Adelaide Writers’ Week on the brink following author boycotts

13 January 2026

Hannah Story, writing for the Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC):

Authors including Miles Franklin winners Michelle de Kretser and Melissa Lucashenko will boycott Adelaide Writers’ Week (AWW) to protest the cancellation of an event featuring Palestinian Australian author, lawyer and activist Randa Abdel-Fattah. Other authors who have withdrawn from the festival include Peter Greste, Yanis Varoufakis, Evelyn Araluen, Amy McQuire, Clare Wright, Chelsea Watego, Bernadette Brennan and Amy Remeikis.

The boycott is in response to the removal of Palestinian Australian author Randa Abdel-Fattah from the 2026 event, scheduled to start at the end of February.

Organisers felt Abdel-Fattah’s presence would “not be culturally sensitive” in the wake of last December’s mass shooting at Sydney’s Bondi Beach, which targeted the Jewish community.

Although organisers say Abdel-Fattah’s writing played no part whatsoever in the atrocity, they were concerned by her long standing anti-Israel sentiments.

Abdel-Fattah has asked organisers to reinstate her, while more writers are threatening to withdraw from the event if this does not happen.

Markdown does not belong to John Gruber, it belongs to everyone

12 January 2026

Anil Dash:

The trillion-dollar AI industry’s system for controlling their most advanced platforms is a plain text format one guy made up for his blog and then bounced off of a 17-year-old kid before sharing it with the world for free. You’re welcome, Time Magazine’s people of the year, The Architects of AI. Their achievement is every bit as impressive as yours.

I’ve never used Markdown, created by John Gruber, aided by the late Aaron Swartz, in 2004, I still add the Markup included in my web writing either through copy and paste, or manually.

That’s the former web designer in me talking. If I want to add, say, bold formatting to some text, how hard is it to type out the <strong> tag, and </strong> to close it again?

Of course, I can see how much easier it would be to type **bold** using Markdown instead, if I wanted to apply bold formatting somewhere. But the real story is just how widely used the formatting tool has become since Gruber released it twenty-two years ago.

I don’t really mean to say “Markdown does not belong to John Gruber, it belongs to everyone”, but that seems to be what has happened.

Much of Australia presently in the grip of a heatwave

8 January 2026

Most Australia states, with the reported exception of Queensland, are in the grip of a heatwave. Temperatures in our part of the world, the NSW Central Coast, are expected to reach the high thirties, Celsius, on Saturday. That’ll be a little too warm at our place here, which doesn’t have AC.

We’ll go into Sydney, where ironically Saturday’s high is (presently) forecast to peak at forty-two degrees, Celsius. However we will have AC there.

We remain hopeful the southerly buster will come through not too late in the day though. This is a wind change from the south (bringing chilled Antarctic air northwards), and can see temperatures drop by up to twenty-degrees over the course of fifteen to twenty minutes.

According to the Bureau of Meteorology, a heatwave occurs in Australia when the maximum and minimum temperatures are unusually hot over three days. We’re only one day into this, and already feeling the pinch. Accumulating heat will make Friday uncomfortable, to say nothing of Saturday.

It’s going to be a difficult time for a lot of people, with bush fires in some places making matters worse. Do whatever you can to stay cool over the next few days.

The more personal websites there are, the better the web will be

6 January 2026

A website to destroy all websites, by Henry Desroches.

Hand-coded, syndicated, and above all personal websites are exemplary: They let users of the internet to be autonomous, experiment, have ownership, learn, share, find god, find love, find purpose. Bespoke, endlessly tweaked, eternally redesigned, built-in-public, surprising UI and delightful UX. The personal website is a staunch undying answer to everything the corporate and industrial web has taken from us.

The website (to destroy all websites) in question is the personal website, because through personal websites, we build the web we want to have. If you only read one article about the present state of the web, make it this one.

Large Language Models and Artificial Intelligence in 2025

5 January 2026

Simon Willison’s third annual review of the AI space, for last year. I read someone saying somewhere that Willison has become expert in AI and LLM since ChatGPT arrived in late 2022.

He’s not the only one (obviously), but in late 2022 and early 2023 I was having conversations with people about ChatGPT and AI. At the time a number of these people looked at me blankly. One said they kept hearing about ChatGPT, but knew little about it.

Fast forward three years, and two of these people — who knew next to nothing about the topic — went on to assume senior roles in their workplaces overseeing the development and deployment of AI technologies. Positions that didn’t exist in 2022.

Possibly I regret my decision to remain focused on writing copy, content, and maybe even blogging here, instead of somehow jumping on the AI train. But on the other hand, possibly I don’t.

Adam Mosseri: the old, personal, Instagram feed is dead

5 January 2026

But that’s what Instagram’s (IG) owner wanted of course. Put another way, this means anyone using IG is expected to behave like an influencer, even if they only have a handful of followers.

