Can confirm that the most significant impact of AI on the cultural heritage institution I work for—BY FAR—has been the staff time and technical cost required to defend against the constant, uncoordinated, and wildly inefficient harvesting of our open data.

Alex Merz 🇺🇸🇨🇦🇺🇦@merz.bsky.social · 5h ago

#AI #LLM Something I've not seen commented on is the explosion of bot-impeding pages (e.g., via Cloudflare) that now appear before web pages load. The cumulative time waste for human users has got to be in the billions of person-hours. An immense burden imposed on everyone by the AI-bro assholes.

Regular viewers will know that I had serious doubts about the 'recovery' well before Trump decided to cause global chaos (and trading opportunities for his buddies). Suffice to say, today's unemployment data is GRIM! Let's have a look... Unemployment rate vs the guesses of clueless ghouls. [🧵 1/n]

Talk about a vote of no confidence. Feels like a brutally specific indictment - not just of where things are at right now for young people, but also how they see the future. Can’t say as I blame them; but how do we win back hope?

RNZ News Feeds@rnzrss.bsky.social · 3d ago

'Things are screwed anyway, why try?' Youth voter enrolment rate plummets

one road, not even long enough to run a marathon on, for the low low price of 42 times the entire 2027 budget for scientific research in new zealand #nzpol

Biggest-ever PPP: $3.6b Northland expressway deal signed

The 26km expressway will include twin tunnels through the Dome Valley.

nzherald.co.nz

I think there will be real value in vibe code cleanup services but I expect most jobs would be a discovery that the vibe coding is a symptom, not a cause.

Attacks on libraries, library staff, collections and patrons are ramping up around the world. Anti library campaigners appear to be sharing their playbooks and only need to be lucky once while library campaigners need to be lucky every single time.📚📜

The Free Speech Union having their CE and board member stand as candidates for Internet NZ and emailing their members to rank them 1 and 2 and not rank any other candidates feels like it should be more of a news story. It's antithetical to a genuine election and the democratic process.

Was in New York again last week and it struck me that a minor but possibly underrated reason for NYC’s unusually strong literary culture (compared to other US cities) is that many people’s main mode of transportation is a passive one where they intermittently lose cell service.

Very useful video to settle debates (in New Zealand, and elsewhere) on whether increasing speed limits on highways from 100kmph to 120kmph make any sense. You only ever save, at best, around one minute. Taken from Instagram, www.instagram.com/reel/DaP4kyF... #nzpol

Conference organisers could immediately impose an embarrassingly silly “AI hat” forfeit. The hat has to be worn for the rest of the talk, and also if you want to be served lunch or get your free drink at the dinner and of course in the group photo.

Zen Faulkes@doctorzen.net · last wk.

Conference organizers don’t have any way to ban gen AI talks and slides, but they could provide far more guidance on best practice and good design.

On top of AI brain rot, companies are proactively obliterating every trace of organizational knowledge they managed to accrue, by annual waves of mass layoffs targeting the most tenured (expensive) people.

As well as what Musical Chairs says here... Yes! Of course Government can spend money better than me! They have scale, access and resources that are totally unavailable to me which allow the value of that money to go further!

Musical Chairs@musicalchairs.bsky.social · 2w ago

Regular reminder that Govt creates new money when it spends, and deletes money when it taxes. The spending has to come first. The more Govt spend, the more money we have to pay taxes (and the more resources are appropriated by Govt ofc).

I often joke that I live on the last road on earth. As evidence, here's a video that dives deep on finding the Loneliest Building In The World, and the nearest neighbour to their choice is… one of my neighbours' sheep barns. www.youtube.com/watch?v=tAhd...

I Found the Loneliest Building on Earth

YouTube video by Matt Forrest

youtube.com

www.theguardian.com/world/2026/j...

