Category: Articles
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Plagiarising Trump
Imitation being the sincerest form of flattery, politicians who copy Trump exude a uniquely snivelling, craven subservience, all the while believing themselves to be the tough guys. Witness Australia’s very own Peter Dutton licking the arse of a foreign despot, by plagiarising Trump’s threats against diversity and inclusion programs and plagiarising Trump’s gleefully reckless gutting…
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Why are our universities undemocratic?
University mismanagement in Australia is capturing the federal government’s attention, with recent headlines exposing wage theft, inflated executive pay, exorbitant expenditure on external consultants, among other issues. It’s hard to defend the status quo. In searching for the root cause of universities’ broken governance, consider democracy, or rather the lack thereof. Australia’s public universities are…
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Gen AI part 2: Digital Fibrilation
The Australian Computer Society (ACS), of which I am a recent member, has published its Digital Pulse 2024, written by Deloitte, and… I’m not sure what they were thinking. Well, the part on diversity is important. Let’s make that clear to begin with. There are significant imbalances in the tech industry regarding gender, First Nations…
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Sober Up, Gen-AI
I will say this as gently as I can: generative AI is shit and you know it. Such pronouncements may seem to lack the nuance and subtlety expected of a computing academic and a science fiction writer (who writes about intelligent robots). But that is what it all boils down to. This isn’t a dig…
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Genocide awaits our acknowledgement
By the reckoning of many, Israel is committing genocide against the people of the Gaza strip, and has been since October 2023. It is doing so by means of starvation, brought on by a combination of blockade and the destruction of Gaza’s civilian infrastructure. Tens of thousands have also died directly in the fighting itself.…
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Lamarkdown
I made a thing. Lamarkdown is an MIT-licenced document preparation system for Markdown/HTML, intended to address similar use cases to LaTeX (and not to be confused with static site generators like MkDocs). My Git logs tell me I’ve been working on this since late 2021, so its release is well overdue. (As is often taken…
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Occam hates your simulated universe
I love the discovery of a new and excitingly nutty cosmic revelation. It’s like unwrapping a present. Melvin M. Vopson got himself in The Conversation, opining on the old Simulation Hypothesis. I can’t say where the idea truly originated, but Nick Bostrom laid down an argument for it in 2003 (so I’m quite late, as…
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Measuring the teaching vibe with Net Promoter Scores (or not)
Recall being asked “How likely you would be to recommend…” something, on a scale from 0-10. Your response (combined with others) goes into creating a Net Promoter Score (NPS) for whatever you were asked about. NPS has become a commonplace tool for gauging public opinion of a product or service. But is it the right…
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I am voting for the Voice
Australia has travelled a long and oftentimes dark road in attempting to reconcile First Nations peoples with the waves of immigrants and their descendants who now reside here too. Right now, as on just a few prior occasions, we have a direction: a glimmer of light into which we can steer ourselves. The Indigenous Voice…
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Roger Penrose’s “Shadows of the Mind”
Sir Roger Penrose, a Nobel-prize-winning physicist, has the distinction of being (I believe) the most famous and gifted adherent to the view that artificial intelligence cannot and will not reach the point of human equivalence. He is a sceptic—perhaps the principal sceptic—of strong AI. In pursuit of this view, he’s written two key books: The…