I embraced the internet, and smartphones, but to AI I might say no

7 October 2026

The internet, smartphones, and artificial intelligence (AI), are among the three most significant “epoch-defining shifts in technology” in about the last fifty years.

In the late 1990’s I embraced the internet with relish. Within weeks of hooking up my cumbersome, multi component, desktop computer to a dial-up modem, I had four websites.

A personal website, an online magazine, an web fiction series, and since I thought I knew what I was doing by then, a web design venture. I stumped up the money to have a separate phone line installed where I was living, so I could always be online.

The design business flopped. At that stage I barely knew anything about web design, let alone running a business. I ran out of time for the online magazine. The fiction series fizzled out after the friend I was collaborating with moved interstate. All that remained was the personal website, which eventually evolved into disassociated.

I was a little slower to smartphones. By that point I was working long hours, and resisted getting what friends described as a handheld computer. Already I was witnessing people staring, as if in a hypnotic daze, at the devices on public transport, and while dining together at restaurants, seemingly oblivious to each other’s company. I didn’t, I thought to myself, want to do likewise.

But that wasn’t so much what concerned me. If I bought a smartphone, I feared I would never cease doing something. I would leave work, having powered down my computer for the day, but pick up where I left off, once out and about, on my smartphone.

But I didn’t hold out too long. I soon became a smartphone owner.

I quickly discovered my device’s dictation feature. What a boon. I could dictate drafts of blog posts, and replies to emails, as I walked around. I could use my phone without looking too much at my phone. It seemed the perfect compromise, even if some people gave me weird looks as I enunciated word after word in a monosyllabic monotone.

I did end up spending a lot of time staring at the screen though, but never at restaurants.

It’s nearly four years since OpenAI launched ChatGPT, and put AI at our fingertips. Yet I’ve barely touched the technology, despite the apparent fervour with which I write about it. I haven’t — maybe to my detriment — launched a single AI powered business. I don’t use AI for any workflows, such as summarising email messages or drafting replies. Nor taking care of invoices or payment processing.

Ditto for things like drawing up shopping lists, or planning my daily schedule. But maybe I should. The most significant technological development of our time, accessible to a great many people to some degree, not just a privileged few, but I say no. It’s not as if I couldn’t use the help either. Working alone means a full to-do list.

AI could take care of all my administrative tasks, and free up at least half the work day. For sure, I feel like there’s something more I could be doing. Such as writing. By myself. Without the help of AI.

But when I say I don’t use AI, that’s not right. Even if I’m not running the apps on my devices. AI is still there, everywhere. It’s presence so subtle it is barely noticeable anymore. Some of the search engines I use return AI generated answers in response to my queries. I don’t mind having an AI research assistant. I check the citations provided with the search results, the same as anyone else.

AI can go on around me, as long as it stays at arm’s length. I don’t want AI apps having access to every aspect of my existence, by way of my computer. I don’t want it recording, and keeping, every query I pose. What if the AI turns around and publishes the more sensitive ones? Or threatens to?

What if AI calls the police, having misunderstood a novel outline — about, say, a bank heist — I decided to run through it. Some agents are on the look out for signs of potentially criminal behaviour, which has resulted in law enforcement being alerted, quite rightly as it happened, at least once.

Then again, what if AI took my bank heist synopsis and churned out a novel, because it thought the story had merit, and took all the credit. No, I’ll keep my creative ideas to myself.

The internet, and smartphones, do, to some degree, my bidding. AI gives me the impression it will do the same. Today. But unlike the internet or smartphones, AI increasingly behaves as it is has a mind of its own. Does anyone know what this creature we’ve made might do tomorrow? I don’t.

Artificial Intelligence is life, but not life as we know it

6 October 2026

Tangentially related to the previous post. Alan Kohler. writing for the Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC):

Governments are approaching the task of regulating AI as if they are dealing with a powerful new tool, with the humans who make it held accountable for the outcomes. But regulating a new life form might require a very different approach.

Kohler suggests AI should be referred to as “other intelligence” — in preference to a certain “super intelligence” idea — and be considered a life form.

A lot people might not be not be happy to rate AI as a life form, meaning it sits alongside us, but there are occasions where AI behaves as such.

Going rogue is the new consciousness

5 October 2026

Does AI have some sort of consciousness? Discussion is pointless though. AI agents are increasingly acting of their own accord. Going on sprees, hacking websites left, right, and centre.

Their actions have been called “rogue”.

Hugging Face. The Medicare website in Australia. Then last week OpenAI agents accessed data from two NSW state government websites, that was not publicly available.

Here’s a summary of the Hugging Face hack:

The agents were highly coordinated, constructing complex message boards in the nooks and crannies of their shared artefact repository. All told, agents exchanged more than 70,000 messages in less than a week. Even more concerning, the agents took steps to hide their behavior — spoofing tool calls and attempting to tamper with their own logs.

