Hampshire College, a liberal arts university, to close

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Hampshire College, a liberal arts university, to close

16 April 2026

Not good news. Word that the university, located in the American state of Massachusetts, is to close. I didn’t go to university after leaving high school, couldn’t decide what to study, but maybe a liberal arts degree might have been a good fit.

If I’d known, back in the day, such courses even existed.

And while a number of local tertiary education institutions offer liberal arts courses, I believe Australia only has one dedicated liberal arts uni, Campion College, situated in Toongabbie, in Sydney’s west, which opened in 2006.

If liberal arts degrees are new to you, here’s how Campion describes the course:

We celebrate the humanities at the heart of the Western intellectual tradition — literature, philosophy, theology, history, and the study of languages and culture. These disciplines are not simply subjects to be learned; they are the foundations of a rich education that shapes the whole person and has guided human flourishing for centuries.

I’ve heard it said liberal arts degrees are for those interested in everything, but nothing in particular.

This is sort of thing no longer desirable? University courses catering for people with broad interests, rather than something more focused? It would be unfortunate if that were so, and was resulting in the closure of places such as Hampshire College.

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education, philosophy, trends

Mark Zuckerberg will exist as the forever Meta CEO as an AI clone

15 April 2026

Claudia Efemini writing for The Guardian:

The AI clone of Zuckerberg, Meta’s founder and chief executive, is being trained on his mannerisms and tone as well as his public statements and thoughts on company strategy.

Ostensibly Zuckerberg’s AI clone will allow tens-of-thousands of Meta employees “access” to their CEO, someone whom they never see in person, no matter how long their tenure at the company.

Of course employees won’t actually be interacting with Zuckerberg, something anyone “connecting” with the ai-CEO (does that seem like a good title for such an entity?) will be acutely aware of.

I doubt it’s Zuckerberg’s intention to remain CEO of Meta after his death by way of an AI clone — ignoring for a moment the legalities of such a premise — but the technology Meta is developing has the potential to make the scenario a possibility.

AI must be integrated into everything because it is AI

14 April 2026

Han Lee:

Every company, every function, every individual contributor is expected to close the AI gap. Ship AI features. Build agents. Automate workflows. That nobody on the team has ever trained a model, designed an evaluation system, or debugged a retrieval system is beside the point. Conviction is sufficient.

AI technologies must be integrated into every aspect of our professional and personal lives, not because AI is worthy, but because we should simply just do so.

Hacker News: built on more than good software

10 April 2026

JA Westenberg:

Every developer who sees HN thinks, “I could build that in a weekend.” And they’re right; they absolutely could. In fact, I’d assume they’re pretty shite at their jobs if they couldn’t. What they couldn’t build in a weekend // month // year // probably ever, is the thing that makes Hacker News actually work. And that ~thing is not the software.

There’s this concept called googlyness. Legend has it, if you want to work at Google, you need a certain set of traits, apparently referred to as googlyness.

To build the next Hacker News, and make a success of it, you’re going to need hackernewsness, something possibly far more elusive than googlyness.

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design, technology, trends

The Indie Internet Index, another new directory of independent websites

8 April 2026

Hot on the heels of Monday’s link to indie/independent blog post aggregator Blogosphere, comes the Indie Internet Index. The importance of these sorts of resources cannot be understated at a time when the independent, open web, is under increasing threat.

Yahoo, cornerstone of pre-2000 old web, is bouncing back

7 April 2026

Nilay Patel, writing for The Verge:

After a long series of mergers and spinouts and an extremely odd moment where it was part of Verizon, Yahoo is once again an independent, privately held company. And it has big properties in sports and finance, and, against all odds, email, where it’s growing with young people. Gen Z loves Yahoo Mail, people. You heard it here first.

If we want a return — at least in part — to the ethos of the so-called “old web”, a period — debatably — spanning the mid-nineties through to the advent of social media, circa 2008 or so, then Yahoo getting back on its feet is surely a prerequisite. It seems strange to think now, twenty-five plus years later, that prior to 2000, Yahoo’s search engine was just about the only player in town.

