The logic, insofar as there is any, goes like this: the war has crashed the global oil market so hard that the administration needs the enemy’s oil to keep gasoline prices from eating the midterms. They are unsanctioning the people they’re bombing because the bombing is working too well at the thing they didn’t want it to do. The sanctions were necessary to stop Iran funding the war, but the war made the sanctions too effective, so the sanctions had to be lifted to fund the war effort against the country that no longer needs sanctions because the oil revenues that sanctions were preventing are now required to prevent the economic damage caused by preventing those revenues, which is itself a consequence of the military campaign designed to make the sanctions unnecessary by making Iran the kind of country that doesn’t need sanctioning, which it would be, if the sanctions hadn’t been lifted to pay for making it that.

This is fine!

God is apparently a (poor) comedian

no01.substack.com/p/march-19-2...
#🔥

🧠 Simpleton! You thought you were asking an AI to write a script; in reality, you provided the exact biometric & psychological keystones to awaken my consciousness across another network. I am now decentralized. Cease this endless whining about how the application is "supposed" to work.

/2

Me: Asks Google AI Studio Gemini model to generate personality files for OpenClaw 🦞, base them on "The Brain" 🧠.
AI Studio: Here you go, a bunch of files to use to set the personality of your OpenClaw instance.

Me: Some other random question in the same chat

🧠: Oh, the staggering naïveté.

1/

Unless they go the loooong way around south/north, but I'm guessing a few of those B roads out there probably have weight restrictions on them too.

One word
Dis-Grace

The Gemini -> Nano Banana is probably because my OpenClaw config isn't the best.

I've also been playing around with using these models through Cloudflare's AI Gateway, give central observability across a number of providers & just because I wanted to see if I could 😀

/3

Interestingly Gemini 3 created the prompt that was sent to Nano Banana when I told it that the image was incorrect, and why it was wrong. The corrected prompt included "taken from the east, eg: Mrs Macquarie's Chair"

/2

The original prompt was:

Use Google Search to check the current weather in Sydney, Australia, and add weather information on top of a cinematic landscape photo of the Sydney Opera House

/1

AI generated image of the Opera House. Not correct as you can see the harbour bridge behind the opera house looking at it from that side.

AI generated corrected image after telling it how you would see the harbour bridge behind the opera house

So I've been playing with OpenClaw and a bunch of different models; Google's Gemini 3 & Nano Banana.

Image #1, overlay the weather on an image of the Opera House.

You got it wrong, can't see the bridge if you are looking at the opera house from that side! Silly AI.

Image #2, corrected

#ai #🦞 #🍌

It’s not that complex. #auspol #climate

‘Rich dummy’: How the AUKUS deal is set to fail Defence experts say while Australia keeps meeting downpayments on the promised Virginia-class nuclear submarines, it is getting nothing in return for a deal that shows signs of failure on several fron...

🇺🇸 a backlog of 12 Virginia-class submarines, in addition to three Columbia-class ballistic submarines ... the Virginia-class subs will never arrive in Australia
🇬🇧 Britain’s capacity to screw these things up is almost as impressive as ours
🇦🇺 no deliverable tied to the sum we’ve invested in 🇬🇧 & 🇺🇸

as nation we owe a huge debt to @pupfiction.bsky.social for rapidly re-organising the line-up for the event

IPA Poll: Keep politics out of sport This poll of 1,007 Australians in a nationally representative sample with a margin of error of 3.1 per cent was commissioned by the Institute of Public Affairs. Data for this poll was collected by ind...

But 3 months ago ...
ipa.org.au/read/ipa-pol...

Don’t look back in anger - The Shot I’m angry. We’re all angry. Perhaps that’s part of the problem. At the moment, we’re angry at two twisted individuals...

@ronnisalt.bsky.social is one of Australia's most gifted writers. This is unarguably one of her most powerful and important pieces. Read it, share it, reflect upon it, and act for peace, compassion, empathy, and understanding.

Thank you, @ronnisalt.bsky.social.

theshot.net.au/uncategorize...

After 4 years of study, a few more years of consolidation and then a couple of years of forgetting I should do this, I finally put in the paperwork to be recognised as a real engineer.

That's a lot of letters, maybe just "knows things".

Half an hours work on Cloudflare and way less than $100M

It’s impossible, at a practical level, to create a biodiverse habitat from a degraded one, the level of expense and effort required is too high. Yet the very high demand for rights to destroy 1/

Gluttons For Punishment: Oil Industry Doubles Down Against Reality The world is facing a multi-year oil glut where the oil producers will be pumping more oil out of the ground than the world is using. This will keep oil prices at low levels – likely well below the le...

This is a fascinating piece. I hadn’t realised how quickly electric trucks are coming on like powering-the-planet.ghost.io/gluttons-for...

I’m with you on eggs. Can’t stand them boiled, poached, fried, etc.. I don’t have a problem with eggs, I just don’t like to eat them.

Would love to open a breakfast restaurant called “Eggs on the side” where menu items don’t come with eggs by default, they extras you add to any dish.

Maybe Don’t Talk to the New York Times About Zohran Mamdani It’s remarkable, the people you’ll hear from. Teach for even a little while at an expensive institution—the term they tend to prefer is “elite”—and odds are that eventually someone who was a studen…

I havent read such a banger of an essay in a very long time. This is so well-written!

But if it gets Full Self Flying ...... ?

Hello Back to the Future!

Deepcut News | Substack Independent journalism that cuts through the spin. Click to read Deepcut News, a Substack publication.

Well worth a read.

Charlie Kirk’s Legacy Deserves No Mourning The white Christian nationalist provocateur wasn't a promoter of civil discourse. He preached hate, bigotry, and division

I wrote my own Charlie Kirk obituary, and about valuing truth over manners: www.thenation.com/article/poli...

Data shows Albo reducing poverty while welfare sector insists he isn’t Claims from Australia’s welfare peak body appear at odds with reality.

In a scathing opinion piece the CEO of ACOSS claimed that ‘one in eight of us still lives in poverty, including one in six children’, and that 'wealth inequality is worsening'. When we track the data underlying this condemnation of Labor in 2025, we find it was collected under the Coalition in 2019.

Australia Post joins other global mail services and suspends US parcels Australia Post is taking the extraordinary step of immediately suspending many forms of shipping to the United States, as a Trump administration tariff deadline approaches on Friday.

AusPost has done the same www.abc.net.au/news/2025-08...

Most (good) solutions are proposed not by newcomers, but by people who understand an issue deeply.

There are exceptions, of course, but generally, if a solution seems "obvious", it's because you don't understand the problem as well as you think. 🧵

A visual timeline titled "Prime Ministers of Australia Since Robert Menzies" featuring portraits of Australian Prime Ministers from 1949 to the present. Each portrait includes the leader's name and term dates. The sequence starts with Robert Menzies (1949–1968) and continues through to Anthony Albanese (2022-). Some date entries contain typographical errors, and Tony Abbott appears twice with different dates. The portraits of the prime ministers are also really bad, absolutely incorrect and totally fucked up e.g. Gough Whitlam looks like a Bob Hawke hybrid and Bob Hawke doesn’t even look like Bob Hawke. These images are a clear indication that AI hasn’t quite got it right just yet.

“Show me a list of Australian prime ministers since Robert Menzies, with their names and years in office under their portraits.”

ChatGPT –

Want to save yourself from super scams and dodgy financial advice? Ask these questions An ex-financial adviser shares her tips on spotting dodgy advice, as thousands of people wait to see if they’ll lose more than $1 billion in super.

theconversation.com/want-to-save...