Booker inspirations
At The Guardian the authors shortlisted for this year's Booker Prize -- whose winner is to be announced tomorrow -- explain: ‘I had a year to write it from scratch’: the 2025 Booker finalists on the stories behind their novels.
Good news on the AI slop front in Social Media
The Indicator: “Two platform updates this week gave me a rare feeling of hope about AI slop. On Wednesday, TikTok announced it would pilot new controls to let users filter how much AI-generated content they see on their For You feeds. The platform already allows users to dial up and down certain topics like current affairs, dance, or fitness. It’s now promising to test letting people decide how much synthetic video they want to see. The move follows Pinterest’s lead; Bluesky users can also filter out AI content by subscribing to a third-party labeler. I would bet that more platforms will follow. (Our guide to AI labelsoutlines down how different platforms handle AI content, and gets continuously updated.)…”
See also CNET – AI Slop Has Turned Social Media Into an Antisocial Wasteland. Commentary: Platforms that once helped us stay in touch have become fractured and impersonal — and AI slop and deepfakes are making it so much worse.
Drone Resources 2025 – This article by Marcus P. Zillman includes links to a range of guides for drone pilots interested in photography, medicine, civil security, real estate, e-commerce, as well as product reviews and buying guides.
Will you still be paying off a home loan in retirement?
Thinking about retiring soon? Here’s where to start
The UK is outlawing ticket scalping?
How the internet made the far right
NYT on Solvej Balle. And from The New Yorker
Claims about risk and prediction markets
The Librarians – documentary film on censorship
Via Kottke – The Librarians – As part of the fascist war on “woke”, tens of thousands of books have been pulled from the shelves of libraries around the country over the past few years. On the front line are the nation’s librarians, “first responders in the fight for democracy and our First Amendment rights”. The Librarians is a documentary film about this latest wave of censorship & persecution of librarians; here’s the trailer. From a review on RogerEbert.com
Perry de Havilland (Prague) · Education & Academia · Slogans & Quotations · UK affairs
We’re told that students perform better when exposed to “different formats”. This is fair enough in principle, though the guidelines decline to specify what these formats might be, beyond implying there will be an impressive number of them. One can already picture the future: a single course requiring essays, posters, podcasts, puppet shows and a short stop-motion film made from Play-Doh – each designed to develop the student’s confidence, creativity and capacity to perform self-expression in increasingly unhinged ways.
Next, the document warns that “Standard Academic English” (once known as “English”) is an oppressive tool that advantages “already privileged students”. The implication, apparently, is that requiring coherent writing is a form of violence.
This is the educational equivalent of a gym announcing that push-ups are discriminatory because they favour those with upper-body strength.
Don’t argue with strangers… and 11 more rules to survive the information crisis
The Guardian: “Feeling overwhelmed by divisive opinions, endless rows and unreliable facts?…sadly we can expect this to get worse before it gets better. But there are tools and techniques we can use in the current information crisis. There are ways we can be better equipped to deal with the era we find ourselves in…Here’s how to weather the data storm..”
- 1 Find a fact-checker you trust – Just as after the print revolution in early modern Europe, it is now massively easier to access scientific information. In a few seconds I can find a video clearly explaining particle physics, chemical bonds or how vaccines work. And at the same time, it is also extremely easy to find very plausible-looking information that is completely false about how vaccines are actually terrible and suggesting solutions that I really don’t even want to write down here. But unlike people living through the print revolution, we have sophisticated and trusted information-dispersal networks that are still fairly robust. The BBC has a good fact-checking service. Snopes and PolitiFact are good. There are others, and it’s worth getting familiar with them. Fact-checking is a specialised skill, though, and it is becoming more challenging as the fakes get ever more convincing…”
Inside the old church where one trillion webpages are being saved
CNN via MSN: “Just blocks from the Presidio of San Francisco, the national park at the base of the Golden Gate Bridge, stands a gleaming white building, its façade adorned with eight striking gothic columns. But what was once the home of a Christian Scientist church, is now the holy grail of Internet history — the Internet Archive, a non-profit library run by a group of software engineers and librarians, who for nearly 30 years have been saving the web one page at a time. Inside the stained-glass-adorned sanctuary, the sounds of church sermons have been replaced by the hum of servers, where the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine preserves web pages. The Wayback Machine, a tool used by millions every day, has proven critical for academics and journalists searching for historical information on what corporations, people and governments have published online in the past, long after their websites have been updated or changed. For many, the Wayback Machine is like a living history of the internet, and it just logged its trillionth page last month. Archiving the web is more important and more challenging than ever before. The White House in January ordered vast amounts of government webpages to be taken down. Meanwhile, artificial intelligence is blurring the line between what’s real and what’s artificially generated — in some ways replacing the need to visit websites entirely. And more of the internet is now hidden behind paywalls or tucked in conversations with AI chatbots. It’s the Internet Archive’s job to figure out how to preserve it all…
The rise of artificial intelligence and AI chatbots means the Internet Archive is changing how it records the history of the internet. In addition to web pages, the Internet Archive now captures AI-generated content, like ChatGPT answers and those summaries that appear at the top of Google search results. The Internet Archive team, which is made up of librarians and software engineers, are experimenting with ways to preserve how people get their news from chatbots by coming up with hundreds of questions and prompts each day based on the news, and recording both the queries and outputs, [says Wayback Machine Director Mark Graham]…Archivists use bespoke machines to digitize books page by page, livestreamingtheir work on YouTube for all to see (alongside some lo-fi music). Record players churn out vintage tunes from 1920s and 1940s, and the building houses every type of media console for any type of content imaginable, from microfilm, to CDs and satellite television. (The Internet Archive preserves music, television, books and video games, too)… “There are a lot of people that are just passionate about the cause. There’s a cyberpunk atmosphere,” Annie Rauwerda, a Wikipedia editor and social media influencer, said at a party thrown at the Internet Archive’s headquarters to celebrate reaching a trillion pages “The internet (feels) quite corporate when I use it a lot these days, but you wouldn’t know from the people here.”
