disassociated

Brisbane based Australian musician and singer, and founder of Pub Choir, Astrid Jorgensen (Instagram page), recently published her memoir, Average at Best.

Average, says Jorgensen, is underrated, given how difficult it is to be the best:

By its very nature, ‘best’ is rare and elusive: you’re not going to get much of it in life. And I sure don’t want to miss out on deeply experiencing the fullness of my one precious existence, searching for the sliver of ‘best’.

One of Pub Choirs’ feats was, in August 2023, to assemble nineteen-thousand people across Australia to sing the ever popular Africa, a song recorded by American band Toto in 1982.

Just about every online publisher has experienced a decline in the number of people reading articles and information published on their websites. Search engines presently do such a good job of breaking down the main points of news reports, blog posts, and the like, that seekers of information are seldom reading the material at its source.

Online encyclopedia Wikipedia is no exception, and falls in visitors stand to threaten what is surely an invaluable resource, along with others such as Encyclopaedia Britannica.

What happens if we follow this shift in the way people obtain information to its absurd, yet logical, conclusion? If websites such as Wikipedia, Britannica, along with news sites, and many, many, others, are forced to close because no one visits them anymore, what is going to feed the search engine AI summaries we’ve become accustomed to?

In short, we’re going to see AI summaries eat the web, and then eat themselves. The onus here is on search engines, AKA answer engines, and whatever other services generate AI summaries, to use them more selectively, and wean information seekers off them.

Is that something anyone can see happening? No, I didn’t think so.

Tabbed browsing, was, says OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, the last significant web browser innovation. Although tabbed browsing didn’t become common place until around 2002, the idea dates back to 1994, with the arrival of InternetWorks, a browser made by BookLink Technologies. Altman seems to be suggesting browsers have barely changed since the early days of the web.

He made the remark during his introduction to ChatGPT Altas, OpenAI’s new web browser, last week. His words made people take notice, but Altman doesn’t seem to know his onions. Atlas is not a web browser, it is an AI-powered aggregator of information, which may, or may not, be accurate.

So far, Atlas is only available on MacOs, meaning I’ve not had a chance to try the innovative “browser” out, but certain aspects of its functionality either baffled or alarmed me, as I watched the OpenAI video presentation. To make use of Atlas, we are required to type out commands or prompts, in strikingly similar fashion to ChatGPT.

That’s not typically how browsers are used, but as I say, Atlas doesn’t seem like a web browser to me anyway. Of more concern is the way Atlas can, potentially, access files on the local drive of your computer, or if you allow it, the contents of your email app. AI scrapers, including no doubt OpenAI’s, have been trawling my website for years probably, but that’s content in the public domain.

AI bots going through what’s in my email app, and doing whatever with it, including training LLMs is another matter entirely. But Atlas is an AI browser, so buyer beware, this is no normal web “browser” if it is even one in the first place. If people want to use it, that’s for them to decide.

What’s more unsettling though, are regular browsers, such as Firefox, morphing into AI-browsers. Mozilla, the manufacturer of Firefox, which I have been using for over twenty years, is not, it seems, introducing a new browser line, instead it is integrating AI features into an existing product.

This is not a good move, we’re all going to end up running clones of Atlas on our devices, whether we like it or not. If Mozilla wants to make an AI-powered browser, fine, but develop a separate product, and let users decide if they want to use it. Leave the original Firefox, whose early predecessor, Phoenix, shipped with those groundbreaking tabs Altman spoke of, back in 2002, as it is.

Somehow I cannot see any of that happening. Firefox is going to become an AI browser whether we like it or not. There is, however a way to opt out of Firefox’s AI functionality, as New Zealand/Aotearoa blogger fLaMEd Fury, has detailed.

American actor Ethan Hawke discusses forty years of work, from Explorers in 1985, through to Blue Moon this year, as part of the Vanity Fair Career Timeline series of videos.

There’s not a lot what of Hawke does that feels like a run-of-the-mill movie. Dead Poets Society, and Before the Devil Knows You’re Dead, for example, are something else all together.

