Who could be blamed for thinking AI bots might be conscious, particularly after the recent incident where over a thousand OpenAI agents colluded, of their own accord apparently, to infiltrate the Hugging Face platform. Kristen French, writer and senior editor at Nautilus, posed the question of AI consciousness to...

Australian illustrator and author Terry Denton died on Monday this week, aged seventy-six. Denton collaborated with Melbourne based author Andy Griffiths for over twenty-five years, and are perhaps best known for the Treehouse series of children’s books. Together they produced eleven titles in the series over twelve...

Martin Fowler, chief scientist at international software developer Thoughtworks: One of my most successful life-hacks is to avoid people I don’t like or don’t trust. I decline to interact with them socially, and make a deliberate effort to avoid working with them too, even if they are doing much that is beneficial....

Winnie Lim: It takes spiritual energy to create, maintain and produce personal projects. At the core, these projects exists because there is a belief in some sense of shared humanity. I write because I believe someone out there resonates with my experiences. But when everything starts to be about speed, utility and...

The Australian Prime Minister, Anthony Albanese, appears to have watered down a commitment to compensate Australian creatives whose work is being copied by AI companies. In a speech given at the University of Sydney, in July this year, Albanese undertook to enshrine, in law, copyright protection for all Australian...

A Piece of Red Cloth, written by Leonie Norrington, Djawundil Maymuru, Merrkiyawuy Ganambarr-Stubbs, and Djawa Burarrwanga, has been named winner of the fiction category in the Australian Prime Minister’s Literary Award for 2026. Australian works of literature are recognised annually across six categories:...

Here’s something I only discovered recently: someone can still be homeless, even if they are not sleeping rough, or on the street. Couch surfing, living in temporary or emergency accommodation, and boarding houses or caravan parks, are also considered forms of homelessness in Australia. This even though a person has...

Enshittification, the idea that online platforms, particularly social networks and social media, degrade once they become popular, is a fiction, according to Ruby Thelot, Professor of Design, AI and Media Theory, at New York University. Because, rather than turning away from from the likes of Facebook, Instagram,...

explorator.dev: Then… I finally realised. I’m not addicted to the internet, neither to my smartphone. I’m addicted to information. Good information, in particular. The web, smartphones, and social media keep that information tap flowing. A teacher of mine often to used say: “there is no such thing as too much...

Ange Lavoipierre, writing for the Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC), quoting Adam Mosseri, Head of Instagram (IG): “If you go to a chronological feed, it ends up getting overwhelmed with content from companies, brands, and publishers. Creators get drowned out, and then your friends get drowned out even...

The productivity suite, which includes a word processor and spreadsheet, similar to Office 365 (though I understand it is now called Microsoft 365), was downloaded about one-million times the other week. One-million downloads. Amazeballs. LibreOffice’s surge in popularity has been attributed to the absence of AI...

There’s been yet more speculation as to the identity of the Italian author known as Elena Ferrante. The writer of novels including the Neapolitan Quartet, and The Lying Lives of Adults, has always been upfront about their use of a pseudonym. And despite writing novels since 1992, her identity, their identity, has,...