Cinemas are just so twentieth century
3 April 2025
Ted Sarandos, co-CEO of Netflix, says cinemas are dead. There’s a bold call. Certainly it can be argued there is no need for cinemas any more. No one needs to go to a cinema to see a movie nowadays. They can do that from the comfort of their own home.
Despite the ease and convenience of watching films at home, negating the need for the middle-person that is a movie theatre, I think cinemas will be with us for a while yet. Going to the movies is a social and entertainment experience. A night on the town, sort of thing. Patronage might be down, and we might see some closures, but I doubt cinemas will go away completely.
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The fifty best Microsoft products? This is not an April fool
3 April 2025
I wondered if this was an April’s fool joke. A list of the fifty best things Microsoft (MS) ever made, compiled by The Verge.
Among inclusions is Clippy, a well intentioned though sometimes annoying paperclip-like assistant, that shipped with Office 97. There’s also Slate Magazine, originally a MS publication. Solitaire is an obvious highlight. But no mention of NotePad. Or Windows NT4? This has to be an April fool’s prank.
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Don’t blame Apple for the failure of Apple Intelligence, blame AI
31 March 2025
Allison Morrow, writing for CNN:
Apple is not the laggard in AI. AI is the laggard in AI.
Here is a technology that’s still in the early days of development, has been hyped to the hilt, and heaped with lofty expectations. We’d call it vapour-ware if it didn’t actually exist. There’s some very smart people working at Apple, but it seems surprising they’d go promising the earth without better understanding what they were dealing with.
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artificial intelligence, technology, trends
Some blogs are digital gardens, but not all of them
31 March 2025
Brisbane, Australia, based blogger Colin Morris, writing about website analogies:
My site isn’t a garden. I’ve seen garden sites, tended to grow and sprout and flower. Ordered in rows or disordered in natural growth.
disassociated is not a garden, a digital garden, either.
A digital garden could be seen as progression, an evolution even, of blogs and personal websites. Whereas content on blogs — old school blogs like this one — is usually considered complete when published, a digital garden’s content is often a work in progress. Articles, or posts, which start out as seedlings, are added to as research into their subject matter continues, or new information comes to light. It’s a sensible approach since knowledge is never complete.
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blogs, Indie Web, self publishing
AI scraper bots like your website content, you should feel grateful
28 March 2025
Herman Martinus, creator of the Bear Blogging platform:
Bear is hit daily by bot networks requesting tens of thousands of pages in short time periods, and while I now have systems in place to prevent it actually taking down the server, when it started happening a few months ago it certainly had an impact on performance.
I check my website stats every morning, and high hopes that something I wrote might have gone viral, wanes almost immediately when I realise AI scraper bots have been at it again.
I considered trying to block the data scrapers, but read that such methods are often ignored. I suppose I should feel faltered that developers of AI bots think the content published here is worthy of training one of their LLMs. There seems little else I can really do.
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artificial intelligence, technology, trends
Does the world no longer need white male authors?
28 March 2025
Jacob Savage, writing for Compact:
Over the course of the 2010s, the literary pipeline for white men was effectively shut down. Between 2001 and 2011, six white men won the New York Public Library’s Young Lions prize for debut fiction. Since 2020, not a single white man has even been nominated (of 25 total nominations). The past decade has seen 70 finalists for the Center for Fiction’s First Novel Prize — with again, not a single straight white American millennial man.
Have white male authors been over presented for too long? Most likely. Other voices, especially from groups that have been pushed aside for too long, should be heard. But I’m not sure if it can be said that white male writers are intentionally being sidelined. We’re seeing more of the work of people we didn’t previously, and it turns out to be excellent.
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authors, books, literature, writing
The Inner West Film Fest part three, scary clowns, road trips, and other films
27 March 2025
The Inner West Film Fest returns for its third outing, between Wednesday 9 April to Thursday 17 April 2025. The inner west — for readers outside of Australia, and that’s a fair few you — is a group of suburbs to the west of downtown Sydney, not too close in, but not too far out either. Newtown, Leichhardt, Balmain, and Marrickville, are among the suburbs in Sydney’s inner west.
Flat Girls by Jirassaya Wongsutin, Who by Fire by Philippe Lesage, and The King Tide by Christian Sparkes, are but a few of the titles screening. Check out the festival trailer for the vibe.
The mysterious death of a young woman’s uncle triggers family turmoil in On Becoming a Guinea Fowl, trailer, by Zambian-Welsh director Rungano Nyoni. The title screened at the Melbourne International Film Festival in 2024, but isn’t in theatrical release in Australia, as far as I can see, so check the streaming services.
