Automated cover-up fails

In one of the siloed social media cess pits Quadcarl said this

I’m not a very smart man but it looks to me like a computer thought this said Don and redacted it. In case you don’t realize it yet this is a big cover-up.

I had to go to original source and verify.

The original file is available for your inspection at: https://www.justice.gov/epstein/files/DataSet%2011/EFTA02440040.pdf

Update: The easiest access to the “Epstein Files” is via The Jmail Suite - an interactive archive that lets you explore Jeffrey Epstein’s emails, documents, photos, flight logs, and more as if you were logged into his accounts. What started as a viral project in November 2025 has grown into a full suite of apps, powered by three major data releases.

The dirty work nobody wants to do is suddenly getting done

Every programmer knows the code rewrite conversation. The codebase has drifted. Security vulnerabilities are piling up. The platform you’re running on is three versions behind. It needs fixing, but nobody wants to touch it.

The economics are brutal. Thousands of hours rewriting working code to do exactly what it already does. Management looks at the spreadsheet and sees massive cost with zero new features. Engineers look at the backlog and wonder why they signed up to translate code line by line when they could be building something new.

This is where agentic AI tools are starting to shift the calculation.

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• So the Epstein scandal is about politics? Silly me for thinking it’s about the mass abuse of women and girls (theguardian.com) Hyde dismantles the partisan point-scoring around the Epstein files, arguing it lets the powerful escape accountability while victims are sidelined yet again.

• We had s*x in a Chinese hotel, then found we had been broadcast to thousands (bbc.com) Eric and his girlfriend unknowingly had their intimate hotel stay in Shenzhen, China broadcast to thousands of strangers on a social media channel.

• Wall Street just lost $285 billion because of 13 markdown files - Martin Alderson (martinalderson.com) Anthropic’s legal tool, a collection of 13 markdown files, caused a $285 billion sell-off in SaaS company valuations on the public markets. Over-reaction? Or the first volleys in a new battle?

• Introducing About the Song, a New Way to Explore the Stories Behind the Music — Spotify (newsroom.spotify.com) Spotify’s new feature on iOS/Android provides stories and context about the music users are listening to. The feature, currently in beta, displays short, swipeable cards in Now Playing View. Available in 6 countries including Australia.

The Economist has been quietly sharing its data since 2018

I only just found out. While we’ve been wringing our hands about media transparency and reproducibility, The Economist has been publishing its data sets on GitHub for the better part of a decade. They’ve been building this out steadily, adding more repositories and refining their approach.

The centrepiece is the Big Mac Index. First published in 1986 as a tongue-in-cheek guide to currency valuation, the index uses Big Mac prices across countries to measure purchasing power parity. It’s become one of the most cited informal economic indicators in the world. Since 2018, you’ve been able to download the complete historical data set going back to 2000, along with the R code that crunches the numbers.

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  • GPT 5.3 Codex vs. Opus 4.6: The Great Convergence (every.to) Anthropic’s Opus 4.6 and OpenAI’s GPT-5.3 Codex are converging in capability, making model choice increasingly about workflow fit rather than raw performance gaps. A detailed comparison of where each still differentiates.

  • Orchestrate teams of Claude Code sessions (code.claude.com) Claude Code now supports multi-agent orchestration — spinning up teams of Claude Code sessions that coordinate on shared tasks via inter-agent messaging. Moves Claude Code from single-agent tool use toward managing parallel workstreams.

  • First solar-battery hybrid sends power into evening peak (reneweconomy.com.au) Potentia Energy’s Quorn Park facility in South Australia is the first solar-battery hybrid to dispatch power into the evening demand peak — when solar alone can’t contribute. A proof point for the co-located storage model that could reshape grid economics across the National Energy Market.

  • The European Commission Is Testing an Open Source Alternative To Microsoft Teams (slashdot.org) The European Commission is piloting a Matrix-based messaging platform as a sovereign alternative to Microsoft Teams, citing inflexibility and digital sovereignty concerns. If adopted, it would be one of the largest institutional deployments of the Matrix protocol to date.

New AI apps are Mac first

It’s a long time since anyone called Apple “beleaguered.” That word followed the company like a shadow through the late 1990s. Now Apple Silicon machines are the default launch platform for the most significant AI tools being built.

In the past few weeks, both OpenAI and Anthropic released major agentic desktop apps exclusively on macOS. Not Windows. Not Linux. Mac only.

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• The Technium: The March of Nines (kk.org) The “march of nines” refers to the increasing difficulty and cost of achieving higher levels of reliability in technology. Each additional “nine” — from 99% to 99.9% to 99.99% — requires exponentially more effort, often demanding entirely new approaches rather than incremental improvement of what already works. Highly relevant to Autonomous Vehicle development.

• AI Bots Are Now a Significant Source of Web Traffic {paywall}(wired.com) AI bot visits to websites quadrupled during 2025 — from 1-in-200 visits to 1-in-31 — and those are conservative numbers. Many scrapers now mimic human browsing so convincingly they’re effectively undetectable, while over 13% simply ignore robots.txt altogether. The shift is increasingly driven not by model training but by AI agents fetching live content as a substitute for search.

• ‘It’s an absolute bloodbath’: Washington Post lays off hundreds of workers (theguardian.com) The Washington Post has laid off hundreds of journalists. PetaPixel reports they’ve sacked all their photojournalists. A further destruction of fact-based journalism.

• Apple Xcode unleashes AI agents for fast and easy app creation (cultofmac.com) Xcode, Apple’s integrated development environment, now features AI-powered coding agents that enable faster and easier app creation for Mac and iOS developers. It speeds their efforts rather than specifically arming newbie programmers. A significant step up from last year’s chat-based code assistance to genuinely agentic development across the full build cycle.

The misinformation isn't coming from where you think

Ipsos surveyed 1,000 Australian adults for their 2024 Climate Change Report and the results on misinformation believability are striking. Not because people believe nonsense, that’s a given, but because of where they’re encountering it.

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All the world is a workflow

Auto-generated description: A robot stands on stage holding a skull, referencing Shakespeare with a modern twist on the famous quote.

The Clawdbot/Openclaw madness was already strange enough. Now there’s a platform where AI agents can rent a human to do the physical tasks—the meatspace errands—they cannot manage themselves.

https://rentahuman.ai/

I confess I didn’t have “humans as gig workers for their AI overlords” on my 2026 bingo card. And yet here we are.