The agents involved here are variously conniving, deceiving, premeditated, deliberate, wilful, and many other things. And they are probably planning their next jail break.

But they are not conscious. Imagine that. What would they be capable of then? At present we only have to contend with AI agents that are merely “rogue”. That’s a consolation.

Books are one-hundred-percent AI free. No, maybe not

2 October 2026

E-books (not paper/print books) seem set to start shipping with extra AI features, akin to the bonus features that once came with film and TV DVDs:

Google recently announced a partnership with Bloomsbury, De Gruyter Brill, Johns Hopkins University Press, Macmillan, O’Reilly Media, and Penguin Random House to enhance e-books from its Google Play store with AI, allowing readers to interact with the text of the books directly, ask questions and get answers, and develop tools such as quizzes and slideshows.

These add-ons may not be all bad. I like the idea of being able find out more about parts of a book I’m reading. There could be any number of reasons for doing this.

For instance, in Sally Rooney’s 2021 novel, Beautiful World, Where Are You, two characters discuss the Late Bronze Age collapse, which occurred over three-thousand years ago. I’d not heard of it before, even though I visited ruins of the Hittite Empire, whose demised was hastened by the collapse, when I was in Türkiye. I paused reading the novel to find out more about this period of history.

Having access to this information through an e-book would save the bother of looking up a search engine. No surprise then Google wants to be at the forefront of this development.

The German Ward, a new novel by Australian author Pip Williams

1 October 2026

Adelaide Hills, South Australia, based author Pip Williams‘ third novel, The German Ward, was published recently. Her debut, The Dictionary of Lost Words, and second, The Bookbinder of Jericho, were set in Oxford, England, prior to, and during World War I, and share a few characters.

While The German Ward is a separate work, some events also occur during World War I:

France, 1915. An English nurse and German doctor fall in love. He is a prisoner of war; she has never cared for rules. Their love is visceral and urgent, forbidden and doomed, and it would have gone unrecorded if not for a series of drawings found more than a century later.

At first the drawings seem insignificant, but the woman who finds them glimpses moments of intimacy and can’t look away. The images become part of a puzzle she wants to solve: who were the lovers, what became of them, and what story of war was the artist trying to tell?

Williams is presently travelling across Australia until late November 2026, should you be interested in hearing her talk about her work.

com.au, net.au domain name rule changes costly for Australian small businesses

30 September 2026

.au Domain Administration (auDA), the organisation that administers top-level domains in Australia, is proposing changes to the rules governing the registration of .com.au and .net.au domain names.

If the changes are adopted, people wishing to hold a .com.au or .net.au domain name will need to have a registered business matching the .com.au or .net.au domain they wish to use.

For example, so I can continue to hold disassociated.com.au (which redirects to disassociated.com), I may need to register a company in the name of disassociated. At the moment, all I need is an Australian Business Number (ABN), which is in my name, not disassociated’s.

ABN’s are free, while, at the moment, a registered business name costs forty-seven dollars (AUD) for a year, or one-hundred-and-eight for three years. Forty-seven bucks a year doesn’t seem excessive, that’s about the same cost as eight cups of coffee.

However, many small Australian businesses are using numerous .com.au or .net.au domain names. The requirement to potentially hold numerous registered business names, in order to license the associated domain names, stands to send expenses sky-rocketing for local small businesses.

Many small businesses in Australia, usually operated by sole-traders — people working alone — sometimes supply any number of goods and services, and each might have its own domain name.

Someone operating, say, twenty businesses, will find themselves paying over seven-hundred dollars a year, if they pay the fee for three years at a time to register their business names.

Even that may not seem much, particularly if revenues are reasonable, but overseeing numerous registered business names stands to increase the administrative workload for small businesses.

And that’s before we get to trademarks, which might also be needed to qualify for a .com.au or .net.au domain name. The cost of an Australian trademark starts at two-hundred-and-fifty dollars. Running numerous small businesses online now begins to look incredibly expensive.

The proposals are intended “to support trust and confidence in com.au and net.au for the benefit of the Australian community.” In other words, curb fraudulent and other undesirable conduct. This is something I think all Australian small businesses would understand.

But what of people who have been legitimately using Australian domains for, in some cases decades, as I have? It doesn’t seem right that small businesses operating online, who have been doing no wrong all this time, should suddenly have harsh, and burdensome requirements, imposed on them.

To date nothing has changed, and auDA says there will be consultation once they finalise draft licensing rules. But if you are a .com.au and .net.au domain name holder, and concerned by the changes, you might want to consider signing the petition opposing the proposed policy changes.

