You know, sometimes I mention my newsletter in passing to my friends and they will apologise for not having read it. To be clear, I don't expect you to read this, even if you love me in real life. If reading this ever feels like an obligation, I implore you to stop and do something else with your life.

I think writing is important for me, but I don't think my writing being read is all that important. Hey— you know what? For this month's letter I'll put the interesting links right at the start, so you have the option of going off and reading something else instead:

From the web

The Verge – OpenAI and Microsoft knew they were starting a ‘doom loop’ for the web

The AI machine hasn't slowed down, and in fact it's gotten so impressive that, for the first time since the technology’s mass-proliferation, it's been making me a bit depressed. Programming for me now feels like an exercise in patience before I give in and just get the agent to do it better and faster than me. What it creates is far from perfect, but it's so consistently good that it's deflating. You might have seen that viral tweet of someone (somehow) modding Minecraft into Dark Souls. I want to be impressed, but more than anything it made me fearful.

So it feels right to admit I was wrong, when I claimed that improvements in AI would plateau sooner rather than later. So far, the latest AI models have surpassed my wildest expectations. Even AI-generated art is starting to look impressive, even if it will forever be devoid of worth or meaning. So my only hope of the AI train slowing down is that the finances somehow stop making sense. Right now, the AI labs are selling dollars for 90 cents a pop, so something feels very wrong. Claude's creator, Anthropic, recently stated that "Anthropic’s gross margins are above 80% before accounting for revenue shared with distribution partners [...] and the cost of training its models." So basically, Claude is profitable if "you take away the cost of making the product and the cost of distributing the product."

Anyway, I have a train booked tonight to take me to the Blue Mountains to go bush walking. If that doesn't clear my mind, I don't know what will.

Thoughts on Flash — (Also, its Wikipedia article)

This is Apple's open letter from 2010, on why it didn't support Adobe's Flash Player on the iPhone. I remember how annoyed I was when I was younger that I couldn't go on Newgrounds on my phone, and how Apple seemed like such an evil figure. To be clear, Apple are evil, but in hindsight, they were right about Flash. The web is healthier now than when Flash existed, thanks to open standards not gated behind an even more evil company like Adobe.

Tim Kreider – I Know What You Think of Me

I really enjoyed this opinion piece from 2013, back when the panopticon of social media was a bit more juvenile, and the most devastating hack anyone could think of was making every email and text public. Pfftt. Today you could create an AI voice clone of someone's dead relative and have them call their phone every day.

Saturday Quiz Time crossword submissions

Sometimes people try and out-quirky me, and sometimes they get very close, but to this day I've never lost a quirk-off. On occasion, a particularly twee girl will have me dead to rights—she thinks she's quirkier than me—but I can always pull out that I write crosswords professionally, and I am instantly the quirkiest person in the room.

Anyway, if you too want to write crosswords for money, the best Australian crossword company, Saturday Quiz Time, has opened crossword submissions to the public.

Ava Dinh-Vu Patreon

I now have a Patreon! I was looking at alternate ways of financing Boggle, and Patreon felt really right for what I want to do with it. It seems people have a kind of special connection with me, considering the strange LinkedIn messages I get from people gloating about beating me. Maybe that will transfer into revenue? So far it's working out, and Beat Me at Boggle has officially broken even! (not including labour costs, which I will likely never recoup).

I originally had the perk of getting your name on the 'about' page as a separate, slightly more expensive tier, but I actually really wanted to show off my subscribers' names, regardless of how much they spend. I am really sincerely grateful for all my Bogglers, and I want to show that off.

Music

Sophia Stel – How to Win At Solitaire

My friend John was very sad that many letters-ago I mentioned I'd been listening to John Keek, who he introduced me to, without mentioning him. I'm sorry John. On an unrelated note, here's another album I've been listening to: Sophia Stel's How to Win At Solitaire. She's coming to Australia for Meredith Music Festival, and to get my money's worth, I'm trying to get into all the acts on the lineup.

All my friends are models
I'm not complaining, there is harder pills to swallow
I'm making something up to get another bottle
You'll never get a chance if all you do is dawdle

Sophia Stel – All My Friends Are Models

World's Happiest Tram Driver running for One Nation

What are we supposed to make of this? The man who welcomes you into the 'tramily' every time you board his tram is running for the party that this month had to clarify that they were only in favour of restricting abortion, not stopping it completely.

Honestly I feel vindicated. I always knew there was something amiss with Bruce Whalley, aka the Happiest Tram Driver. I never liked his bow tie or curly moustache. Although I would never share how I felt about Bruce, who is a driver on my local tram line, because I don't like being needlessly mean about things that make people happy. But now I get to come out as a Bruce hater.

Every time I board a tram and realise he is the driver it makes my day worse. I remember one time I was coming home late from a comedy show in the city to find him driving. It was past midnight, on a Thursday—but still Bruce kept making his stupid little quips. I had already had my fun for the day, and now I just wanted to go home. When the rest of the tired tram wasn't giving him the reaction he wanted either, I could feel him growing frustrated. Bruce, it's late, please just do your job and drive me home. Let's see if he's better at politics than he is at stand-up.

Canning Street

Did you hear the story about the Canning Street nature strip in Carlton? In summary: a local wine shop sells wine, people drink wine on the eight-metre-wide grass road-median on Canning Street. Canning Street residents complain, and the wine shop puts out a statement on Instagram telling people to stop.

Obviously I support letting people picnic on the median. When push comes to shove, I will always come out on the side of day-drinking. It's just been so entertaining watching every vaguely left-wing, vaguely populist politician swoop in like seagulls trying to win easy brownie points. It's moved up the chain from the local Greens MP, to the Yarra Mayor, to the leader of the Victorian Greens, to now the Premiere of Victoria Ben Carroll, who said: "Consider this unbanned. Because if council doesn’t reverse it, we will reverse it for them." I look forward to Albanese's statement on it at the UN General Assembly.

