Showing all posts about trends
Hacker News: built on more than good software
10 April 2026
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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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.
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blogs, self publishing, technology, trends
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.
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blogs, RSS, self publishing, technology, trends
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.
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artificial intelligence, technology, trends
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?
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film, film production, J. R. R. Tolkien, Peter Jackson, trends
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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artificial intelligence, technology, trends
Do you enjoy forty-nine megabytes of extraneous data with your news?
26 March 2026
Shubham Bose found the publishers of some news websites — often reputable outlets — are forcing readers to download, in some cases, an additional forty-nine megabytes of needless scripts and data with their articles. This might explain why some of us need to keep our phones charging (a no-no I know) while reading the news:
When you open a website on your phone, it’s like participating in a high-frequency financial trading market. That heat you feel on the back of your phone? The sudden whirring of fans on your laptop? Contributing to that plus battery usage are a combination of these tiny scripts.
We need a browser with an all-scripts kill switch, such as the Quiche Browser (presently for iPhone only), which has the option to include a JavaScript (JS) kill switch on its tool bar.
Sure, we can sift through our browser settings and disable JS, but a one click button, on the interface, is a more elegant solution. Kill switches shouldn’t stop at JS though, give us more. How about AI slop, and auto-play video, for starters.
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artificial intelligence, technology, trends
Talk the talk but cannot circle back and walk the walk
26 March 2026
Researchers at New York’s Cornell University have devised something called the Corporate Bullshit Receptivity Scale. Long story short, the scale measures how convincing corporate jargon and buzzwords are. Offending terms include actualise, adaptive coherence, credentialing, pressure-test, and the particularly loathsome align, when agree would do.
A high score on the scale, meaning someone cannot hear enough of this… language, suggests they may not be the sharpest knife in the drawer:
People who scored higher on the Corporate Bullshit Receptivity Scale tended to perform worse on tests measuring analytical thinking, cognitive reflection, and fluid intelligence. They also made poorer judgments in workplace decision-making scenarios designed to mimic common business problems.
That’s a conclusion that will come as no surprise to anyone in this corner of the web.
If like me though, you struggle to comprehend corporate speak, much less talk or write the lingo, this translator compiled by Kagi will help should you, for whatever reason, need to talk the talk.
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The 2026 Oscars: the end of Hollywood, and film, as we know them?
20 March 2026
From film and TV writer David Chen’s review of this year’s Academy Awards:
The concept of a 3.5-hour broadcast where you watch big movie stars accept awards and deliver heartfelt speeches is no longer as desirable or profitable as it once was.
The Oscar’s TV audience has been steadily declining for about ten years, as more people have taken to watching only segments of the ceremony on YouTube and social media. Indeed, from 2029, the awards will screen exclusively on YouTube, but, as Chen notes, this isn’t solely a reflection of the changing viewing preferences of those watching the ceremony:
While I think that [YouTube] will actually be a better home for the telecast in many ways, and may even lead to some innovation for the broadcast (a man can dream), it’s also yet another sign of the fading primacy of movies as the center of our culture.
This is a perturbing thought. Is our appetite for feature length films diminishing in favour of the short-attention-span-friendly brain-rot video clips posted on social networks? Film production and streaming company Netflix think they know the answer. In a recent interview with podcast show host Joe Rogan, American actor Matt Damon shared some of Netflix’s production advice:
Damon told Rogan that the streamer asks film-makers to dumb things down a little, adding a big action set piece early on to keep viewers interested, and advising them that: “It wouldn’t be terrible if you reiterated the plot three or four times in the dialogue because people are on their phones while they’re watching.
Enough said?
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