Total solar eclipse books out hotels two years in advance in New Zealand city

Dunedin will be the focal point, having last experienced such an eclipse in 1163 – before any humans reached New Zealand

theguardian.com

Aotearoa bird-voting culture is undefeated.

Jer Thorp@jerthorp.bsky.social · 2w ago

In the end, it wasn't even close. The pīwakawaka is the best "ordinary" bird in the world! Undefeated in 8 matches, this little guy was the class of the tournament by some distance. #WorldCupOfBirds

Gotta rep my piwakawaka or the three that are out on the deck right now are never gonna let me hear the end of it.

Jer Thorp@jerthorp.bsky.social · 3w ago

Who will win #WorldCupOfBirds Match 102? 1️⃣ Black Guillemot (🏴󠁧󠁢󠁳󠁣󠁴󠁿) 2️⃣ New Zealand Fantail (🇳🇿) 📊 Show results

💯💯💯

Amalia S. Levi, PhD@amaliasl.bsky.social · 3w ago

📢 Once more for the people in the back: - Most [more than 95%] of archives have not been digitized. - Most of humanity's knowledge and memory is *not* reachable by LLMs. - Believing that AI can provid you with comprehensive, definitive, "intelligent" results is folly.

If you're in Dunedin on Friday 17 July, come along and hear me talk about how to vandalise Wikipedia.* Guaranteed amusing anecdotes, but also educational. And it's pay-what-you-want. *It would be nice if you did not actually vandalise Wikipedia. scifest.org.nz/programme/ho...

How to Vandalise Wikipedia with Mike Dickison | NZ Science Festival

Can we trust Wikipedia? How does it even work? Find out how the editable website stays reliable.

scifest.org.nz

Seriously though I was that kid who when my high school history teacher said "you have to turn in your rough draft with your final version" did the final version and then made a slightly shittier version as the "rough draft" and printed it on worse paper

✨❤️✨

Christchurch City Libraries Ngā Kete Wānanga o Ōtautahi@christchurchlib.bsky.social · 4w ago

Mānawatia a Matariki mā Puaka! Multiple levels of keen listeners at Tūranga as Te Akatoki perform on the stairs. Tumeke! ^MT

This is life-endangering if you don't use facebook and governments need to do better.

📢 Latest update on the Dunedin weather. We had a higher volume of rain than predicted last night. Most of the system has held up well, but Mosgiel has been hit hard due to localised rainfall there. The Taieri Bowling Club on Wickliffe Street is open as an evacuation and Welfare Centre.

Happy Independence Day

😍this is my politics electric school buses for kids turning into even more of a public utility than they already are by helping the grid out....

Patrick Siegman@siegman.biz · last mo.

Parked but not idle: The buses “will charge up their nearly 200-kilowatt-hour batteries overnight, when the power supply is at its cleanest & cheapest, then send energy back to the grid from 4 pm to 7 pm on days when the grid is strained. The district will earn revenue for the power it shares…”

I especially love this diagram.

In the stone ages I went to a training session where we were told students could only concentrate for 15 mins and this new invention - PowerPoint - would allow us to put up a captivating image. Professor of Medieval Italian was outraged: part of our job, he said, was to accustom people to boredom.

Asheesh Kapur Siddique@asheeshks.org · 2mo ago

Idea for a conference: figure out how to fund people to do humanities research using methods like sitting in archives and libraries for years reading and thinking and writing about what they find out.

When utilized in literature review, LLMs consistently 1. fail to mention female authors in female-led literatures, 2. insist that men are more influential or more heavily cited when this is contradicted by objective citation counts, and 3. attribute women’s work to hallucinated male scholars.

Delightful news. I am waiting for the day an adventurous kākā makes it over here across the harbour. We're only about 5k as the kākā flies, and no possums! C'mon over and hang, you goofy, noisy lil guys.

Orokonui kākā make Dunedin their home

After being extinct in Dunedin for about 150 years, encounters with endangered kākā are becoming increasingly common across the city. The noisy...

odt.co.nz