Mr.Devitt 🌻🇺🇦

As AI reshapes how Australia works, our institutions need to evolve with it, protecting fairness while creating opportunity. Read the report, For All of Us: Making AI Work for Working People, at #ai-report" target="_blank" rel="nofollow noopener">curtinrc.org/#ai-report

For 50 years Britain hid these transcripts. They were even withheld from the Nuremberg trials to protect the secrecy of this eavesdropping operation. Here’s what Nazi generals really said about Auschwitz and the mass murder of Jews when they thought no one was listening: (🧵)

@McFaul In a NASA style organisation it’s not. It’s trump that’s the problem, not nationalisation.

Nationalization of AI is a very, very bad idea.

An MIT professor taught the same math course for 62 years, and the day he retired, students from every country on earth showed up online to watch him give his final lecture. I opened the playlist at 2am and ended up watching three of them back to back. His name is Gilbert Strang. The course is MIT 18.06 Linear Algebra. Every machine learning engineer, every data scientist, every quant, every self-taught programmer who actually understands how AI works learned the math from this one man. Most of them never set foot on MIT's campus. They just opened a free playlist on YouTube and let him teach. Here's the story almost nobody tells you. Strang joined the MIT math faculty in 1962. He retired in 2023. That is 61 years of standing at the same chalkboard teaching the same subject to 18-year-olds. The interesting part is what he did when MIT launched OpenCourseWare in 2002. Most professors were skeptical. They worried that putting their lectures online would make their classrooms irrelevant. Strang did not hesitate. He said his life's mission was to open mathematics to students everywhere. He filmed every lecture and gave it away. The decision quietly changed how the world learns math. For decades linear algebra was taught the wrong way. Professors started with abstract vector spaces and proofs about field axioms. Students drowned in the abstraction. Most never recovered. They walked out believing they were bad at math when they had simply been taught in an order that nobody's brain is built to absorb. Strang inverted the entire curriculum. He started with matrix multiplication. Something you can write down on paper. Something you can compute by hand. Something you can see. Then he showed his students that everything else in linear algebra eigenvectors, singular value decomposition, orthogonality, the four fundamental subspaces was just a different lens for understanding what the matrix was actually doing under the hood. His rule was strict. If a student could not explain a concept using a concrete 3 by 3 example, that student did not actually understand the concept yet. The abstraction was supposed to come last, not first. The intuition was the foundation. The proofs were just confirmation that the intuition was correct. The second thing Strang changed was the classroom itself. He said please and thank you to his students. Every single lecture. He paused mid-derivation to ask "am I OK?" to check if anyone was lost. He never used the word "obviously" or "trivially" because he knew exactly what those words do to a student who is one step behind. He treated 19-year-olds learning math for the first time the way he treated his own colleagues. With patience. With respect. With the assumption that they belonged in the room. For 62 years. The result is something that has never happened in the history of education. A single math professor became the default teacher of his subject for the entire planet. Universities in India, China, Brazil, Nigeria, every country with a computer science department, started telling their own students to just watch Strang's lectures. The University of Illinois revised its linear algebra course to do almost no in-person lecturing. The reason was honest. The professor said they could not compete with the videos. His final lecture was in May 2023. The auditorium was packed with students who had never met him before. He walked to the chalkboard, taught for an hour, and at the end the entire room stood and applauded. He looked confused for a moment, like he genuinely did not understand why they were cheering. Then he smiled and waved them off and walked out. His written comment under the YouTube video of that final lecture was four sentences long. He said teaching had been a wonderful life. He said he was grateful to everyone who saw the importance of linear algebra. He said the movement of teaching it well would continue because it was right. That was it. No book promotion. No farewell speech. No legacy management. The man whose teaching is the foundation of modern AI just thanked the audience and went home. 20 million views. Zero ego. The entire engine of the AI revolution sits on top of math that millions of people learned for free from one quiet professor in Cambridge. The course is still on MIT OpenCourseWare. Every lecture, every problem set, every exam, every solution. Free. The most important math course of the 21st century is sitting one click away from you. Most people will never open it.

@petite_michelle An Australian company had been sending cardboard drones to Ukraine for years now as part of Aus gov support packages.

At this point, Ukraine and its drone innovation have completely reshaped modern warfare. It's the game of drones now.

BREAKING: Ukraine has destroyed another large Russian military vessel. Ukrainian drones have struck the FSB Project 23550 arctic patrol ship Purga just as its construction was nearing completion in the port of Vyborg. It’s now leaning over and has hit a building.

This isn’t monetary policy. It’s a transfer of workers wages to the wealthy. I am a board member of the John Curtin Research Centre, and delighted to see Lachlan Kerwood-McCall appointed as our new in-house economist. His op-ed is exactly why. Lachlan’s piece details something that rarely gets said plainly: the RBA’s rate hikes don’t punish the people who drove inflation. They punish the people who had nothing to do with it. Australia’s inflation was largely driven by corporate margin expansion, firms using cost pressures as cover to grow profits and global supply shocks from energy markets. Workers didn’t cause either. Neither did mortgage holders. Yet the policy response works like this: rates rise, mortgage repayments rise, and that money flows directly from workers’ wages into the hands of the global capital markets that fund home loans. Investors who had no role in causing the inflation, and no stake in fixing it, are now being handsomely compensated through it. Sounds fair? Wonder why One Nation is on the rise?? The people who drove inflation, corporations expanding margins, face no equivalent discipline. The people paying the price are the ones who simply had the misfortune of needing somewhere to live. Lachlan’s alternative, CGT reform to curb speculative demand, a windfall profits tax on those extracting rents from inflationary conditions, and serious investment in productive capacity, actually targets the source. That’s the kind of structurally honest economics the JCRC exists to advance. Welcome aboard, Lachlan.

