Why are the Zuckerbergs here? What are they doing? Follow the lede to find out

12 October 2026

Jeremy Stern introduces his fifteen-thousand word essay, published in Colossus, about Meta CEO, and Facebook co-founder Mark Zuckerberg, with a lede so succinct it must be the envy of any writer:

There they are. The Zuckerbergs.

Ledes, also called hooks, are a brief sentence that entices someone to read a newspaper or magazine article. The longer the piece, the more important the hook.

They were something I struggled with during my extremely short career a freelance newspaper writer. I was fortunate to be working with an editor who helped me out a little.

“Try again,” he’d say, patiently after I sent through idea after idea. The rest of what I’d written was fine, but it took awhile to get the first line right.

But Stern’s lede is a classic.

Even though I know who the Zuckerbergs are (or thought I did; take a look, you’ll see what I mean), I still wanted to read on to learn just where the Zuckerbergs were, and what they were doing there.

But Stern’s Zuckerberg write-up is replete with hooks. Of sorts. As it must, to sustain interest in a fifteen-thousand word long article. Particularly in 2026. But not hooks in the conventional sense.

They’re enticements to continue reading. Subtle — suspenseful even — builds up to the next part of the story. The constant piquing of a reader’s curiosity.

Ledes aren’t seen often in blog posts, though there are writers using them. The environment online is different, the blogosphere another realm. Titles are what matter. A blogger’s primary instinct is to appease the SEO gods. Their favour must be curried. Perhaps then the gods will bestow good fortune on the blogger through favourable placement on a search engine results page.

This is achieved by post titles, not ledes or hooks.

Readers of blog posts don’t necessarily need, or want, to be lured in. They’ve come to read what a blogger has to say. Either the subject matter interests them, and they read on, or it doesn’t, in which case the reader goes elsewhere.

The writer of an article published in a newspaper or magazine, doesn’t always have that luxury. So the lede it is. Build it baby, build it. And keep honing the craft, because sometimes you’re only as good as yesterday’s hook.

Exit Party, new novel by Emily St. John Mandel

9 October 2026

Exit Party is the seventh novel by Canadian author Emily St. John Mandel, and was published last month. But savour the trademark mind-altering synopsis:

2031. America is at war with itself, but for the first time in weeks there is some hope: the Republic of California has been declared, the curfew in Los Angeles is lifted, and everyone in the city is going to a party.

Ari, newly released from prison, arrives with her friend Gloria just as a fragile new era begins. But there are people at the party who shouldn’t be there. Something is very wrong…

Years later, living a different life in Paris, Ari remains haunted by that night. Whatever happened at the party fractured her sense of reality — and may hold the key to a very different world.

Mandel’s previous works include Sea of Tranquility, and Station Eleven, which was adapted for television. It’s my guess Exit Party ends up with a screen adaptation of some sort.

AI scrapers are hiding behind referrer spam

8 October 2026

Back in the day, referrer spam used to be a means to trick a website publisher into thinking another website was sending visitors their way.

It’s something I’ve seen often. I’ll be looking through my referrer logs, and see traffic apparently emanating from a website, usually one I’ve not heard of before.

At first I’d be stoked. Someone had found my website and liked it enough to share with their readers. Awesome. And of course I’d fallen for the ruse and gone to the supposedly referring website, only to learn there was no sign of a link to mine.

I’ve never tried to make another blogger believe I’ve linked to their website when I haven’t, so I don’t know what’s involved in engineering referrer spam. But it seems like a lot of trouble to score what might be a single visit from someone who’ll probably never return.

However, there are, or were, some websites posting lists of their traffic sources. This might prompt a visit from whoever looks at that information. This referrer list apparently also, in the past, had the effect of boosting the spamming website’s search engine rankings.

A few weeks ago I noticed a reputable American medical organisation had linked to the front page here. That didn’t seem right. Why would a website for medical professionals be linking to mine?

Of course, they weren’t. But the “visits” kept coming, and increasing. Soon they were linking to all sorts of disparate pages, none of which contain any medical or health related content at all.

It didn’t take long to recognise the pattern of page visit activity though, it was clear another AI scraper was trawling through the content here.

I looked into ways of blocking, or at least keeping the referrer spam scraping activity off my referrer logs, but as ever there really aren’t any effective solutions.

AI scrapers hiding behind referrer spam, whatever will they do next?

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.

1 2 … 234 NEXT