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Opinion Featured

The Adults Know It’s a Problem. So Why Don’t We Act Like It?

In a recent interview with Dr Rangan Chatterjee, published in The Guardian, the British doctor and podcaster made a statement that felt both obvious and strangely radical. We should consider banning social media for under-18s. Not tweaking it. Not regulating it more tightly. Not asking platforms to “do better.” Banning

Opinion

When AI Crosses the Line: Claude’s Reported Role in the U.S. Venezuela Raid

A new report claims that the U.S. military used Anthropic’s large-language AI model Claude as part of a classified operation to capture Venezuela’s former president Nicolás Maduro. According to sources cited by The Wall Street Journal, the AI was accessed through a partnership between Anthropic and Palantir

Project Journal

Getting Kavita + Komf Metadata Working (Without Losing Your Mind)

I run Kavita in Docker for manga and comics. Think Netflix for reading. Metadata scraping (information like author, illustrator, publisher, release date, etc.) should be easy, but in practice it’s confusing, under-documented, and most UI-first instructions do not match how Komf actually works today. This post documents the exact

Project Journal

Running a Pruned Bitcoin Node on Reused Hardware with Umbrel

Why I set this up I didn’t set out to build a perfect Bitcoin setup, and I wasn’t chasing yield, mining rewards, or Lightning complexity. I mostly wanted to contribute something real to the network. Running your own node is one of the few ways an individual can

Project Journal

Turning the Ulanzi TC001 Into a Proper Ambient Display With AWTRIX

The Ulanzi TC001 looks like a simple LED desk clock, but under the hood it is an ESP32 matrix display with just enough capability to be interesting. Out of the box, the official firmware is extremely limited. With a bit of work, it can become something far more useful. This

Project Journal

Mining Bitcoin at Human Scale

Setting up a Bitaxe, on purpose Bitcoin mining usually appears in one of two forms. At one end, it is an abstract process hidden behind charts, hashrate graphs, and network difficulty numbers that update every few minutes. At the other, it is an industrial activity, taking place in vast warehouses

Project Journal

Endgame Switch Lite

If you had told me a year ago that I would be inside my Switch Lite with a screwdriver, a spudger, tweezers, and the kind of concentration usually reserved for bomb disposal scenes in movies, I would have laughed. Yet here we are. Yes, I know the Switch 2 is

AI In Education

White House Plans Executive Order to Curb State AI Oversight

Published: November 20, 2025 Summary The administration of Donald Trump is considering signing an executive order that would centralise federal control over AI regulation and effectively block or override state-level laws focused on AI safety, algorithmic fairness and “woke” AI. The draft order would create an “AI Litigation Task Force”

Opinion

Why the Singularity Still Isn’t Near

In recent years a curious constellation of ideas has emerged from the tech-elite orbit: a world in which humanity is no longer seen as a given, but as a species to be upgraded, transcended or even abandoned in favour of a “post-human” future. At its core sit the ambitious hopes

Opinion

AI’s Hidden Cost: The Environmental Toll of a Tokenized Future

To most users, AI feels weightless. Type in a prompt, get a poem or a photo or a fake Morgan Freeman voice in return. But under the surface, the computation required for each of these tasks is vast, energy-intensive, and carbon-heavy. Especially at scale. Take large language models (LLMs) like

Opinion

The Bitter Lesson, Revisited: Richard Sutton and the Limits of Human Design

Summary In his conversation with Dwarkesh Patel, Richard Sutton, one of the founding figures of modern reinforcement learning, revisits the core argument that has defined his career: that intelligence, whether human or artificial, emerges not from clever human design but from simple algorithms coupled with vast computation and experience. The

Opinion

War by Algorithm: How AI Moved From Safety Promises to Military Contracts

Inspired by The Verge “Decoder” podcast episode How AI safety took a backseat to military money Artificial intelligence is no longer confined to research labs, chatbots, and corporate productivity tools. Increasingly, it is finding its way into the defense industry. Military applications of AI are not hypothetical, they are already