The skills tax professionals need in today’s landscape
The second commissioner of taxation has outlined the necessary and crucial skills tax professionals, advisers, agents, policymakers and administrators need in today’s landscape.
Earlier this year at the ATAX International Conference on Tax Administration, Kirsten Fish, second commissioner of taxation, shared why tax professionals must remain ahead of the curve while keeping their core skills intact.
Despite a focus on change and the future of technology within the tax space, Fish made clear that tax professionals would always need law, regulation and technical tax knowledge, communication and negotiation skills, attention to detail, as well as ethics and public interest.
“In 2025, globalisation has transformed the size, scale, and nature of transactions and business operations. Technology has enabled new industries to emerge, large businesses have complex and sophisticated supply chains, and even small businesses can operate globally, selling products and services through online digital platforms,” she said.
“Individuals are deriving income and gains and trading new digital assets and high frequency through new types of legal transactions. Technological developments, such as automation and AI, have changed the way tax professionals work. Traditional manual tasks are being replaced by automated processes and AI tools.”
It was noted that technology had also changed the way professionals engaged with tax authorities, yet confirmed the evolution would not replace tax professionals and their knowledge, skills and attributes, but merely changed how they worked.
It went without saying that tax professionals would always require a deep understanding and grasp of tax law and regulations, Fish said.
“Tax professionals must understand that the tax law exists and applies in the context of the operation of the general law and have a current working knowledge of contract law, corporations law, the law of trusts and partnerships, real property and intellectual property law, aspects of international law and more,” she said.
“The general law that tax practitioners must maintain currency will itself continue to evolve and develop.”
“As globalisation and technology drive changes in business structures, operations, transactions and even the nature of assets and payments, these will necessarily drive changes in the regulatory landscape and general law that tax practitioners must understand beyond those traditional areas and into the realms of smart contracts, digital assets, payment regulation, automated decision making and privacy.”
In terms of new skills, Fish said it was imperative that tax professionals questioned and tested the outputs produced by automated processes, software, AI and other technology were correct.
Tax professionals should now have the skills and knowledge to identify irregularities and exercise judgement based on their human experience and broader knowledge of the circumstances in which they operate, therefore should never assume or accept the outputs produced by something automated as correct.
Based on their strategic role, Fish said tax professionals needed to have a broad understanding of business operations, strategy, financial management and industry-specific information and challenges so they could effectively and efficiently provide “holistic advice”.
“In this, top tax professionals are able to adequately and appropriately assess tax risk and provide solutions to address it within the risk appetite of their client or organisation,” Fish said.
“In doing so, they do not look merely at the technical issues and consider whether an interpretation or position is ‘available’. Top tax professionals consider matters holistically, in the commercial context, with an understanding of the consequences of the position adopted for the business, the tax system, and the likely attitudes of the administrator.”
Attributes were also highlighted as increasingly important for top tax professionals, with ethics and integrity being named as the most fundamental.
Australia needed tax professionals who were trusted and trustworthy, given the nation's reliance on tax to fund government services and the tax system's reliance on the existence of tax professionals.
According to Fish and the ATO, tax professionals had the highest possible standards of personal and professional ethics and integrity as they had to stand by their convictions, even in challenging situations.
“With the many and varied skills that a tax expert is expected to have today, you might think they are a unicorn. But I would argue that actually what we're really looking for in a tax expert is someone that is human,” Fish said.
“As technology advances, it is our humanness and human skills become even more essential and valuable for tax professionals. With curiosity, judgment, integrity, and influence, today's tax professionals are well-placed to adapt to future changes.”
