Colin

@colin@mckellar.social
16 Followers
170 Following
207 Posts
Native title lawyer, interested in video encoding, 3d printing, and technology generally.
@camwilson I heard your interview on If you’re listening. It was great. I look forward to reading your book. I mostly consume books in audio form. Will your book come out on audio? Or should I pick up a paper version?
@liamvhogan practise/practice just what on earth

This guy kept a diary which, among other things, records having killed almost 20 Aboriginal people around geraldton 1850s. The diary is now being published, but will remove references to the killings, because “we are too close to the moment” to look at it “dispassionately”. And “the nation is not yet ready to understand its often bloody and brutal past”

If a nation is not ready to understand its bloody and brutal past 170 years later, it likely intends to never so do.

https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2025/aug/05/the-descendants-traditional-owners-call-for-diaries-of-wa-settler-who-killed-aboriginal-people-to-be-released-in-full-ntwnfb

Traditional owners call for diaries of WA settler who killed Aboriginal people to be released in full

Major Logue’s diaries use code to describe the frontier killings of Yamatji people but a local publisher plans to omit the coded sections from publication

The Guardian

Wow, "AI" is doing the thing is absolutely known for doing, which is pulling nonsense straight out of its cybernetic ass, who could have possibly predicted this utterly predictable turn on events

https://gizmodo.com/fdas-new-drug-approval-ai-is-generating-fake-studies-report-2000633153

#uspol

FDA's New Drug Approval AI Is Generating Fake Studies: Report

The AI, dubbed Elsa, is supposed to be making employees better at their jobs.

Gizmodo

Improving AVIF in Open Source via the Halide blog

https://halide.cx/blog/improving-avif-in-open-source/index.html

I wanted to write this to explain some of what went into Tune 4/Tune IQ, & help outline some of my reasoning for starting Halide Compression in the first place. I hope you enjoy!

#av1 #avif #encoding

Improving AVIF in Open Source | Halide Blog

Had a couple, "I'm suddenly old" feelings in the last couple days during the process of getting some quotes for our roof (which is 20 years old) and maybe adding solar to it (if we can somehow swing it with a refinanced house loan or something).
The most surprising finding was while google docs does a really good job, Googles AI is a complete disaster at OCR. It hallucinated the majority of the test producing credible, but false output. I am worried that people may be using this, expecting accurate text detection.

In my day job I spend a lot of time reading and searching through old scanned government gazettes. I have long wondered how good their ocr was, and if I could find software that could do better. I compared a bunch of different options, and wrote about it here:

https://colinmckellar.com/2025/05/28/ocr-comparison/

OCR comparison – Something Something

I grew up in freo, and always saw people skateboarding along this ledge. I had no idea it was known so widely, and am excited that it is to be preserved. https://www.perthnow.com.au/local-news/perthnow-fremantle/fremantles-wool-stores-redevelopment-must-retain-world-famous-skate-ledge-says-midap-c-18581819
Fremantle’s Wool Stores redevelopment must retain world-famous skate ledge, says MIDAP

The 100m-long ledge is a 24/7 skateboarding haven for locals in Freo and a must-visit in Perth for some of the sport’s biggest names.

PerthNow
The only phone AI feature that I want is one that reviews my outgoing messages and adjusts them to make more realistic scheduling commitments. If I say I say I will meet someone at 8am on Sunday, my phone should intervene and change it so I will actually be meeting at 9… any true intelligence ought to know that an 8am meeting on a Sunday is unrealistic.