Crypto investor donates record £9m to Reform UK
The sum from Christopher Harborne is the largest ever single donation by a living person to a British political party. ⌘ Read more

Crypto investor donates record £9m to Reform UK
The sum from Christopher Harborne is the largest ever single donation by a living person to a British political party. ⌘ Read more

Hegseth’s use of Signal app posed risk to US personnel, watchdog finds
A report by the Pentagon watchdog concludes US Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth violated Pentagon policy by using his personal device for official business and recommends better training for all Pentagon officials. ⌘ Read more

Fourth person arrested over Adelaide shopping centre stabbing
The Elizabeth City Centre shopping centre was placed in lockdown with shoppers evacuated on Friday afternoon after an alleged fight that left two males with “critical” and “life-threatening” injuries. ⌘ Read more

YouTube Releases Its First-Ever Recap of Videos You’ve Watched
YouTube has launched its first-ever “Recap” for videos watched on the main platform, giving users personalized cards that showcase their top channels, interests, and a personality type based on their watch habits. The feature rolls out across North America today and globally this week. TechCrunch reports: Users can find their Recap directly on the You … ⌘ Read more

Woman tells court she witnessed but did not commit brutal murder of 72yo
A woman on trial for the alleged murder of 72-year-old Victorian man John Hunter tells the Supreme Court she was present when he was killed but another person was responsible for his death. ⌘ Read more

Breaking: Two in hospital after shooting in northern NSW
Police have arrested a person after two people were injured during a shooting in northern NSW. ⌘ Read more

Waymo Hits a Dog In San Francisco, Reigniting Safety Debate
A Waymo robotaxi struck a small unleashed dog in San Francisco – just weeks after another Waymo killed a beloved neighborhood cat. The dog’s condition is unknown. The Los Angeles Times reports: The incident occurred near the intersection of Scott and Eddy streets and drew a small crowd, according to social media posts. A person claiming to be one of the pa … ⌘ Read more

OpenAI Declares ‘Code Red’ As Google Catches Up In AI Race
OpenAI has reportedly issued a “code red” on Monday, pausing projects like ads, shopping agents, health tools, and its Pulse assistant to focus entirely on improving ChatGPT. “This includes core features like greater speed and reliability, better personalization, and the ability to answer more questions,” reports The Verge, citing a memo reported by the Wall S … ⌘ Read more

Person found dead after fire engulfs home to Brisbane’s south
Police say two people were able to escape the fire and forensic investigations into the deceased person’s identity are underway. ⌘ Read more

Threats against Victorian judges, magistrates by sovereign citizens double
A report tabled in state parliament has recommended judicial officers be paid an allowance to increase their personal security. ⌘ Read more

Breaking: Person in potentially life-threatening condition after wall collapses
Paramedics received reports a wall collapsed at an industrial site in Brisbane’s West End at about 8:30am. ⌘ Read more

Korea’s Coupang Says Data Breach Exposed Nearly 34 Million Customers’ Personal Information
An anonymous reader quotes a report from TechCrunch: South Korean e-commerce platform Coupang over the weekend said nearly 34 million Korean customers’ personal information had been leaked in a data breach that had been ongoing for more than five months. The company said it first detected the unaut … ⌘ Read more

New York Now Requires Retailers To Tell You When AI Sets Your Price
New York has become the first state in the nation to enact a law requiring retailers to disclose when AI and personal data are being used to set individualized prices [non-paywalled source] – a measure that lawyers say will make algorithmic pricing “the next big battleground in A.I. regulation.”

