The myth of AI productivity?
Do we spend more time conjuring up clever bots than just getting on with it? It can be a trap.
RSS is still the best way to read the web
Think about how you read the web right now. You visit a news site, check a blog, open another tab for a tech site, scroll a subreddit. Repeat daily. Most of this routine is unnecessary, because a technology called RSS has been doing it for you since 1999.
RSS stands for Really Simple Syndication. It is a standard format that lets websites publish updates in a way that software can automatically collect. You subscribe to the sites you care about (news, blogs, podcasts, anything) and a single app called an RSS reader pulls all the new articles into one place. Content comes to you. You stop visiting individual sites. It is, genuinely, like email for websites.
Windows is the problem, not the answer
Sarang Sheth published a thorough piece on Yanko Design this week cataloguing how Microsoft broke Windows. The TPM 2.0 lockout. Stealth OneDrive syncing. TikTok pre-pinned to a fresh install. Thirteen years of two competing settings interfaces. Updates that break the machines they’re supposed to protect. It’s a well-argued indictment.
I agree with nearly all of it. Where I part ways with Sheth is his conclusion: that Windows remains the most practical OS, that there’s no clean exit, that MacOS is “paternalistic by design,” and that the MacBook Neo is “genuinely less of a laptop and more of a netbook.”
AI Addiction leads to more work
While I have ‘graduated from the workforce’ (aka ‘retired’) I am finding the current crop of uber-powerful and enabling tools are encouraging me to do more ‘work’ at my computer, as I push my capabilities and do stuff that was scarcely imaginable 10 years ago. It is addictive. The same phenomena is hitting in high tech workplaces. According to Every.to “New research shows AI doesn’t reduce work—it makes you want to do more of it”
Look up
A Melbourne high school teacher puts up a photo of the Milky Way in class. His students say, “Where’s that?” He says, “In the sky.” They say, “No, it isn’t.”
That exchange, from a beautifully crafted ABC News piece published today, is quietly devastating. Not because the kids are ignorant. Because they’re right about their own experience. In suburban Melbourne, the Milky Way functionally doesn’t exist. More than 2.8 billion people worldwide can no longer see it from where they live. A child born today who can see 250 stars will see just 100 by their eighteenth birthday.
Claude making it easier to move
Check out how to make the move in 2 steps: https://claude.com/import-memory
Claude Code finally remembers who you are
Every developer knows the pain. You open a new Claude Code session, and it’s forgotten everything. Your coding standards, your project quirks, the debugging insight it figured out yesterday. Gone. That era is ending. Claude Code now runs dual memory systems. First, CLAUDE.md files where you write persistent instructions (coding standards, workflows, project context). Second, auto memory, where Claude saves its own notes on patterns it discovers, debugging insights and your preferences.
Mow or No: I built a mowing decision engine with Claude
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. Last weekend I sat down with Claude and built it in a single session.
Farewell ChatGPT - the new friend of the Masters of War
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.
Squeezed from both ends
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.