Deux personnes échangeant de la salive (Two People Exchanging Saliva) a short by Natalie Musteata and Alexandre Singh, is set in a repressive world where kissing is illegal. Don’t snigger: it might happen. Luàna Bajrami, who featured in Portrait of a Lady on Fire (presently stream-able on Kanopy, by the way), stars as Malaise. See the teaser here (Instagram link).
With or Without You, trailer, by Kelly Schilling, an Adelaide, Australia based filmmaker, is a road trip story about three people, at odds with each other, forced to drive together across Australia. With or Without You opens in local cinemas on Thursday 8 May 2025.
Why do clowns and horror stories go together so well? I have no idea. But if you like horror movies featuring sinister clowns, then Clown in a Cornfield, trailer, directed by Eli Craig, might be for you. Also opens in Australian cinemas on Thursday 8 May 2025.
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Eli Craig, events, film, Kelly Schilling, Luàna Bajrami, Rungano Nyoni
Auto generated Instagram comments, the smallest biggest AI threat
26 March 2025
Meta has been trailing an AI assistant that will help Instagram (IG) users compose comments for photos and video posted by their friends, says Aisha Malik, writing for TechCrunch:
Users who have access to the test feature will see a pencil icon next to the text bar under a post that they can tap to start accessing Meta AI, according to a video posted by Manzano. From there, Meta AI will analyze the photo before generating three suggestions for comments.
Awesome. Now we don’t even need to think up a comment to write about a friend’s photo on IG. What next then? AI is going to turning us all into beings incapable of original thought.
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artificial intelligence, social media, technology
Man posts videos of himself propositioning Sydney women to his socials
26 March 2025
An unnamed American “content creator” recently asked a number of women — quite persistently at times — to go on dates with him, in and around the eastern suburbs of Sydney, NSW. He was however — unbeknown to the women in question — filming the interactions with smart-glasses, and later posting them to his social media accounts.
At least one woman asked him to take down a post she featured in, but he refused to comply. She also asked Instagram owner Meta to remove the footage, but the request was ignored. The women then spoke to NSW Police, who told her there was nothing they could do — even though NSW state surveillance laws were breached — as the man has since left Australia.
Here is another quagmire we’re walking into. Up until now it has been relatively apparent if a face-to-face interaction is being recorded in public. At the very least, a smartphone is being pointed at us.
But by way of a pair of glasses, with a camera that may not be easy to detect, is another matter. It might be against the law, in some states anyway, but if the wrong-doer is outside the country, it seems people out and about in public might have no legal recourse if the law has been broken.
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crime, social media, technology, trends
Do not buy a new computer: Microsoft should make a Windows 11 variant that works on old computers
24 March 2025
I’m no longer (thankfully) in the Windows fold, so I’m not one-hundred percent sure, but it seems like some older computers might not be able to run Microsoft’s (MS) most recent operating system (OS), Windows 11. Accordingly, owners of such devices seem intent to hold onto their existing machines, and stay on Windows 10, at the same time.
After all, do you really need to buy a new computer? If their present device is sufficient, why bother replacing it? That’s not the way MS sees things though. They want everyone to migrate to Win 11, come what may. Your existing computer is not up to running Win 11? No problem, simply buy a new device, and see if you can get a trade-in on the old one.
This is a suggestion MS has emailed to some Win 10 users recently. Evidently MS is unaware of the cost of living pressures some people are facing. And what sort of trade-in deal does MS think anyone will get from a device that cannot run Win 11, anyway? What an absurd notion: buy a new computer so you can upgrade to MS’s new OS.
People can continue using Win 10 on their computers for as long as they want, but will eventually stop receiving security updates. And running Win 10 without crucial updates would not be wise. The only safe way forward is to try another OS, such as Linux, but that’s not an option for everyone.
It’s doable of course, but there is something of a learning curve involved. I think the ball is in MS’s court though. They could do more to help people on older machines migrate to Win 11. One suggestion is to roll out a “light weight” version of Win 11 for those unable to change computers. This light version of Win 11 wouldn’t of course have the same capabilities as the full version, but for some people that might be a small price to pay.
I’m thinking a little of XFCE, the Linux Mint OS variant, designed to run on “low-end” personal computers. It could hardly be an onerous task for a company with the resources MS has at its disposal. Don’t make people buy a computer that suits your OS Microsoft: make an OS that suits the computers people already have.
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