Long shadows

The Metro Tunnel has been open fully since February, but when it opened I hadn’t anticipated that the project would still feel unfinished six months later. The very long shadow of the project is being cast on the city, as Swanston Street still feels a bit like a construction site.

The third and final entrance to Town Hall Station at Fed Square is, from the looks of it, almost finished. I remember the day I realised that the purple was not some kind of temporary cladding but actually the final colour of the entrance. It's certainly a bold choice for the "most iconic corner of Melbourne."

On the opposite corner, just behind Young and Jackson, the government has revealed plans for the former Town Hall Station construction site.

Lendlease are proposing towers, and shock horror, they are 40 metres higher than what is legally allowed. What's more shocking maybe, is that I don't even hate the design. Sure, it's kind of ugly and cynical. And it's maybe not the best precedent to waive height regulations without community consultation. But as demonstrated by the eggplant metal entrance, the government can't care that much about what the community thinks.

I would be more precious about the CBD's heritage if Melbourne's CBD had not been flying in the face of good taste since the 1950s. If Whelan the Wrecker could take a wrecking ball to the Federal Coffee Palace in 1972, does anything matter? Why not just let developers go crazy? I mean, it's the city, why wouldn't there be skyscrapers? I remember the outrage at former planning minister Mathew Guy giving the greenlight on so many skyscrapers—which are sometimes humorously known as Guyscrapers. Melbourne now has the 28th most skyscrapers of any metro area in the world, and I can't help but like being in a skyscraper city.

Anyway, I have very little reverence for the street corner that features the abomination of Fed Square, a train station that was never even finished, and a kitschy pub. I'd like it if we stopped pretending that Flinders Street Station was a real landmark. It's not like Lendlease's towers are going to cast a shadow on the Sydney Opera House, they'd be casting shadows on a pretty rundown train station.

On the other end of the CBD, my alma mater RMIT (Go Redbacks!) and Scape (Boo!) have announced what is going to be built on top of the new State Library Station. A frankly massive set of towers, with the lowers floors being dedicated to the university and the rest being student accommodation (imagine waking up and not even leaving your building to go to class)

Here is probably part of why we shouldn't just let every plot of land shoot up with reckless abandon. Lendlease being propped up by the construction industry; RMIT and Scape from student visa mills—it might all come crashing down and leave terrible pockmarks on the city.

More thoughts on Perth

I would say that travelling from Australia’s east coast to its west is probably the largest geographic distance you can travel while experiencing the smallest distance in culture. There are of course differences, but they are pretty subtle. After my two weeks in Perth, I think my Australian accent got stronger. Also, people in Perth don't say they are going to the CBD, they say they are "going to Perth." There exists a Perth Station, which sounded so strange to my ears. I just flew for three and a half hours, I thought I was already in Perth?

Part of me wonders why there isn't Zionism but for Perth. Not that it's not ethnically diverse—it is; but in Perth exists a beautifully pure version of Australian culture. There weren't any Starbucks in the city until 2024, for example. They do have this thing called Dome Coffee, which I was told was a local institution, so of course I insisted on trying it for an authentic Perth experience.

I went to the Dome on Rottnest Island, the island with all the quokkas on it. And while Rottnest was maybe the most beautiful single location I've ever visited, the Dome coffee on Rottnest was expectedly mediocre. The Consumer Aesthetics Research Institute coined the aesthetic label Global Village Coffeehouse, to describe that kitschy 1990s faux-woodgrain look that coffee shops like Dome embody—down to the authentic 1990s coffee: watery, a bit burnt, and very foamy.

To be fair to Dome, I haven’t had a good coffee in a really long time. I’ve started drinking 7/11 coffee—around one per week—and I worry it's permanently impacting my tastebuds. The last coffee I had that made me sit back in my chair and whisper, 'wow', was at Florian in May. Even the enjoyment of my trusty Breville Barista Pro at home has gone down. Am I just getting older? Is this the kind of long Covid that makes you lose your taste and slightly bisexual?

I don't mean this disparagingly, but Perth today is probably similar to how Melbourne was in the 1990s, when it had a population comparable to Perth today at around three million. I keep calling Perth a town, despite its large population. But because it's so spread out it felt like lots of little towns all smushed into one. A Perth local asked me if I was surprised at how long Perth was, but it's roughly the same geographic size as Melbourne, just with half the population. Melbourne is already a pretty sparsely populated city, so Perth is a suburban paradise.

Especially with so many Americans in Melbourne for the NFL this month, I've spent a lot of time trying to put Melbourne's population into its international context. I read an article that was comparing cities that have invested a lot into sport, and compared Melbourne to Riyadh, Los Angeles, Paris, Las Vegas, and Miami with this insane chart.

Melbourne does not have double the population of Paris. That is insane. Sorry to put such an inconsequential detail in this newsletter, but this made me so annoyed. It's just that Paris counts a historic core as being "Paris", whereas Melbourne counts anything within a a 90-minute train ride from the CBD as being "Melbourne". Paris has a functional population of around thirteen million.

As a comparison, Melbourne is roughly the same size as Los Angeles County, which has a population of almost ten million. If Melbourne was an American city, and we were counting entire metropolitan areas, it would only be the 10th biggest, ahead of Phoenix and behind Philadelphia. I like when Americans visit. They are big and friendly. During the peek of the NFL in Melbourne, white American with dreadlocks said he liked my hair.

That's basically everything I mused about this month. Tune in next month for more musings.

hi :P

This is normally where I put what I've been listening to and the links, but that's at the top. Anyway, thanks for reading, bye!