michael lascarides

Otago Peninsula officially declared possum free A biodiversity advocate says possums were recently so rare in the region that roadkill was something the younger generations had never seen.

This is a wonderful thing. The entire community has been working for about 17 years to eradicate possums from the peninsula, and they’ve succeeded.

No way to predict this, says Government of nation whose media outlined exactly this scenario 16 months ago.

(that one lone green triangle in the middle is the one Iran set on fire last night, which I imagine scattered the rest out of missle range)

Been watching marinetraffic.com (an excellent resource for getting the current real-time vibe in the Gulf), and fwiw, all the ships waiting just outside the Strait backed the f up about 60km overnight. Does not seem to be improving.

Whānau, remember how the far-right tried to take over Internet NZ last year and we kicked their butts? They haven't learned, and they're trying to do it again this year. Register by March 31st ($21 for a year) so you can vote in the AGM and send them packing again. members.internetnz.nz

My favourite grasshopper fact: Grasshoppers first appeared on the planet 250 million years ago.

Grass did not appear on the planet until 40 million years ago

Imagine it: 210 million years, hopping around on any random surface you can find, waiting for the grass that will make you truly yourself.

"No man earns punishment, no man earns reward. Free your mind of the idea of deserving, the idea of earning, and you will begin to be able to think."

— Ursula K. Le Guin

Would be keen to learn more about this framework.

Rule #1 in warfare: don’t start a war if your primary enemy is your own skill issue

I want this lenticular card.
(Paris Fashion Week x Anrealage x Ghost In The Shell)

UX researcher here 👋🏻 Yes, this will be quite bad.
Most of the critical things you need to uncover about your target customer is latent needs and behaviors. The kind of stuff that doesn’t exist in the training data fed into models. That’s why synthetic users produced by AI are garbage.

We need to mercilessly, brutally, viciously cull every single person in tech who does not understand what "garbage in, garbage out" means.

They simply can't coexist with human society. They need to go fuck off into the deep forest.

So grateful to my Peninsula neighbours for this epic mahi. Have traded my possum traps for native birdsong. Next: the rats.

Our organisation had a multi-year project to retire or merge the dozens of little freestanding websites we'd accumulated over the years. We made a cartoon cemetery on a whiteboard with a little paper gravestone for each. Often there'd be a little eulogy at standup for the most recently departed.

I stopped myself from posting family pics on instagram in 2021 because we were doing stuff like going to festivals and concerts and that was So Not The Case for my American friends and whānau who were in the midst of some real trauma.

Screenshot of map marine traffic in the Strait of Hormuz, showing still no ship traffic, 10 March 2026.

The markets and the commentariat can express whatever belief they want through words & prices, but this is the live view of the Strait (& next week's oil).

Wake me when there's red dots in the middle.

"The ability to tell shit from chocolate" is a significant chunk of the value of the Humanities.

This thread is incredible; if you have more suggestions, post them in the replies:

Screenshot of ships moored outside the Strait of Hormuz, from Marinetraffic.com.

Marinetraffic.com is a trip right now in the Gulf region. This is a mooring (one of several) just outside the Strait of Hormuz. Too many ships to render properly.

If you're playing bar trivia and one of the other teams looks like this...you're gonna lose

I had the increasingly rare experience of feeling better informed after reading this.

"Explanations exist; they have existed for all time; there is always a well-known solution to every human problem—neat, plausible, and wrong."

— H. L. Mencken, 1920.

This is what it looks like to be an "electrostate"; politics flow from what energy infrastructures will allow.

He'll enlist and they'll immediately promote him to Colonel in charge of a wing of the Pentagon.

A great conversation from a couple of lovely humans who've been doing interesting work in digital libraries for decades. (Meeting Tim at NYPL back in the day was my first connection to the Oceania GLAM world that's become my home.)

Their true innovation was being the first in that space to lawyer up and convince the Patent Office to give them cover. Believe me when I say that there was a lot of "wtf?!" about the decision in the early e-commerce space.

A reminder to the young 'uns that Amazon *patented* one-click shopping early on, which was less an invention than a technique that was blindingly obvious to everyone in the industry at the time. This literally meant that every other e-commerce store required more clicks in their ordering process.

This is just a shitpost, but there's something to the idea that

Almost every design choice and optimization for large language model-based "AI" comes from the designers' terror of ever hearing the words "you're wrong" or even just "no."

This show convinced me 7-year-old me that I too could build a spaceship out of things I found in the backyard.

Bush v. Gore, man. What an inflection point. That week post-9/11, had President Gore come on the TV and said "We need to get off of oil as a matter of national security", we would've all done it.

Instead we got…