Golden Pains

I went to Golden Plains over the March long weekend. It's more or less the only festival I get my aching old bones to any more but it was a particularly special one. Kneecap were awesome, and it really felt like being part of a bit of a moment. PJ Harvey seemed to split the crowd, but I was firmly in the 'this is awesome' camp. She's always been god-teir and I was moved. I'm not really into Fontaines DC, but their show was great. I discovered the Osees and haven't looked back. Magdelena Bay, Elliot and Vincent and Bahamadia all also really stood out. Stella line ups. Good times.

The Victorian government has decided to live up to it's reputation of being the most progressive government in Victoria by ensuring that traumatised young kids from First Nations and migrant background are incarcerated by reforming bail laws. It just feels cruel, will only increase criminality of these young people leaving us less safe and failing our most vulnerable. Yes, people have a right to feel safe and we need to protect people from violent crime, but it seems to be that reforming bail laws is a pretty backward thing to do. Oh yeah, and they're also trying to restrict your right to protest which you should email your local representative about. I have.

Cloudflare have announced AI Labyrinth which, instead of blocking bots that ignore your robots.txt file, sends them down a Labyrinth of AI generated nonsense, causing them to waste resources etc. Needless to say it is now enabled for this blog.

Speaking of AI, Meredith Whittaker has highlighted the potential privacy and security issues associated with "agentic" (not a word) AI. In (Signal) related news, the UK government has removed it's encryption advice from their website. It's a move that is presumably linked to the encryption battle they are having with Apple that I mentioned in my previous post.

23andMe has gone bankrupt and now the DNA of 15 million people is up for sale. What could possibly go wrong?

It's not the sort of thing that I usually comment on, but Apple loses $1 billion a year on Apple TV+. A billion dollars is still a lot of money right? I'm sure there's some very clever business people that are playing a very clever long game, but wow that's a lot of money (I'm quite sure). Some really great TV is coming out of it at least.