It’s almost enough to entice me back onto social media. But not quite. The Australian government is proposing to give local social media users the choice to opt out the algorithms that determine the content they see. If the laws eventuate, social media companies will be obliged to allow their members to only see...

On the subject of less than faithful book-to-film adaptations, it sounds like a sequel to 2011’s the Adventures of Tintin might be on the way. To be precise, New Zealand filmmaker Peter Jackson, who collaborated with Steve Spielberg to make the 2011 film, said, earlier this year, he was writing a screenplay for a...

Emily Wilson, Professor of Classical Studies at the University of Pennsylvania, in the United States, has lashed American film director Christopher Nolan’s recent adaptation of The Odyssey, in a recent London Review of Books article. Wilson, who translated the version of the Odyssey, a poem traditionally attributed...

Eleven websites have been selected as finalists for this year’s Tiny Awards, and you can vote for your favourite. Polling closes on Friday 25 September 2026. There’s some awesome late-nineties web design vibes to found among the 2026 finalists.

I’ve been reading Josh Ellis’ blog for a couple of years maybe, since finding a link there on Dense Discovery once. Ellis has been at it since 2004, so achievement unlocked. In his latest post, he ruminates about writing a book. Acquaintances of his have made the suggestion over the years. I’ve had the same. “You...

Shouldn’t it be the other way around? It seems not. The more people use AI agents, the more robotic their behaviour comes, says Victor Tangermann, writing for Futurism. Tangermann’s article brings to mind the trailer for The Social Reckoning, which I linked to a few days ago, and the robotic-like demeanour of Meta...

Murat Demirbas suggests the work of writers might be amongst the safest from AI, a notion that defies broader thinking on the subject: In systems theory, a wicked problem is a problem that lacks a definitive formulation, a clear stopping rule, and an objectively correct solution. Writing is the ultimate wicked...

That sounds like a bold claim. But such vehicles are already transporting passengers in Chongqing and Wuhan in China, and a number of cities in the United States. Australian entrepreneur Tim Kentley Klay, who several years ago designed a self-driving car that didn’t have a steering wheel, nor foot pedals, says...

That’s Mine, by Hobart based Australian author Adam Ouston (Instagram page), which features one incredibly, outrageously, long sentence of perhaps eighty-five thousand words. No full-stops, chapters, or even a few lines of space to break up the text it seems. I can’t find an official word count for the novel, so...

A trailer for The Social Reckoning, directed by Aaron Sorkin, which opens in Australian cinemas on Thursday 8 October 2026, and follows-up 2010’s The Social Network, which Sorkin co-wrote. As I wrote a few months ago, The Social Reckoning is a far darker continuation of the Facebook story. That said, hints of what...

Luke James, writing for Tom’s Hardware: California’s legislature has passed Assembly Bill 1856, exempting open-source operating systems from the State’s Digital Age Assurance Act months before the law is due to take effect on January 1, 2027. It’s good news, but Linux, and other open source operating systems, are...

Talk about defying the odds. Maybe. Late last year, Operation Bluebird lunched a bid to “revive” Twitter, the micro-blogging platform Elon Musk bought in 2022. Operation Bluebird claimed — rather optimistically I thought — they could take control of the Twitter brand, as they believed Musk had abandoned the rights...