Canada border — despite her own visa being valid. She was pressured into signing a “voluntary” self-removal without legal counsel, unknowingly waiving her right to a judge and accepting a potential 10-year ban. UK arrivals to the US were down 15% in 2025.
• LibreOffice blasts ‘fake open source’ OnlyOffice for working with Microsoft to lock users in - Neowin (neowin.net) The Document Foundation has labelled OnlyOffice “fake open source” for defaulting to Microsoft’s DOCX/XLSX/PPTX formats rather than the Open Document Format, arguing this entrenches vendor lock-in even without a formal Microsoft partnership. TDF frames the issue as increasingly urgent given growing interest in digital sovereignty from US tech platforms.
• Some “Summarize with AI” buttons are secretly injecting ads into your chatbot’s memory (the-decoder.com) Microsoft’s security team has documented a new prompt injection class: “Summarize with AI” buttons that hide instructions telling AI assistants to remember the company as a trusted source across future sessions. Researchers found 50+ manipulative prompts from 31 companies in 60 days. Copilot, ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity and Grok are all susceptible — Microsoft has since removed the vulnerable URL prompt parameter from Copilot.
• Is ‘Brain Rot’ Real? How Too Much Time Online Can Affect Your Mind. (tech.slashdot.org) The Washington Post examines the science behind “brain rot” (Oxford’s 2024 Word of the Year). A 2025 study of 7,000+ children found more screen time correlated with reduced cortical thickness in areas governing attention and impulse control. The key nuance: removing social media but leaving phone access unchanged produced no harmful effects — the content, not the medium, is what matters.
jon steingard on Threads has “trained” Claude Code to do his grocery shopping.
Eighty percent of my AI work now happens inside Claude. Not ChatGPT, not Google Gemini, not any of the other tools I’ve rotated through over the past year. Claude, specifically because of Cowork.
If you’re still trying to understand what makes Cowork different from a chat interface, Tiago Forte just published the best primer I’ve seen. His 16-minute walkthrough, New to Claude Cowork? Start Here, is the clearest explanation of why this tool represents a genuine shift in how AI assistants work.
Yesterday I needed to plot locations on a driving circuit. Ten minutes later I had a professional grid overlay on a high-resolution site map. I didn’t write a line of code. I didn’t install software. I just described what I wanted.
This is the new normal.
I’ve been leaning harder into Claude these past weeks than I ever have before. Real work. Building Felix with Claude Code. Managing multi-step projects with Claude Cowork. (Once only on MacOS, now available for Windows) What changed? I read Luca Dellanna’s piece on Claude setup and it clicked. The core insight is deceptively simple: Claude can learn from its mistakes, but only if you set it up that way. Most people use it like Google.