AI In Education

SA to roll out ChatGPT-style AI app in all high schools

Source You can read more about this story on ABC News Summary South Australian high schools are set to introduce a ChatGPT-style AI app, marking one of the most ambitious statewide deployments of artificial intelligence in Australian education. Developed by EdChat, the tool is designed to act as a classroom

AI In Education

A-Levels, GCSEs, and the AI Tipping Point

Generative AI is forcing the UK to rethink some of its oldest educational institutions: A-Levels and GCSEs. In a recent report, education experts and policymakers warned that these high-stakes exams may no longer be “fit for purpose” in a world where students can generate essays and solve problems using tools

Opinion

Polluting the Well: How AI is Quietly Poisoning the Internet

AI-generated content is flooding the internet — not with insight, but with recycled noise. From SEO sludge to synthetic “expertise,” we’re poisoning the sources we once trusted. Can we still find clean water in a digital world built on mirrors?

AI In Education

It’s 2025. Why Are Teachers Still Making Lessons Alone?

The Australian Productivity Commission has called for a national repository of lesson plans to help lift student outcomes and ease the strain on teachers. In a recent report, it argued that “fragmented and duplicated” efforts across schools are slowing educational progress, and that smarter lesson-sharing, especially supported by AI, could

Opinion

AI’s Mental Health Mirage: The Danger of Delegating Emotional Labor to Machines

AI companions promise comfort on demand, but emotional support without actual empathy may be more harmful than helpful. As mental health chatbots proliferate, are we helping people or teaching them to confide in simulations? You can read more about the rise of emotional AI tools here We’re in the

Project Journal

No Subscriptions, No Surveillance: Usenet My Way

Streaming subscriptions are expensive, and one usually isn't enough. So I took full control in a way that lets me get everything I want without relying on torrents (no seeds, poor download speeds) and moved to Usenet. I can find almost everything I want and max out my

AI In Education

AI Isn’t Just Helping Students Cheat — It’s Revealing a Broken System

You can read the full article here on Business Insider. Published: August 2025 Summary As AI tools like ChatGPT become increasingly integrated into student life, many educators have scrambled to prevent cheating and plagiarism. But economist Tyler Cowen argues the real problem is deeper — and far older. In a July

Project Journal

Setting Up AdGuard Home on a Debian Server with Quad9 DNS

AdGuard Home is a powerful network-wide ad and tracker blocker. It acts as a local DNS server, blocking unwanted content before it even loads. In this guide, I'll walk you through how I set up AdGuard Home on my local Debian server ("blackbox") and configured it

Opinion

Your Chatbot Has a Boss

Elon Musk’s AI chatbot Grok promises unfiltered truth. But when it hedges on climate change and spars with politicians, is it rebellious… or just branded? A look at ideological bias, editorial control, and trust in a chatbot with a fanbase.

AI In Education

AI's Rapid Disruption of the U.S. Education System

AI tools like ChatGPT are changing classrooms faster than anyone expected — and not always for the better. As students bypass traditional learning, schools are scrambling to catch up. Is AI helping education evolve, or hollowing it out?

Opinion

AI isn't coming for your job - management is

The Myth of Inevitability In Blood in the Machine, Brian Merchant dismantles the idea that technological displacement just happens. The first Luddites weren’t afraid of machines — they were angry at how those machines were being used by mill owners to devalue skilled labour and deskill entire professions. We’re

AI In Education

South Australia Pioneers AI in Student Language Assessment

Published: June 4, 2025 Summary South Australia's Department for Education has introduced EdChat, an AI-powered chatbot developed in partnership with Microsoft, to assess English language proficiency among migrant students. This tool reduces the time needed for assessments from 30 minutes to just 52 seconds per student. Piloted across

AI In Education

Can AI Help Stop Teachers Leaving the Profession?

Published: May 2025 Summary A new report by the UK’s National Audit Office has raised an urgent alarm: teacher recruitment and retention are under growing strain, with workload burnout cited as a leading cause. In response, schools are increasingly exploring artificial intelligence tools as a way to lighten the