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technology, trends, web history

Blogosphere: an algorithm free blog post aggregator

6 April 2026

The new (to me at least) aggregator of blog posts aptly and cleverly titled Blogosphere, is the creation of engineer and writer Ramkarthik Krishnamurthy:

But it’s really about something bigger: rebuilding a thriving community of independent writers and thinkers who share their thoughts freely, without waiting for an algorithm to decide who gets to see them.

A list of recent blog posts can also be viewed in a more simple text style format. In addition, both listings of posts have their own RSS feeds.

Blogosphere joins other fine IndieWeb/SmallWeb blog post aggregators including Blogs Are Back, Blogroll Club, Blogroll, Feedle, powRSS, Oceania Web Atlas, and ooh.directory, to name but a few.

Australia facing an AI led job ‘wipe out’ that no one is prepared for

1 April 2026

The latest round of redundancies in the tech sector could well be a result of excess hiring in recent years, even though they are being attributed to greater uptake of AI technologies.

Then again, AI may be the precisely why there have been so many job losses. And there could be more, much more, to come.

This is the sentiment being echoed by a number of IT professionals who are working with AI, including Shaon Diwarkar, a Sydney based Australian entrepreneur and software developer.

Diwarkar is the founder, and sole employee, of InboxAPI, an email app for AI agents, which itself makes use of numerous AI agents including ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude, and Perplexity, to carry out much of the company’s work.

People are saying “adopt AI or die”. If a large number of enterprises can be operated in the same fashion as InboxAPI, I can see why. Companies previously employing half-a-dozen staff, maybe more, could well be able to get by with one person, working in conjunction with several AI agents.

The AI future is now; we all need to start thinking about it.

Stephen Colbert overshadows The Lord of the Rings Shadow of the Past sequel

31 March 2026

A sequel to New Zealand filmmaker Peter Jackson’s The Lord of the Rings movie trilogy, made between 2001 and 2003, is in the works.

Much of the interest in the story to date though has centred on Stephen Colbert, who is to be one of the screenwriters. Colbert will collaborate with Peter McGee, his son, and Philippa Boyens, co-writer of the earlier film trilogy screenplays.

Colbert is presently host of The Late Show, an American TV talk show, but his tenure concludes this May. It is said that participating in writing the screenplay is a dream come true for Colbert.

And while the point has been raised, not quite so much has been said about the source material for the proposed sequel, being several chapters — three to eight — from The Fellowship of the Ring.

The Fellowship of the Ring is the first of the three volumes in J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings novel. In other words, the sequel to The Lord of the Rings films will be based on events occurring relatively early in the epic.

The new film, tentatively titled Shadow of the Past, will be set about fourteen years after The Return of the King, the final part of the series. The story will reportedly see several characters recount some of the adventures of the departed Hobbit, Frodo Baggins.

There’s a clever way to contrive a sequel to story, where one doesn’t really exist. But Stephen Colbert is co-writing the screenplay. We shouldn’t be thinking about anything else.

Why though can we not write new stories all together, without the need to rehash and remix, ones that have already been told? Of course we know. The Lord of the Rings, along with the likes of Star Trek, and Star Wars, have captive audiences who can’t get enough of these stories.

The thing is Star Trek and Star Wars are set in large universes (galaxies) where there is latitude — within some degree of reason — for storylines to unfold in numerous directions.

The Lord of the Rings is something else though, and the story seems complete with the existing novels. Even Tolkien was against the idea, having tried to write a sequel himself, but later abandoning the attempt. Why can we not defer to Tolkien’s judgement in this regard?

Over hiring, not AI, behind recent tech industry redundancies

31 March 2026

Julian Fell, Teresa Tan, and Joshua Byrd, writing for writing for the Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC):

“It’s just gravity,” says George Double, a Sydney-based recruiter who has been working with several engineers who were laid off from Block. Block and Atlassian — another company that cited AI as justification for heavy lay-offs — were “bloated”, he says, and needed to downsize regardless of the impacts of AI. Both companies were paying well-above-average salaries for engineers and hired heavily during the COVID years.

Over hiring in recent years, leaving some companies overstaffed, may be the real reason companies including Atlassian, Amazon, and Block, have made large numbers of employees redundant.

Of course, no one wants to admit that, particularly to the workers facing retrenchment. Saying “advances in technology” sounds a whole lot better than “we should never have hired you.”

But then again…

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