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Seven days on the roof of the world: A Leh–Ladakh Motorcycle tour
Leh in the Indian Himalayas does not reveal itself easily. At 3,500 metres, the air is thin, the light is hard, and the mountains look as if they’ve been cut from biscuit tins. I spent the first few days wandering Leh at a deliberately slow pace. The old market, the palace, Shanti Stupa, a few…
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Using GPTs in education: four practical examples
Custom GPTs can turn ChatGPT from a general-purpose chatbot into a focused teaching tool for a specific subject. They allow teaching staff to specify the assistant’s role, provide approved subject material, and set clear rules for what students should (and should not) ask it to do. A GPT is a customised version of ChatGPT configured…
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Cory Doctorow: Enshitification: Festival of Dangerous Ideas (review)
I spent last weekend at the Festival of Dangerous Ideas at Carriageworks in Sydney, a high-profile collision of writers, thinkers, provocateurs and people who have made a career out of worrying in public. The main festival weekend was 22–23 August, with a line-up that included Peter Singer, Stan Grant and Maria Ressa. I stayed upstairs…
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The AI capability gap is getting bigger!
The tools and methods for using AI in the academic workplace have improved dramatically over the past year or so. What has not improved at the same rate is the capacity to use them with methodological seriousness. We now inhabit a landscape in which AI systems, under human direction and oversight, can help academics assemble…
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Context is king: situated judgement in the age of AI.
A few months ago, on the road out past Lake Eildon, the sky did what Victorian skies do without warning: it dropped seven degrees, the light went flat, and the bitumen turned that shade of dark that tells you, before you consciously register it, that the surface is about to change. No app had warned…
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Dark Mofo 2026: The fire this time
This year’s Dark Mofo was a fleeting visit, a day and a half lifted from a longer trip to Tasmania’s north-west coast, where I’ve been spending time with my mother, who is approaching her 90th year. She lives near Ulverstone, and something is grounding about being there, in the flat grey light of a Tasmanian…