Then there’s the Richard Linklater productions, Before Sunrise, the first of the Before films, which spans an eighteen year period across three instalments, and Boyhood, filmed over twelve years.

Elizabeth Spiers, writing at Talking Points Memo:

The lesson for me, from the early blogosphere, is that quality of speech matters, too. There’s a part of me that hopes that the most toxic social media platforms will quietly implode because they’re not conducive to it, but that is wishcasting; as long as there are capitalist incentives behind them, they probably won’t. I still look for people with early blogger energy, though — people willing to make an effort to understand the world and engage in a way that isn’t a performance, or trolling, or outright grifting. Enough of them, collectively, can be agents of change.

As Spiers says, it might be possible to manipulate the CEOs of large media companies, but doing the same to a million independent publishers, may not be so easy.

The Transformations, the new novel by Sydney based Australian author Andrew Pippos (Instagram page), will be published next week, on Tuesday 28 October 2025.

This is a story for the times, if the synopsis is anything to go by:

In the fading glow of Australia’s print journalism era, The National is more than a newspaper: it’s an institution, and the only place that George Desoulis has ever felt at home. A world-weary subeditor with a bookish sensibility and a painful past, George is one of nature’s loners.

But a late-night encounter with an unorthodox and self-assured reporter, Cassandra Gwan, begins to unravel both of their carefully managed worlds. As the decline of the newspaper enters a desperate stage, George and Cassandra struggle to balance their turbulent relationship with their responsibilities to family, and the compromises each has built their life upon.

The Transformations follows up Pippos’ debut, Lucky’s, published in 2020, which was shortlisted for the Miles Franklin literary award, among others, in 2021. Lucky’s, which sits in my e-bookshelf, was a great yarn about a life well lived, and I’m looking forward to reading this new work from Pippos.

Some sad news. Billy Wiz, Sydney based Australian DJ, artist, author, cartoonist, and colourful character in general, died last week.

In recent years Billy operated a gallery — in the garden of his street level apartment, on Oxford Street, Bondi Junction — displaying his painting and illustration work, for passersby to peruse.

When in Sydney, we go to the bakery beside his apartment building, and would frequently see Billy deep in conversation with someone who was waiting for their coffee order.

The neighbourhood won’t be quite the same without Billy, who brought a sense of community to what often feels like a retail and commercial precinct. He was even happy to let customers of the bakery tether their dog’s leashes to his fence, while they went inside.

You can find out a bit more about Billy in this Media Man interview published in August 2003, and see some of his artworks on his Instagram page.

American novelists Molly Tanzer and Jennifer Gilmore have launched legal action against Salesforce, accusing the San Francisco based software company of copyright infringement.

Tanzer and Gilmore allege Salesforce used thousands of novels, not just their work, without permission, to train AI agents.

Salesforce want to have their cake and eat it as well. After replacing several thousand workers with AI technologies, presumably saving the company large sums of money, Salesforce want to pay as little as possible to develop the AI agents that displaced the workers in the first place.

What part of any of this is reasonable?

In blind taste tests conducted on eighty-four people, American researchers discovered nearly eight in ten study participants preferred instant coffee over drip coffee. The findings have, needless to say, astonished some coffee aficionados.

But I’m not sure the news is that surprising. I tried for a while to get into drip coffee, but struggled. I’m no fan of instant either, but when it comes to coffee, I think my preference is for something with a little texture, a little froth.

Probably not real coffee to those who like drip brews though, but to each their own, of course.

Authors Tasma Walton (Instagram link), based in Western Australia, and Robbie Arnott (Instagram link), based in Tasmania, have been named joint winners of the 2025 ARA Historical Novel Prize, with their novels I am Nannertgarrook, and Dusk, respectively.

I’m yet to pick up I am Nannertgarrook, but read Dusk earlier this year. It seems to me members of literary award judging panels must have their work cut out for them when novels of the calibre of Dusk are among shortlisted titles.

Suzanne Leal won in the Children and Young Adults category with her novel The Year We Escaped. Awarded annually, the ARA Historical Novel Prize celebrates the work of Australian and New Zealand historical novel writers, with prizes valued at a total of one-hundred-and-fifty-thousand dollars.