Hugh

Hey so random recommendation for Australians: I recently started listening to Reformasi Dispatch podcast and now I know 98% more about current affairs & politics in Indonesia specifically and SouthEast Asia generally. If you'd like to know more about our neighbours to the north, I highly recommend it!

Last night I went to a 70th birthday party and ended up sitting next to Frank.

Frank used to work as a computer programmer, because this was the 1970s to 90s and people had normal job titles that described real things, instead of "full stack orchestration engineer" or "solutions architect".

Anyway Frank's employer was the Victorian Attorney General's department. He wrote, updated and maintained in-house software for managing the court system, trial documentation managements and so on using low level languages.

The point of this post is that there was nothing special about this period of history that made it possible for government departments to write and maintain their own software to solve their own problems then but not now.

The complete lack of any in-house capacity to do this kind of thing is a political choice. Frank is a reminder of that.

🚨 ausglam.space maintenance 🚨

Ok thanks to @misty@digipres.club I *probably* have the answer to why earlier upgrade attempts failed, so ausglam.space will have some down time later today, and 🤞 we will then be upgraded to the latest Hometown and Mastodon.

Why take hallucinogenic drugs when you could simply read this article in Harpers?

https://harpers.org/archive/2026/03/childs-play-sam-kriss-ai-startup-roy-lee

Clarivate: We have decided to ignore best practice password hygiene in favour of password security theatre. Thankyou for your attention to this matter.

The point of AI is to discipline labour. The "productivity" comes from suppressing wages through fear.

ausglam.space will be down for maintenance later tonight.

Down for how long, you ask? Well that depends on how incompetently I manage the upgrade.

This is very good. You should read it.

"Technology doesn’t need to be free. It cannot be free because freedom as a concept applies to people."

https://tante.cc/2026/02/20/acting-ethical-in-an-imperfect-world

I thought I was going mad but Mastodon really does send the "object" in "Flag" activities as an array and not an ...object.

What even are words.

Still thinking about how CAUL unceremoniously dumped the international collective they built, one year after winning an OE Global award for building it.

https://awards.oeglobal.org/awards/2024/open-collaboration/caul-open-educational-resources-collective