The law, enacted through the state budget, … ⌘ Read more

Scientists Discover People Act More Altruistic When Batman Is Present
Psychology Today reports:

In a study conducted in Milan, Italy, and published in November 2025, the sight of a person dressed as Batman led to a nearly doubled rate of people giving up their seat to a pregnant woman. Over the course of 138 subway rides, researchers found that people who saw “Batman” standing near the pregnant woman … ⌘ Read more

‘Naughty Boy’ pelican munches on seagulls and plays dead for tourists
Locals say this cheeky pelican has a personality unlike any bird they have ever seen. ⌘ Read more

It’s only been really @manton@bridge.twtxt.net that’s new on yhe disxover cure? 🧐 And only because i’m following him (only person whose Fediverse handle i could remember 🤣)

Nothing will bring him back, but Jai Wright’s family say they have seen ‘justice’
For the family of Dunghutti teen Jai Wright, the guilty finding against police officer Benedict Bryant for dangerous driving occasioning Jai’s death lifts a “weight off their shoulders”. Legal experts say it’s the first time a police officer has been convicted in relation to the death of a First Nations person in custody. ⌘ Read more

Hacker who set up fake ‘evil twin’ Qantas Wi-Fi to steal passenger data jailed
A Perth hacker who copied intimate images and sex videos from women’s personal online accounts and set up fake Wi-Fi on Qantas flights is sentenced to more than seven years in prison. ⌘ Read more

I’m kind of tired of late of telling support folks, for example, ym registrar, how to do their fucking goddamn jobs 🤦‍♂️

Hi James,

Thank you for your patience.

There are several reasons why a .au domain registration might fail or be cancelled, including inaccurate registrant information, ineligibility for a .au domain licence, or issues related to Australian law.

For a full list of possible reasons, please see this article: https://support.onlydomains.com/hc/en-gb/articles/6415278890141-Why-has-my-au-domain-registration-been-cancelled

If you believe none of these reasons apply to your case, please let us know so we can investigate further.

Best regards,

Yes, so tell me support person, why the fuck did it fail?! 🤬

NT parliament pushes through banned drinking register changes on urgency
In the final hours of NT parliament for the year, the government has extended the time a person issued with a Banned Drinker Order is prevented from drinking alcohol. ⌘ Read more

More Than Half of New Articles On the Internet Are Being Written By AI
An anonymous reader quotes a report from the Conversation: The line between human and machine authorship is blurring, particularly as it’s become increasingly difficult to tell whether something was written by a person or AI. Now, in what may seem like a tipping point, the digital marketing firm Graphite recently published a study sho … ⌘ Read more

Black Friday sales ‘pressure’ pushing some Australians into debt binge
With millions of Australians tipped to spend record amounts this Black Friday, the value of personal credit and charge-card balances accruing interest has hit its highest level since 2021. ⌘ Read more

@prologic@twtxt.net as per #kzirx3a I managed to avoid having to use it (there’s also a thing or two wrong about its creator as well, which is more on a personal level than technical here)

Councillor resigns for personal reasons after ‘accidental’ strip club visit
A City of Joondalup councillor, who lodged an expense claim for a drink he bought at a strip club, resigns from the council citing “personal reasons”. ⌘ Read more

Recurring Events for Meetable
In October, I launched an instance of Meetable for the MCP Community. They’ve been using it to post working group meetings as well as in-person community events. In just 2 months it already has 41 events listed! ⌘ Read more

Ubisoft Shows Off New AI-Powered FPS And Hopes You’ve Forgotten About Its Failed NFTs
Ubisoft has revealed Teammates, a first-person shooter built around AI-powered squadmates that the company is calling its “first playable generative AI research project” – not long after the publisher went all-in on NFTs and the metaverse only to largely move on from both. Built in the Snowdrop Engine th … ⌘ Read more

Meta Plans New AI-Powered ‘Morning Brief’ Drawn From Facebook and ‘External Sources’
Meta “is testing a new product that would give Facebook users a personalized daily briefing powered by the company’s generative AI technology” reports the Washington Post. They cite records they’ve reviwed showing that Meta “would analyze Facebook content and external sources to push custom updates to its users. … ⌘ Read more

When I try to code something personal over the weekend and lose 2 hours configuring the environment ⌘ Read more

The EU “19.11.2025 COM(2025) 837 final 2025/0360 (COD): Digital Omnibus” Regulation Proposal is out, and it it we have:

• “proposed simplification measures” watering down personal data protection
  
• There are two terms, “open format” and “formal open standard” with different definitions - none “open enough”
  

