In less than a week, Australia becomes the first democracy in the world to ban under-16s from social media. On December 10th, 2025, platforms like TikTok, Instagram, YouTube, X, Snapchat, Reddit, and Twitch will be legally required to boot millions of Australian teenagers off their platforms or face fines up to $50 million per violation.
We are about to run a massive social experiment on an entire generation. And I do not think protecting children is the real goal here.
I owned the original Helix Floor and loved it. That thing could conjure tones that made my ears genuinely happy. The amp models were solid, the effects library was extensive, and the workflow made sense once you wrapped your head around it. But there was always this nagging limitation that drove me absolutely nuts: DSP. The Helix Floor is incredibly DSP limited, and if you’re someone like me who loves pitch effects, you learned to compromise pretty quickly.
I’ve been using automatic guitar tuners for years now. The concept is simple: you place the device on a tuning peg, pluck the string, and the motorised tuner detects the pitch through vibration and rotates the peg until you’re in tune. No pedals, no cables, no staring at a screen while you turn the peg yourself. It should be the fastest way to tune a guitar, especially when you’re constantly switching between tunings.
Every time an AI music app starts feeling like the future, the labels show up with lawsuits and NDAs. This month they skipped the velvet gloves and went straight to taking the keys. The goal is not safety or artist love. It is control, and they are getting it by strangling the very features that made these tools fun.
When Udio slammed the door On October 30, Udio killed downloads without warning while announcing its Universal deal. A few days later it tossed users a 48 hour retrieval window as a peace offering, then shut the chute again. The platform that promised you owned your outputs is now a walled garden where your own songs cannot leave. The angry Discords and refund requests did not move the needle because the settlement terms mattered more than the people who built the hype.
We’re living through a fascinating time in software development. AI coding assistants like Claude Code, Codex CLI, and GitHub Copilot have become powerful tools that can generate code, explain complex algorithms, and even debug issues.
I’ve watched developers embrace these tools with varying degrees of success, and there’s a clear pattern emerging: the developers who truly benefit from AI are the ones who already know how to code well.
There’s a dangerous narrative floating around that we’re approaching the end of programming as we know it.
Claude Code fell off a cliff these last few weeks. Anyone actually using it felt the drop: dumber edits, lost context, contradictions, the works. No, we weren’t imagining it.
Well, Anthropic has finally spoken and said what many of us already knew weeks ago. From their incident post on September 8:
Investigating - Last week, we opened an incident to investigate degraded quality in some Claude model responses. We found two separate issues that we’ve now resolved. We are continuing to monitor for any ongoing quality issues, including reports of degradation for Claude Opus 4.1.
Scrum had a moment. I lived through it, ran it, defended it, and tried to make it work in teams that had no business running two–week theater. In 2025, I do not need another ceremony calendar, another points debate, or another sprint “commitment” that collapses the first time reality shows up.
Scrum is not modern. It is a ritual from a different era that now gets in the way.
Scrum solved a 2001 problem, not a 2025 one Scrum came from a world of colocated teams, quarterly releases, and product owners who sat ten feet from the developers. That world is gone. Today I have:
I have lived through a few waves of tooling changes. If you write software long enough you get comfortable with the ground moving under your feet. The latest shift is vibecoding: pointing a capable model in roughly the right direction and steering it with context, examples, and taste. Tools like Claude Code, Codex CLI, and Gemini Code make that feel effortless. This post is less about what the tools are doing and more about how to use them without losing your engineering brain.
Look, I’ve built on a few different blockchains over the years, and I’ll be straight with you: most of them are a pain in the backside. Gas fees that’ll bankrupt you, smart contracts that feel like you’re programming with your hands tied behind your back, and consensus mechanisms that move slower than bureaucracy. But then there’s Hive, and it’s a completely different beast.
Hive is hands down the easiest blockchain to build applications on. Not because it holds your hand or abstracts away complexity, but because it gets out of your way and lets you actually build things. Here’s why it’s become my go-to platform for blockchain development.
This isn’t my first air fryer, but it’s the first one that feels like it could replace half my oven. The Ninja XXXL FlexDrawer is massive. It takes up so much bench space that it could probably apply for its own postcode. Moving it is a two-hand job, and once it’s on the counter, that’s where it lives. But here’s the thing: the size actually makes sense when you start cooking with it.