This isn’t the same article but it’s relevant:

https://www.abc.net.au/news/2025-07-02/kanye-west-denied-entry-to-australia-after-antisemitic-song/105487620

The first game is set in North America but mostly looks like Iceland. I don’t have high hopes that Kojima’s Australia will be recognisably Australia.

Sounds wonderful. I recently had my writing—which is liberally sprinkled with em-dashes—edited to add spaces to conform to the house style and this made me sad.

I also feel sad that I failed to (ironically) mention the under-appreciated semicolon; punctuation that is not as adamant as a full stop but more assertive than a comma. I should use it more often.

I’ve long been an enthusiast of unpopular punctuation—the ellipsis, the em-dash, the interrobang‽

The trick to using the em-dash is not to surround it with spaces which tend to break up the text visually. So, this feels good—to me—whereas this — feels unpleasant. I learnt this approach from reading typographer Erik Spiekermann’s book, *Stop Stealing Sheep & Find Out How Type Works.

Laughs in Queensland

Plus there is a tiny little Texas inside Queensland.

I agree. Subtly different but overall and surprisingly very similar.

PresAux are more hippy like and a little less like the academics in the book which I find just a little annoying but it’s OK (I’m an academic).

One of the things I’m really curious about is how they flesh out the contrast between the capitalist dystopia of the Corporation Rim and the clearly socialist Preservation Aux. I feel like it’s a politically charged topic in the current capitalist dystopia American context (at least that’s how it looks to me from outside America). I keep waiting for them to water it down but they haven’t done it so far. Good on em.

COVID pandemic started in Wuhan market animals after all, suggests latest study The finding comes from a reanalysis of genomic data.

LLMs don’t ’remember the entire contents of each book they read’. The data are used to train the LLMs predictive capabilities for sequences of words (or more accurately, tokens). In a sense, it develops of lossy model of its training data not a literal database. LLMs use a stochastic process which means you’ll get different results each time you ask any given question, not deterministic regurgitation of ‘read texts’. This is why it’s a transformative process and also why LLMs can hallucinate nonsense.

This stuff is counter-intuitive. Below is a very good, in-depth explanation that really helped me get a sense of how these things work. Highly recommended if you can spare the 3 hours (!):

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7xTGNNLPyMI&list=PLMtPKpcZqZMzfmi6lOtY6dgKXrapOYLlN

Every single thing Trump does is about the grift.

It’s a brilliant book, though I have yet to read the sequel. Can’t recommend it enough.

I was driving from Brisbane → Tasmania last week and a helpful truckie definitely used the right indicator to tell me it was safe to pass. Thanks, mate!

Of course you treat it as a suggestion, nose out and judge for yourself before trying to overtake.

To each his own, of course, but coy swearing is still swearing.

Actually I do sympathise. I swear too much (but not more than the average Aussie) and wish I could train myself to use some other intensifiers in my language but most of them lack intensity. By Jove! My word! Sweet zombie Jesus! Drokk!

You KNOW people are bigger assholes when it’s hot. We ALL do

I don’t agree with this at all. That’s not my experience as an Aussie.

The documents also show that the Bayesian could begin taking on some water at angles that appeared to violate the safety threshold set by the British Maritime and Coastguard Agency.

Clearly safety rules shouldn’t apply to the rich and famous. For example, princesses shouldn’t need to worry about wearing seat belts in cars speeding away from Parisian paparazzi.

Yes, it’s such a beat-up. People don’t understand how important aesthetics is to Apple and I’m totally there for it. If you can’t stand the thought of needing to take a 10 min charge break to get through the next few hours (because you ignored the low battery warnings) buy a different mouse.

As soon as they’re on the wrong side of the free market they demand government intervention.

I think it’s pretty good for what it’s trying to do, which is relay scientific data to non-technical readers.

Riddick’s first name is ‘Richard’? Dick Riddick?

I read this to my partner; we both said, “that’s us!”

I thought it was the Turkish they mostly celebrate for killing?

This phrase illustrates how profoundly you misinterpret these war memorials. These are not celebrations of killing, they are memorials to those who died, markers of grief not celebrations of conquest.

I live in a small village in Tasmania and I’m not aware of any war memorial however there is a grove of trees commemorating WW1 at the nearby Port Arthur Historic Site. I think this is interesting because Port Arthur is itself a memorial to a brutal, horrific past, a past that isn’t celebrated but remembered. The same site also contains a memorial garden that marks the deadliest mass shooting in modern Australian history, remembrance of a tragedy not a celebration of it.

What do you think? How should a community treat the memories of those who die in tragic events? Should they be forgotten or remembered? For that matter, do you think that wars should be forgotten or remembered?

“Those who ignore the lesson of the past, will be doomed to repeat it.”
George Santayana