I’m sure there is a lot more to digest from it, so here you go:

https://digital-strategy.ec.europa.eu/en/library/digital-omnibus-regulation-proposal

IRS Accessed Massive Database of Americans Flights Without a Warrant
An anonymous reader shares a report: The IRS accessed a database of hundreds of millions of travel records, which show when and where a specific person flew and the credit card they used, without obtaining a warrant, according to a letter signed by a bipartisan group of lawmakers and shared with 404 Media. The country’s major airlines, inc … ⌘ Read more

Some People Never Forget a Face, and Now We Know Their Secret
alternative_right shares a report from ScienceAlert: A new study from researchers in Australia reveals that the people who never forget faces look “smarter, not harder.” In other words, they naturally focus on a person’s most distinguishing facial features. “Their skill isn’t something you can learn like a trick,” explains lead author James Dunn, a … ⌘ Read more

While Meta Crawls the Web for AI Training Data, Bruce Ediger Pranks Them with Endless Bad Data
From the personal blog of interface expert Bruce Ediger:

Early in March 2025, I noticed that a web crawler with a user
agent string of

meta-externalagent/1.1 (+https://developers.facebook.com/docs/sharing/webmasters/crawler)

was hitting my blog’s machine at an unreasonable rate.

… ⌘ Read more

Logitech Reports Data Breach From Zero-Day Software Vulnerability
BrianFagioli writes: Logitech has confirmed a cybersecurity breach after an intruder exploited a zero-day in a third-party software platform and copied internal data. The company says the incident did not affect its products, manufacturing or business operations, and it does not believe sensitive personal information like national ID numbers or … ⌘ Read more

Hyundai Data Breach May Have Leaked Drivers’ Personal Information
According to Car and Driver, Hyundai has suffered a data breach that leaked the personal data of up to 2.7 million customers. The leak reportedly took place in February from Hyundai AutoEver, the company’s IT affiliate. It includes customer names, driver’s license numbers, and social security numbers. Longtime Slashdot reader sinij writes: Thanks … ⌘ Read more

When I realize my personal API key has been running in production for 6 months ⌘ Read more

Analysing Hitler’s DNA for a TV gimmick tells us nothing useful
To understand Adolf Hitler, we need to look at his personal life and the wider societal and historical context - analysing his DNA for a TV gimmick tells us nothing, says Michael Le Page ⌘ Read more

Search for protesters who allegedly assaulted police officers
Police have released the images of eight persons of interest as investigations continue into violent protests in Melbourne. ⌘ Read more

Search for protesters who allegedly assaulted police officers
Police have released the images of eight persons of interest as investigations continue into violent protests in Melbourne. ⌘ Read more

OpenAI’s GPT-5.1 Brings Smarter Reasoning and More Personality Presets To ChatGPT
OpenAI today released GPT-5.1, an update to its flagship model line. The update includes two versions: GPT-5.1 Instant, which OpenAI says adds adaptive reasoning capabilities and improved instruction following, and GPT-5.1 Thinking, which adjusts its processing time based on query complexity.

The Thinking model respond … ⌘ Read more

Critics Call Proposed Changes To Landmark EU Privacy Law ‘Death By a Thousand Cuts’
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Reuters: Privacy activists say proposed changes to Europe’s landmark privacy law, including making it easier for Big Tech to harvest Europeans’ personal data for AI training, would flout EU case law and gut the legislation. The changes proposed by the European Commission … ⌘ Read more

I went to a rental inspection. There was a surprise
When does a “studio apartment” come with extras? Like a person in his underwear? ⌘ Read more

Duisburger Filmwoche: Unsichtbares Personal und würdiges Sterben
Die Filmwoche in Duisburg zeigt Dokumentarfilme über Freiräume auch unter widrigen Umständen und begleitet das Team einer Berliner Palliativklinik. mehr… ⌘ Read more

Samsung Galaxy XR vs. Apple Vision Pro
Samsung recently came out with the Galaxy XR, its first mixed reality headset. The Galaxy XR competes with the Apple Vision Pro, so we thought we’d pick one up to see how it compares to Apple’s headset.