Maybe remind Trump we had trials and jailed, or hung the guilty and traitors at the end of the war….

@visegrad24 Rest in peace

19-year-old Pavlo Skyra was killed in battle against the Russian Army. Rest in peace Pavlo 💔

@EuromaidanPR Rest in peace.

Mykola Dyachok. Ukraine defender. Forever 28. R.I.P.

The AEU has today launched Australia’s first national inquiry into public school infrastructure. Chaired by Sharan Burrow AC, the inquiry will examine the current state of public school infrastructure, assess future needs and recommend long-term funding and policy reforms.

@AprilHuggett RIP HERO

February 24, 2022. Before dawn had fully broken, missiles were already striking the military airfield in Vasylkiv near Kyiv - home of the 40th Tactical Aviation Brigade, the unit tasked with defending the capital’s skies. The first to rise into the air was 25 year old Senior Lieutenant Viacheslav Radionov. While the enemy tried to destroy Ukrainian aircraft on the ground, Radionov took off into a sky already turning hostile. He helped ensure the organization of combat flights and the take-off of other pilots, knowing every second mattered. Kyiv depended on them getting airborne. He did not wait. He did not hesitate. He went first. In the sky above Vasylkiv, he entered an unequal battle against three enemy aircraft. As he engaged them, his fellow pilots were able to lift off and continue the defense of the capital. He held the line in the air so others could rise behind him. Then communication was lost. It was his first combat flight. It was his last. His aircraft was later found. He had ejected. His mother said that even if he had known how it would end, he would have done the same. Vyacheslav was born into a family of pilots. Flying was in his blood. He was posthumously awarded the title Hero of Ukraine. When the enemy believed they could silence our air force in a single strike, Viacheslav Radionov proved them wrong. He was the first in the air. He fought so others could fly. He gave his life so Kyiv would stand. Eternal memory. 🕯️ #StandWithUkraine

@Mylovanov Hero! 🦸

“I left my Manhattan apartment for Ukraine’s front lines. Now I’m fighting drones.” Viktoriia Honcharuk quit her dream job at Morgan Stanley in 2022 to become a combat medic. She evacuated up to 100 wounded soldiers a week from one of the war’s deadliest fronts, The Times. 1/

@AlanKohler @abcnews Forever trying to find a way to not do what is plainly obvious to any half intelligent person….

This morning's @abcnews column: intergenerational fairness, and inequality generally, will only be addressed by taxing the people who have the money, not by cutting the taxes of those who don't. abc.net.au/news/2026-02-2…

@shaunwalker7 Incredible article Shaun. 👏👏👏

I've been working on this for ages in various countries: the story of the intelligence buildup to Putin's 2022 invasion. How did the US and Britain find out so much, and why were Europe and Ukraine sceptical. It's a long one: theguardian.com/world/ng-inter…

@NChvastek @DaleH1234 @TimWilsonMP @JEChalmers

@TimWilsonMP @JEChalmers Bullshit. You left him with close to a trillion dollars debt while your mates were Robodebting teenagers to suicide

The debt rot started under @JEChalmers as Wayne Swan’s adviser. Most people would be sacked for sending a nation into a trajectory of unsustainable debt. Under Labor Chalmers got promoted to Treasurer and has poured debt petrol onto the inflation bonfire. abc.net.au/news/2026-02-1…

I’d be sweating bullets if I was ScoMo right now. @ScoMo30 right now.

SCOOP: The NSA detected a phone call between foreign intelligence and a person close to Trump last spring. Whistleblower says that @DNIGabbard blocked agency from sharing report and delivered it to White House chief of staff. theguardian.com/us-news/2026/f…

The signal strength hitting Earth from Voyager 1 is less than one trillionth of a watt. To put that in perspective, your phone’s WiFi signal is roughly 100 billion times stronger, and it drops a connection walking between rooms. NASA picks up Voyager’s whisper using arrays of 70-meter antennas, then reconstructs coherent data from it at 160 bits per second. That’s slower than a 1990s modem. Downloading a single photograph at that rate would take weeks. The spacecraft itself runs on 8.8 kg of decaying plutonium-238 that generated 470 watts at launch in 1977. Today it produces roughly 200 watts, losing about 4 watts per year. NASA has been shutting down instruments one by one since the 1980s to keep the math working. They turned off the cosmic ray sensor just this year. And here’s the part nobody’s talking about: there is exactly one antenna on Earth that can send commands to Voyager. Deep Space Station 43 in Canberra. It went offline for major upgrades from May 2025 through early 2026. During that window, if Voyager had a critical fault, the team would have had to wait months to respond. A 48-year-old spacecraft built on 1970s computing, running on a plutonium battery that’s lost 60% of its output, transmitting at a power level that barely qualifies as existing, from a distance where light itself takes 23 hours to arrive. And a German observatory just casually picked up its carrier signal on a live stream. The engineering margin NASA built into this mission was designed for 4 years to Saturn. Everything after that is borrowed time the engineers keep extending by doing math with 200 watts.

@AlboMP Praise a visionary reform whilst doing nothing visionary yourself. Pathetic.

42 years ago today, Bob Hawke launched Medicare. And we’re strengthening it. With cheaper medicines, more bulk billing, Medicare Mental Health Centres, 1800MEDICARE, this week’s record hospital funding agreement, and 137 Medicare Urgent Care Clinics being rolled out across the country. Because every Australian should have access to affordable, quality healthcare.