The comment was made by Mosseri, Head of Meta owned IG, in a year-end presentation (Instagram link), a few days ago. That Mosseri didn’t label his thoughts Instagram Wrapped is a small mercy.

The IG leader also made the point that authenticity is becoming ever harder to gauge, on account of the proliferation of generative AI tools. It doesn’t matter that Meta is playing a part here, what’s important is ascertaining what content posted to IG is genuine, and what is AI generated.

This means more layers of verification, and not just for content, but users also. If that’s not for you, now’s a good time to jump ship. Provided you can establish a presence somewhere else.

But that’s not going to be most people. They have IG pages that their businesses and livelihoods depend upon, and have not realised just how, bit by bit, reliant they’ve become on the platform.

Write more, about anything, on a personal website, not social media

2 January 2026

Fernando Borretti:

I will often find a blog post on Hacker News that really resonates. And when I go to check the rest of the site there’s three other posts. And I think: I wish you’d write more! When I find someone whose writing I really connect with, I like to read everything they have written, or at least a tractable subset of their most interesting posts.

I’m the same.

There are probably quite a few people writing, or posting publicly, but much of that content ends up on social media, rather than a personal website or blog. Let’s do more to encourage independent online publishing on personal websites and blogs.

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blogs, self publishing, social media

Melbourne Ashes fourth test pitch judged unsatisfactory by ICC

1 January 2026

Test matches in cricket are generally meant to last the best part of five days. Fans of the game expect to see individual batters clock up scores of one-hundred plus runs. Maybe two-hundred plus, if they get on a roll. Brian Lara, a West Indies cricketer, once made four-hundred runs in a test match.

Last week, during the fourth test of the Ashes Series, not one batter from either the Australian or English teams managed to notch more than fifty runs. Twenty wickets fell on the first day of this match. That means both teams were bowled out on the same day.

This sort of thing happens — it’s a funny old game after all — but it is not something anyone expects of the top, first class, teams of any cricketing nation.

Last Tuesday the International Cricket Council (ICC) rated the pitch at the Melbourne Cricket Ground (MCG) as “unsatisfactory”, which is the second lowest rating a cricket pitch can receive.

This was on account of the one-centimetre long grass on the pitch, which seemed to suit bowlers more than batters, and explains the regularity with which wickets tumbled. Usually, the grass on test pitches is shorter, but on occasions has exceeded one centimetre.

While the length of the grass contributed to the low scoring game, commentators also said the quality of batting left much to be desired. England went on to win the truncated two day test match, their first victory in nearly fifteen years on Australian soil.

The fifth, and final, Ashes test commences in Sydney on Sunday 4 January 2026.

While Australia has already retained the Ashes, with a three to one lead in the five game series, I’m hoping England win in Sydney. That would make the score line three to two, and look, at least on paper, that this summer’s test series had been some sort of contest.

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Australia, cricket, England, sport

Otroverts have websites called disassociated, are like Albert Einstein

1 January 2026

Rami Kaminski, a New York based psychiatrist, has identified a new personality type, the otrovert:

An Otrovert is someone who feels like an eternal outsider in groups, even when they are friendly and socially capable. Media descriptions of “otroverts” commonly emphasize emotional independence from groups, original thinking, low interest in joining or in adopting group rituals, and a tendency to seek depth in a small number of relationships rather than broad group belonging.

This seems all very familiar.

Albert Einstein, for one, is cited as an example of an otrovert, although up until now he’d been more considered an introvert. Otrovert seems more like a sub-classification of an introvert though, and I dare say more could forthcoming, as one introvert is not a cookie-cutter version of another.

The same, no doubt, would go for extroverts as well.

The COVID, AI, triggered cultural vibe shift we did not see coming

30 December 2025

Sydney based Australian journalist and speech writer Brigid Delaney, writing for the Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC):

Arriving, a friend asked me how I was. I was OK, I replied, but still disorientated from my time on X. “I don’t know what’s real anymore,” I said. It was dawning on me that this feeling of not knowing reality was — for me — the vibe shift. AI had polluted my clarity, in part because it was so uncanny and real that it was very easy to be tricked.

The COVID lock-downs were the beginning, but the arrival of AI in 2022, and even the election of American President Donald Trump in 2024, have accelerated the vibe shift Delaney writes of.

I’m certainly aware of changes in the way people interact with each other, even if those are relatively subtle. I hear of people adopting hermit-like lifestyles, enveloping themselves in AI fostered domains, with AI companions, but don’t see, or hear, much about it in the circles I move. Most people seem to socialise face-to-face with family and friends as usual. Or at least create that impression.

Delaney’s article is contemplative reading, whatever your thoughts on any sort of vibe shift might be.

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