_Subscribe to the MacRumors YouTube channel for more videos._

In person, it’s hard to mist … ⌘ Read more

Thank you for the encouragement and love and kind words, @lyse@lyse.isobeef.org @movq@www.uninformativ.de @bender@twtxt.net @doesnm@doesnm.p.psf.lt and others along the way I’m not sure of their feed uris 💕 I’ll keep at it, but for the time being I will keep my distance, mostly off IRC, because I don’t have the energy to spare in that kind of engagement (what//if the worst happens, it’s so draining). I need to remember what I ever did any of this for, it was back in ~2020 and I wanted really to build small interconnected communities that any non “tech savvy” person (more or less) could also benefit from ane enjoy. Even if there are aspects of the specs we’ve built/extended over time that aren’t “perfect”™, they’re “good enough”™ that they’ve last 5+ years (I believe this is 6 years running now). I want to spend a bit of time going back to why I did any of this in the the first place, and get a little micro-SaaS offering going (barely covering running costs) so encourage more folks to run pods, and thus twtxt feeds and grow the community ever so slightly. Other than that, I plan to get the specs “in order” to a point (with @movq@www.uninformativ.de and @lyse@lyse.isobeef.org’s help) where I hope they’ll stand the test of time – like SMTP.

Thank you all ! 🙏

Did ChatGPT Conversations Leak… Into Google Search Console Results?
“For months, extremely personal and sensitive ChatGPT conversations have been leaking into an unexpected destination,” reports Ars Technica: the search-traffic tool for webmasters , Google Search Console.

Though it normally shows the short phrases or keywords typed into Google which led someone to their site, “starting this September, odd q … ⌘ Read more

Double congrats, @thecanine@twtxt.net! \o/

I’m not a fan of the gemtext limits. This being only a single page (which probably doesn’t get updated a whole lot), the efforts of having two dedicates files are not all that big, or so I’d at least naively imagine.

I always recommend checking the W3C validator results, even though I’m very guilty of not doing that myself. It just doesn’t occur to me in the heat of the moment. I reckon if I were writing HTML on a more regular basis, I would pick up on making that a real habit. Anyway, your HTML being generated, you probably can’t address the findings, though. So, might not be even worth the time heading over to the validator.

From a privacy point of view, personally, I would definitely host the CSS myself. Other than that, nice link collection. :-)

macOS Tahoe’s Terrible Icons
An anonymous reader shares a report: On the new MacOS 26 (Tahoe), Apple has mandated that all application icons fit into their prescribed squircle. No longer can icons have distinct shapes, nor even any fun frame-breaking accessories. Should an icon be so foolish as to try to have a bit of personality, it will find itself stuffed into a dingy gray icon jail.

[…] While Apple had previously urged developers to use … ⌘ Read more

Code-level telemetry instrumentation: From “oh hell no” to “worth it”
A platform engineer’s guide to developer buy-in Originally published on the author’s personal blog, whitneylee.com As platform engineers, we want the holistic system insights that instrumented code can give us –  yes, please. With code-level insights… ⌘ Read more

@prologic@twtxt.net Let’s go through it one by one. Here’s a wall of text that took me over 1.5 hours to write.

This section says AI should not be treated as an authority. This is actually just what I said, except the AI phrased/framed it like it was a counter-argument.

The AI also said that users must develop “AI literacy”, again phrasing/framing it like a counter-argument. Well, that is also just what I said. I said you should treat AI output like a random blog and you should verify the sources, yadda yadda. That is “AI literacy”, isn’t it?

My text went one step further, though: I said that when you take this requirement of “AI literacy” into account, you basically end up with a fancy search engine, with extra overhead that costs time. The AI missed/ignored this in its reply.

Okay, so, the AI also said that you should use AI tools just for drafting and brainstorming. Granted, a very rough draft of something will probably be doable. But then you have to diligently verify every little detail of this draft – okay, fine, a draft is a draft, it’s fine if it contains errors. The thing is, though, that you really must do this verification. And I claim that many people will not do it, because AI outputs look sooooo convincing, they don’t feel like a draft that needs editing.