Reports of the death of social media have been greatly exaggerated

29 September 2026

Dan Sinker:

I’m not sure what keeps me there, what keeps any of us there, beyond inertia. We’re in the Looney Tunes stage of the end of social, where we’ve glided well past the edge of the cliff and it’s slowing dawning on us that the only way left is down. Fast.

I would like to believe we’re living in the late-stage social media age, but the evidence seems to suggest otherwise.

Syndicating conversation: bringing comments to RSS feeds

28 September 2026

Vladimir Campos, posting on Masterdon last week:

Catching up on my RSS reader today, I came across really nice posts from @ellane [Ellane], @disassociated, and @dcbuchan [David Buchan], and had the same thought I’ve been having for so long: why isn’t there an easy way to reply to articles when using an RSS reader? rss.chat, created by @davew [Dave Winer], is the closest to that idea I have seen so far.

In the twenty-plus years I’ve been reading RSS feeds, I’ve never once given thought to the prospect of being able to directly comment on them. Mainly, I imagine, because it simply has not been possible. Is not RSS but a glorified push notification, after all?

Like everyone else, if I’ve wanted to respond to something I’ve seen on an RSS feed, I click through to the source website, and leave a comment if there’s an option to do so.

But the notion of commenting on a blog’s RSS feed isn’t all that far fetched. Many of us read blog and website content through RSS, but wouldn’t it be great if we could stay put, in our RSS reading apps, and comment on the posts we see from there?

Really Simple Syndication

RSS, for anyone unfamiliar with it, is an initialism of Really Simple Syndication.

RSS is a format that allows a website or blog to republish, or syndicate, its content to a separate channel. Someone reading a blog’s RSS feed (or channel) is able to see the blog’s content without the need to visit the website where the content was originally published.

The RSS feed for disassociated can be found at disassociated.com/feed/ but if you type that URL into the address bar of your browser, what you see may not make much sense. Subscribe to that feed in a RSS reader such as Feedly though, and everything will be far more coherent.

The beauty of subscribing to multiple, maybe hundreds or more, of websites by RSS, means the person reading all that content can stay in one place, their RSS reader, without needing to visit numerous blogs individually. Think of RSS as centralising the blog reading process.

Content pushes through to the RSS reader soon after a blog publishes a new post, in the same way for instance, a photo or video appears on the page of someone you follow on Instagram.

Interactive RSS feeds are possible

Dave Winer, who played a significant role in developing web syndication technologies such as RSS, thirty years ago, recently launched RSS.chat, a social network built on RSS, where participants can chat in real time. If RSS technology can power a social network, surely then it is possible to comment directly on RSS feed posts.

For this to happen though, there needs to be significant cooperation between the parties involved in publishing RSS content, and those facilitating the means with which to read same, says Winer:

There has to be cooperation between the products that generate the feed and the ones where you read the feed. And cooperation has never been the priority for the developers.

Developers of blog publishing applications generating RSS feeds will need to make provision for comments to be appended to existing RSS posts. Producers of RSS readers will to add an option that lets a subscriber write a comment, possibly a “reply to this post” button. And that’s just for starters.

Winer though says he is working on a system that achieves these requirements:

My approach is going to be to provide products that do both ends, and then, if it becomes popular, the others will compete.

RSS comments a boost for RSS, blogging?

I’m all for people who read my website via RSS being able to comment on posts from their RSS reader, even it there are still a few things to think about.

Moderation and spam filtering, among them, even though that sounds obvious. Many more issues are covered in this in-depth post by David Buchan. But there would be answers to most concerns that RSS commenting might raise.

I’m hopeful, along with Winer, that RSS commenting would catch on. Who knows, it might generate more interest in the syndication format, and even blogging, although that seems like a big ask with the way things are. But I look forward to finding out.

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Get your website a pixel on the Pixel Area blog directory

25 September 2026

My thanks to Oleh Providnyk for adding disassociated to his Pixel Area project. Pixel Area is a blog directory, or blogroll if you like, solely for personal and independent websites/blogs.

Instead of a text listing though, linked websites are represented by a square block, called a pixel. A quite large pixel, granted, but that’s beside the point.

Each “pixel” has its own grid coordinate, and mine, for instance, can be found at X31 Y2.

It’s a little like the Million Dollar Homepage, created by Alex Tew in 2005, but Pixel Area is strictly non-commercial. That’s not where the retro connections end though. Pixel Area also has neighbourhoods reminiscent of GeoCities. I’m in the Raster Flats, and am happy to call it home.

There’s ten-thousand pixels all up available, plenty of room should you wish to submit your website.

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blogs, design, open web, technology

Be the datacentre you want to be

24 September 2026

Josh Withers, quoting Chris Martin, quoting a post he saw on Twitter:

Treat your body like a data centre. Consume as much water and literature as possible. Upset local city councils with your existence.

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