All I can think of whenever I see Commbank’s annoyingly worded advertising campaign.
Max Wheeler
@maxwheeler
- 152 Followers
- 183 Following
- 462 Posts
A duck once chased me. In the high-level details at Visibuild. He/him.
𝔰𝔥𝔦𝔟𝔠𝔬In 2015 I was on a beach in Hawai'i helping build the prototype of what became Signal. I argued that the app needed pseudonyms because abusers know their victims' phone numbers. I lost the fight that day. History proved me right, and Signal would move to usernames under @Mer__edith's stewardship.
In this new essay, I trace the line from Barlow's Declaration of Independence of Cyberspace through smart-home forensics, metadata killings, and Archive Team's non-consensual Tumblr scrape to ask: when did we decide that a jpeg is a photograph, that a profile is a person, that storage is memory?
The answer involves a boat off Honolulu, the early days of Signal, Iran's missiles over Amazon's Dubai AWS facilities, and the communities already building for a world where the server goes dark. This is an essay about infrastructure, memory, archiving without consent, and what we lose when we mistake the filesystem for memory.
It is also the angriest and most personal text I've ever written. I'm furious, and you should be too. We bet an entire civilisation on a brutal and unreliable stack. Now, fate has come to collect that wager.
California has a lot to fucking answer for.
https://newdesigncongress.org/en/pub/who-will-remember-us-when-the-servers-go-dark/
Picked up Magical Athlete on the weekend and it is hilarious silly fun and the art is beautiful – kiddos loved it! https://www.cmyk.games/products/magical-athlete
”The giddy joy of his accomplishment is not only heartening. It's affirming.“
Sad but not unexpected to see obvious AI slop show up in ABC News articles – I hoped for better though: https://www.abc.net.au/news/2026-02-13/cooper-woods-australias-unexpected-champion-winter-olympics/106339106
The two other things I use Siri for still work though:
- Setting timers
- Automatically searching the web for “Ocean” when I fill up my water bottle
Somehow Apple has broken one of the *three* things I actually use Siri for. When I go to set reminders now with a request like, ”reminder 9am tomorrow do betterer”, it helpfully tells me that I have no reminder set for that time 🙃
Of course asking it to set that reminder instead does one of these two things so far: create the reminder without any of the date information, or create a reminder named ”set that reminder“.
I will not read your article if you write it in the staccato-thought-leadership style people seem to think is so impactful (or at least LLMs think is so impactful).
Write full paragraphs, write with subtlety, write like you care at least a little for the human you’re trying to reach.
After working through the intense boringness of plantar fasciitis for the last 18 months, it is so nice to be able to simply go for a run and not be in continuous pain afterwards.
From the Australia Institute report earlier this year (https://australiainstitute.org.au/report/gun-control-in-australia/):
“Despite Australia’s significant gun reforms following the 1996 Port Arthur Massacre, there are now over four million guns owned by civilians nationwide — 25% higher than in 1996. This equates to one firearm for every seven Australians.”
Fuck guns. There’s no reason to have anything like this number of them accessible.
Gun Control in Australia
Despite Australia’s significant gun reforms following the 1996 Port Arthur Massacre, there are now over four million guns owned by civilians nationwide — 25% higher than in 1996. This equates to one firearm for every seven Australians. Guns are widespread in metropolitan and suburban areas, with one in three firearms in NSW located in major cities.