Can you, as an expert, still use an AI draft as a basis/foundation? Yeah, probably. But here’s the kicker: You did not create that draft. You were not involved in the “thought process” behind it. When you, a human being, make a draft, you often think something like: “Okay, I want to draw a picture of a landscape and there’s going to be a little house, but for now, I’ll just put in a rough sketch of the house and add the details later.” You are aware of what you left out. When the AI did the draft, you are not aware of what’s missing – even more so when every AI output already looks like a final product. For me, personally, this makes it much harder and slower to verify such a draft, and I mentioned this in my text.

You, @prologic@twtxt.net, also mentioned this in your car tyre example.

In my text, I gave two analogies: The gym analogy and the Google Translate analogy. Your car tyre example falls in the same category, but Gemini’s calculator example is different (and, again, gaslight-y, see below).

What I meant in my text: A person wants to be a programmer. To me, a programmer is a person who writes code, understands code, maintains code, writes documentation, and so on. In your example, a person who changes a car tyre would be a mechanic. Now, if you use AI to write the code and documentation for you, are you still a programmer? If you have no understanding of said code, are you a programmer? A person who does not know how to change a car tyre, is that still a mechanic?

No, you’re something else. You should not be hired as a programmer or a mechanic.

Yes, that is “skill evolution” – which is pretty much my point! But the AI framed it like a counter-argument. It didn’t understand my text.

(But what if that’s our future? What if all programming will look like that in some years? I claim: It’s not possible. If you don’t know how to program, then you don’t know how to read/understand code written by an AI. You are something else, but you’re not a programmer. It might be valid to be something else – but that wasn’t my point, my point was that you’re not a bloody programmer.)

Gemini’s calculator example is garbage, I think. Crunching numbers and doing mathematics (i.e., “complex problem-solving”) are two different things. Just because you now have a calculator, doesn’t mean it’ll free you up to do mathematical proofs or whatever.

What would have worked is this: Let’s say you’re an accountant and you sum up spendings. Without a calculator, this takes a lot of time and is error prone. But when you have one, you can work faster. But once again, there’s a little gaslight-y detail: A calculator is correct. Yes, it could have “bugs” (hello Intel FDIV), but its design actually properly calculates numbers. AI, on the other hand, does not understand a thing (our current AI, that is), it’s just a statistical model. So, this modified example (“accountant with a calculator”) would actually have to be phrased like this: Suppose there’s an accountant and you give her a magic box that spits out the correct result in, what, I don’t know, 70-90% of the time. The accountant couldn’t rely on this box now, could she? She’d either have to double-check everything or accept possibly wrong results. And that is how I feel like when I work with AI tools.

Gemini has no idea that its calculator example doesn’t make sense. It just spits out some generic “argument” that it picked up on some website.

The AI makes two points here. The first one, I might actually agree with (“bad bot behavior is not the fault of AI itself”).

The second point is, once again, gaslighting, because it is phrased/framed like a counter-argument. It implies that I said something which I didn’t. Like the AI, I said that you would have to adjust the copyright law! At the same time, the AI answer didn’t even question whether it’s okay to break the current law or not. It just said “lol yeah, change the laws”. (I wonder in what way the laws would have to be changed in the AI’s “opinion”, because some of these changes could kill some business opportunities – or the laws would have to have special AI clauses that only benefit the AI techbros. But I digress, that wasn’t part of Gemini’s answer.)

Except for one point, I don’t accept any of Gemini’s “criticism”. It didn’t pick up on lots of details, ignored arguments, and I can just instinctively tell that this thing does not understand anything it wrote (which is correct, it’s just a statistical model).

And it framed everything like a counter-argument, while actually repeating what I said. That’s gaslighting: When Alice says “the sky is blue” and Bob replies with “why do you say the sky is purple?!”

But it sure looks convincing, doesn’t it?

This took so much of my time. I won’t do this again. 😂