The News

Facebook still turning a blind eye to AI slop featuring Australian politicians

Facebook being a dumpster fire of misinformation isn't new, but the ABC has a fresh story on how Facebook is once again being used by overseas ragebait farms powered by AI slop featuring Pauline Hanson, to generate genuine activity from brain dead dribbling moron Australians who think it's real, or at least don't seem to care it's total bullshit. The ABC article doesn't go into depth about why this happens, but it's very likely people in poor countries taking advantage of Facebook's monetisation programs and Meta's deliberate ignorance as to how it is used - 404 Media has a solid explainer about what incentivises these slop factories.

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Anthropic opens a Sydney office to better hock its wares and expand datacenter footprint

Anthropic is opening an office in Sydney. The goal for this office is to "deepen our engagement with Australian institutions, as well as collaborate on projects that advance Australia's national interests and priority sectors". The announcement mentions that they already work with "Canva, Quantium, and Commonwealth Bank of Australia". Oh and they are "exploring opportunities to expand our compute capacity in Australia" because they have a "longstanding belief that democracies should lead in AI development". Nice little backhand comment at their competitors datacenters in the Middle East - that are only there because of non-democratic state subsidies - getting blown up by Iranian drones.

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Debian grappling with how to handle AI/LLM contributions to a vital piece of computing infrastructure

One of the Debian developers put up a General Resolution to discuss how they should tackle "AI-assisted contributions" and there's a wide range of opinions within the team. Some are concerned that widespread acceptance of AI contributions will erode the ability of junior developers to hone their skills. There's copyright issues - both on the data the LLMs are trained on and the output Debian may accept. There's also debate on where to draw line on use of LLMs, what to actually call AI/LLMs, and the costs of AI tools. No decision has been made, but it's fascinating to see the cogs turn in the Debian team's head as they genuinely struggle with how to responsibly adapt to the changing environment.

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Oh, Also

JP Morgan’s 2026 Eye on the Market takes aim at the colossal AI spend & risks

Seeing as everything else in today's issue is about AI, I may as well continue the trend and mention one of the best articles I've read about the industry - JP Morgan's 2026 Eye on the Market Outlook (PDF link). It analyses the historically unprecedented level of AI investment and how a handful of companies has totally dwarfed the US stock market, posing "what could go wrong" questions like what happens if (when?) Chinese companies achieve semiconductor fabrication and LLM parity with TSMC/Nvidia/OpenAI/Anthropic/Google and what if AI ends up being a "metaverse" not a "broadband" level technology? It's already aged a little just in the 3 months since its release, but still interesting.

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Bargains

The End

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