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michael lascarides

@mlascarides

Art tinkerer, library dweller, immigrant. Thinking a lot about how to prove libraries are worth keeping around. Ōtepoti.

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03.12.2024
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Latest posts by michael lascarides @mlascarides

So if we want to know why dialysis is being rationed, there's a clear answer: it's so the 311 richest families in the country can enjoy one of the lowest effective tax rates in the world. We're killing people in order to make the ultra-rich ultra-richer

06.03.2026 20:20 👍 37 🔁 27 💬 2 📌 1

Or… programming.

06.03.2026 21:16 👍 0 🔁 0 💬 0 📌 0

As a recent convert to the Church of Cricket, this is a delightful story to learn about.

But also as a recent New Zealander, this is a DELIGHTFUL story to learn about.

06.03.2026 18:39 👍 2 🔁 0 💬 0 📌 0

An excellent, thoughtful essay that lines up with a lot of my personal experience with human-centred software design.

06.03.2026 18:25 👍 2 🔁 0 💬 0 📌 0

As an aside, this mindset is often described as "lean" because you skip the "waste" of low fidelity work.

Buddy, no. Low fidelity is not the waste. Work in low fidelity is what prevents the high detail work from being waste. Lean is when cheap-as-free sketches are all you need to avoid that waste.

06.03.2026 16:34 👍 171 🔁 21 💬 1 📌 2

If you're doomscrolling, guess what? So far there are 51 kākāpō chicks hatched and thriving this season, the same number of birds as we had in TOTAL in the 90s! Only one chick has died and there are still fertile eggs waiting to hatch!

06.03.2026 04:31 👍 5942 🔁 1626 💬 66 📌 61

Supreme Court just ruled that AI creations can't be copyrighted, so…

06.03.2026 02:51 👍 1 🔁 0 💬 1 📌 0

"Listen to me:

Our profit from the post office is the post office.

Our profit from a library is the library.

Our profit from a school is the school."

05.03.2026 21:35 👍 43 🔁 21 💬 1 📌 0

This would *significantly* set these kids back from being able to enter the modern workforce, not to mention kneecap their online security/anti-scam education, and devastate a significant number of kids through social isolation. Especially at-risk kids. Cascading generational damage.

05.03.2026 04:13 👍 53 🔁 22 💬 4 📌 0

Ōtepoti op-shoppers: The BroadBay rummage sale is on this weekend, and the Macandrew Bay school fair is on next weekend. Also, the Duck in Mac Bay is open for all you coffee/cake/actual meal needs.

05.03.2026 18:03 👍 4 🔁 4 💬 0 📌 0

Very relatable, ha! Thanks for the breakdown… interesting stuff!

05.03.2026 18:26 👍 1 🔁 0 💬 0 📌 0

This is a good principle for design in general:

When users tell you there's a problem, they are usually right.

When users tell you how to fix it, they are usually wrong.

(bonus: if you replace "user" with "stakeholder" this still applies)

05.03.2026 17:31 👍 186 🔁 30 💬 6 📌 6

This is such a cool idea. What's your "self-hosting" setup? The thought of a tiny custom server at home with a dedicated IP just fronted by an aggressive third-party cache is very appealing.

05.03.2026 17:46 👍 0 🔁 0 💬 1 📌 0

We seem to be seeing an explosion of dudes with radically optimised workflows, yet the concurrent explosion of more and better software products doesn't seem to have arrived.

05.03.2026 17:32 👍 4 🔁 0 💬 1 📌 0

Including pretty much all of the government.

05.03.2026 06:16 👍 4 🔁 1 💬 0 📌 0

Is my fear that this is an attempt to force previously private & encrypted communications to become unencrypted and snoopable under the guise of protecting children justified?

05.03.2026 03:49 👍 1 🔁 0 💬 1 📌 0
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Vale Neville Peat, 1947–2026 Remembering the respected conservationist, prolific author and man of extraordinary talent and generosity.

thespinoff.co.nz/books/05-03-...

05.03.2026 03:33 👍 5 🔁 4 💬 0 📌 1

My Large Cultural Organisation's 100-year backlog of Things That Are Not Digitised would like a word.

04.03.2026 21:36 👍 2 🔁 0 💬 0 📌 0
Raising Arizona (1987) - Freeze or Get Down
Raising Arizona (1987) - Freeze or Get Down YouTube video by Andy Friedhof

www.youtube.com/watch?v=dF9O...

04.03.2026 18:58 👍 2 🔁 0 💬 0 📌 0
Preview
Canterbury fishing comp gives out $60K in prizes despite no fish caught For the first time in 40 years, no fish were weighed in at the Rakaia Fishing Competition due to woefully low numbers of salmon in the river. But ...

www.odt.co.nz/news/nationa...

04.03.2026 18:51 👍 0 🔁 1 💬 0 📌 0

i think enthusiastic LLM use is mostly a stack of cognitive biases, unacknowledged plagiarism, and unmet needs in a trenchcoat

but also my main objections aren't about them being bad at tasks so i don't care if you think they've gotten better at it

04.03.2026 16:53 👍 454 🔁 134 💬 8 📌 3

They are so disconnected from the output of their work that many of the norms of the industry are outright illegal: there's a good chance that if you follow popular practices for a React project, for example, you'll end up with a site or product that violates accessibility law in several countries

04.03.2026 11:07 👍 111 🔁 16 💬 3 📌 2

Developers who come up in this system generally have no benchmark or reference point for genuinely working software. Most usability labs were disbanded over 20 years ago. Very few companies do actual user research, which means most of their designs are based on fiction. Bugs are the norm.

04.03.2026 11:07 👍 137 🔁 21 💬 4 📌 1

Full on makerspace and a sound studio

04.03.2026 04:08 👍 29 🔁 6 💬 1 📌 2

If you ever want to read a paper for free and can't find it otherwise, email the lead author and politely ask for a copy. You will not be bothering the person. You will in fact make their whole entire day. I have had scientists get so excited I asked they sent me everything they ever published.

04.03.2026 02:17 👍 2767 🔁 984 💬 17 📌 40
Library of Congress Innovator in Residence graphic

Library of Congress Innovator in Residence graphic

Calling all technologists, artists and other creative visionaries:

The Library of Congress has opened the call for the next Innovator in Residence!

Apply by 2pm ET April 10

newsroom.loc.gov/news/library...

03.03.2026 19:28 👍 14 🔁 25 💬 1 📌 0

I just keep coming back to how entire fields of iso9000-ish quality control and process management are based on repeatability, predictability, and optimisation. Your average 1995-era Perl script has more utility in that realm than any LLM.

04.03.2026 02:36 👍 1 🔁 0 💬 0 📌 0
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Meridian warns households could face power bill increases up to seven percent Meridian CEO Mike Roan said "unfortunately" some cost increases would be passed through to households again this year.

We're facing exactly this same dynamic… in New Zealand.

www.rnz.co.nz/news/busines...

03.03.2026 22:53 👍 3 🔁 0 💬 0 📌 0

Was a beautiful night for an eclipse here. Couldn't have been clearer.

03.03.2026 19:31 👍 1 🔁 0 💬 0 📌 0

That is a brilliant policy.

03.03.2026 00:38 👍 0 🔁 0 💬 0 📌 0