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.
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.
I like good tools as much as anyone, but the last couple of weeks around Anthropic’s Claude 4 family have been a reminder that you can’t build your working life on shifting sand. Models change, limits move, and entire features wobble without much notice. Useful? Absolutely. Dependable enough to be your only plan? Not even close.
What changed If you’ve been anywhere near Claude lately you’ve probably felt the turbulence. Some days are fine; other days you’re staring at elevated errors, partial outages, or features that feel half-broken.
Almost two years ago I deactivated my LinkedIn. Not paused. Not lurking. Gone. I have not missed it for a single day.
I have never received a real opportunity through LinkedIn. The good work in my career has come through people who know me: former clients, colleagues, friends of friends. Conversations, coffee, shipping things together. In Australia especially, our circles are smaller than you think. Reputation travels faster than an algorithmic feed ever will.
I love Nintendo hardware and I was excited for the Switch 2. The form factor is better, the Joy‑Con 2 controllers feel sturdier, and the bigger 7.9‑inch 1080p screen is a real upgrade. Docked 4K output and the revised internals make older games feel fresher too. On paper, this is exactly what I wanted. In practice, the software side still feels thin for a brand‑new console.
What’s good Hardware. Nintendo kept the magic of the original and tightened almost everything: a nicer screen with HDR/VRR, revised Joy‑Cons with new tricks like mouse‑style input, and a sturdier build. Even enhanced ports like Cyberpunk 2077 are surprisingly playable here, with a proper physical 64 GB cartridge option on day one. That last bit matters to me.
WordPress is underrated. If you only hang out in framework circles you would think it is old, clunky, or not serious enough for modern work. I keep finding the opposite. For many projects it is the most practical path to a high quality site that real people can edit, host and keep running without drama.
I write code for a living, but more and more I feel like my job is designing systems. Some of those systems include code I type. Some include services, models and tools that I orchestrate. The biggest shift is mental: stop thinking in files and start thinking in flows, boundaries, feedback and failure. If you have solid fundamentals, this moment can multiply your impact. If you treat every new tool like magic, it will waste your time and your client’s money.
I like boring technology. Not because I am against progress, but because most projects are not auditions for a conference talk. Clients want results they can afford, host, edit and keep running when I am not around. That means choosing tools for outcomes, not for hype.
Let’s get one thing straight: the only people demanding a return to the office are executives who still think “synergy” happens in fluorescent-lit conference rooms and that “collaboration” requires smelling someone’s tuna sandwich from three desks away. Spoiler alert: it doesn’t.
Forcing employees back to offices isn’t about productivity or culture. It’s about power. And companies clinging to this delusion are about to get left in the dust by those smart enough to embrace reality.
Welcome to the main event: an AI free-for-all where OpenAI, Google, and Anthropic swagger into the ring with their trillion-parameter hype machines—then promptly lose their cool when a ragtag Chinese startup named DeepSeek R1 strolls in, spending less than Sam Altman’s annual hoodie budget.
While OpenAI and Google play SimCity with billion-dollar compute clusters, DeepSeek’s crew apparently cracked the code using ramen money and a Costco pallet of export-controlled GPUs.