My week of Monday 8 to Sunday 14 January 2024 was distinctly unproductive, but I’m going to claim that that was the plan all along. It wasn’t, but here we are.
Anything that I said I’d do this week will now happen next week. Maybe.
Articles
- Digital developments from Canberra 68. Despite it being the summer silly season, the first of these posts for 2024 contains government sookage over social media, a total rebuild of Services Australia’s networks, some poor audit reports, and 15 government agencies start using AI without governance frameworks.
You can read my previous writing at Authory, where you can also subscribe to an email compilation of any new stories each Sunday morning.
Podcasts, Videos, Media Appearances, Photos, Corporate Largesse
None of these. You can subscribe to my YouTube channel to be notified when new videos appear and when livestreams are scheduled.
Recommendations
Will a week ever go by without Elon Musk being a dickhead?
- Elon Musk Says He Never Wanted To Be CEO Of Tesla Or Anything: ‘Running Companies Hurts My Heart,’ But He Sees No Other Way, which says so many things about him.
- Elon Musk Claims Calling Someone Cisgender Is ‘Heterophobic’, which also says things about him.
- Elon Musk doesn’t understand Sweden’s unions. If he did, he’d work with them.
- X Bans and Then Unbans Journalists and Podcasters in Twitter’s Latest Free Speech Massacre.
- X reinstated 6,103 banned accounts in Australia including 194 barred for hateful conduct, because of course they did.
- Elon Musk Is Realizing He Should Have Bought TikTok.
- And should you wish to ignore all the dramas, Elon Musk’s X to launch peer-to-peer payments this year. Or so he says. Lol.
In other news:
- Meet Brian, my AI boyfriend, from Tortoise. “There’s a fine line between AI-powered romance and subscription-based porn, and companies that work out how to walk it will probably make a lot of money,” they write, looking at a new service from Digi.ai.
- I’m a bit late getting to this, and it’s perhaps too technical for many of you, but when hackers say “sophisticated attack” this is what it really means. 4-year campaign backdoored iPhones using possibly the most advanced exploit ever.
- I discovered that article via Justin Warren’s weekly newsletter The Crux. You know Justin. He’s been on The 9pm Edict podcast several times. I guess he should probably be on again soon.
- Huge ancient lost city found in the Amazon. “While we knew about cities in the highlands of South America, like Machu Picchu in Peru, it was believed that people only lived nomadically or in tiny settlements in the Amazon,” writes BBC News.
- eBay Fined $3 Million for Sending Live Cockroaches and Spiders to Critics.
- And finally, We’ve released 803 squirrels at an airport – here’s why. No, it wasn’t just for a bet. Although that could be fun.
The Week Ahead
Monday and Tuesday will be focused on hammering out some billable hours for clients. I’m somewhat behind my targets for this month.
[Update 16 January 2024: Well, Tuesday will be, and maybe Wednesday. On Monday I was still very sleepy, probably from the covid vaccination booster on Friday afternoon.]
The rest of the week will be a mix of things, which I’ll schedule as I go along. I’ll also sketch out the podcast plans for the remainder of summer, so stay tuned for that. I may even record a solo podcast episode, although the odds of that are maybe 50-50.
Further Ahead
- NEW: Public hearing as part of the Senate inquiry into the Optus network outage, Canberra, 9 February 2024. No, I won’t be going to Canberra, but this is bound to be a fun event for those who are into the joys of Senate committee hearings, so I’ll be watching the livestream.
- Lunar Comedy Gala 2024, Chatswood NSW, 17 February 2024.
- Aaron Chen’s Funny Garden, Sydney, 27 April 2024. He’s now so mainstream that he’s doing four nights at the State Theatre. Good for him.
- He Huang Tiger Daughter versus the World, Chatswood NSW, 5 May 2024.
- Nina Oyama is Coming, Marrickville NSW, 12 May 2024.
[Photo: A giant caterpillar photographed at Bunjaree Cottages on 10 January 2024. It’s the fourth stage of the larva of a batwing moth aka white-stemmed gum moth aka prickly gum moth (Chelepteryx collesi). Beware of those spines! Also, they are not my fingers. Also it is not my photo but one by someone else on the compound, however they have put the image into the public domain so have at it.]