GitHub platform activity is surging
simonwillison.net/2026/Apr/…
Trump's Iran war is costing Australian households $42 a week
Forty-two dollars a week. That’s what Trump’s Iran adventure is costing the average Australian household, and most people don’t even realise it yet. John Naughton highlighted a neat calculation on his blog this week, drawing on methodology from the Financial Times. The IEA reported the UK consumed 4.4 million terajoules of oil and gas in 2024. Convert that to barrels, apply the roughly US$40 per barrel price increase since the Iran war kicked off, and British households are about £22 billion worse off.
Movies Leaving SBS On Demand - April
Eleven Studio Ghibli films are leaving SBS On Demand in April. All gone between April 17 and 20. If you’ve been meaning to work through Miyazaki’s catalogue (or introduce someone to it), this is your window. More on the best watching order below.
Steve Jobs and the greatest run of products in tech history
Starting with the iMac, Jobs and Apple went on one of the all-time hot streaks in business history, churning out hit products, cultural revolutions, and game-changing new ideas about the future. From that May day in 1998 to the January Macworld in 2007 when Jobs revealed the iPhone — a time you might call the iDecade — Apple was on a product tear the likes of which we’ve never seen before or since. (The Verge)
NanoClaw - now even more secure
I haven’t gone down the ‘do it all for me’ agent route as pioneered by OpenClaw. So far Claude and Claude Cowork are doing all I need.
If I did want a 24/7 all knowing, all doing agent then I would choose NanoClaw. Not initially as broadly capable as OpenClaw - need to train with ‘skills’ - but much, much more secure and robust.
NanoClaw are now making their implementation even more robust.
The real case for EVs isn't the price
The chart doing the rounds today is brutal. Melbourne’s weighted average fuel price sits at $3.02 per litre. The equivalent electricity to drive an Electric Vehicle the same distance? $0.35. That’s 2.13 kWh at 16.3c/kWh. An 88% cost advantage.
It lines up neatly with The Driven’s reporting that petrol and diesel prices are soaring while EV fast-charging costs are actually falling. Two lines on a graph heading in opposite directions. The crossover story writes itself.
Free is fine until it isn’t
OpenYak looks like a genuinely capable local AI agent. File automation, data analysis, 46 MCP connectors, persistent memory. The price against Anthropic’s Claude Cowork is hard to argue with: free, open source, one-click install. But there’s a detail buried in the feature list that should give you pause. “Auto-updating via GitHub releases.” That sentence is doing a lot of work. Every time OpenYak checks for an update, it trusts the GitHub repository to be exactly what it says it is.
AI’s RAM hunger may have met its match
Google’s TurboQuant algorithm compresses the KV cache (the RAM-hungry memory core of every large language model) by 6x, with no accuracy trade-off and no model retraining required. It operates near the theoretical lower bound of what information theory says is even possible. This is not incremental. If adopted at scale, the economics of AI inference flip. adlrocha’s writeup is the clearest explanation I’ve seen of why this matters.
Project Hail Mary
What an epic movie. Received 8.5/10 on IMDB. I agree. Best movie I’ve seen in years. Skillful storytelling and cinematography. VFX to support the story, not swamp it. I will avoid spoilers. Loved the book - listened as an audio-book as I drove the 6+ hours drive to and from Canberra in the back end of 2024 as my father spent months in hospital. The audio-book was 16 hrs and 10 mins!
Where to sit at the cinema
I’m never quite sure where to sit at the cinema. Too close feels wrong. Too far back feels like watching television. I end up somewhere in the middle and spend the first ten minutes of the film wondering if I got it right. So before heading to the Cameo Cinema in Belgrave on Sunday to see Project Hail Mary, I did what any reasonable person does in 2026. I asked Claude.