G’day! I’m just a Melburnian with opinions and a keyboard. Expect rants about everything from coffee prices to climate change. Warning: May contain traces of sarcasm and smashed avo.
Recent Posts
The Great AI Smokescreen: When Tech Giants Blame Algorithms for Bad Decisions
There’s something deeply cynical about watching a company worth billions announce 1,600 job cuts while simultaneously claiming “our approach is not AI replaces people.” It’s the corporate equivalent of “it’s not you, it’s me” – except it’s very much them, and we all know it.
Atlassian’s latest round of layoffs has been making the rounds in tech circles, and the discussions around it have been fascinating in all the wrong ways. The official line is that AI is making workers more “efficient,” which apparently means they need 1,600 fewer of them. But here’s the thing that really gets under my skin: AI isn’t holding a gun to anyone’s head. These are choices made by executives, pure and simple.
When the Robots Started Optimising Themselves (And I'm Not Sure How to Feel About It)
Andrej Karpathy just casually dropped something on Twitter that’s got me sitting here with my third latte of the day, staring at my MacBook screen and feeling that familiar mix of excitement and low-key existential dread that seems to define 2025.
For those who don’t know, Karpathy is one of the godfathers of modern AI – co-founded OpenAI, former head of AI at Tesla, basically the kind of person who forgets more about neural networks before breakfast than most of us will ever learn. So when he posts about an AI agent that ran autonomously for two days and improved his tiny LLM training process by 11%, making it go from 2.02 hours to 1.80 hours to match GPT-2 performance, people pay attention.
Who's Making the Life and Death Decisions? The Troubling Lack of Oversight in Military AI
I’ve been reading about the rapid deployment of AI in military applications lately, and frankly, it’s keeping me up at night. Not in the melodramatic sense, but in that particular way where you’re scrolling through your phone at 2am and suddenly realize we might be sleepwalking into a future we’ll deeply regret.
The thing that really gets me is how we’re having this conversation after the technology has already been deployed. Someone mentioned that we passed the milestone of technology moving faster than regulation “a while ago,” and that’s the crux of it, isn’t it? We’re not having a preventative discussion here – we’re playing catch-up with systems that are already making life and death decisions.