Category: All
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The Replaceable Human
How Capital Has Always Tried to Own Your Skills Right now, capital is making the largest coordinated investment in a single technology in human history. We’re talking trillions of dollars. More than the Manhattan Project. More than the Apollo Program. More than the Interstate Highway System. Adjusted for inflation, the money being poured into AI…
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Survivorship Bias and the End of the World
Why “We’ve Survived Before” Is the Most Dangerous Argument There’s a famous image from World War II, a diagram of a bomber covered in red dots, each one marking where returning planes had been hit by enemy fire. The military’s first instinct was obvious: reinforce the areas with the most bullet holes. Protect the parts…
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The Taboo of Survival: Why Capitalism Won’t Let Us Save Each Other
It is January 2026. If you look at the stock market, we just finished a year of record growth. If you look at the real world, however, the picture is very different. Since the start of the year, I have been watching the global stage with a sense of dread. The potential breakup of NATO,…
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The Machine Doesn’t Believe Us
When AI Thinks 2026 Is Too Crazy to Be Real I asked Gemini to help me with something routine, just a bit of research about current events in 2026. It panicked. Not because the request was inappropriate or dangerous. It panicked because it thought I was lying to it. It thought I was testing it,…
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Migrating WordPress from Lightsail to S3 + CloudFront
After almost a decade of running MannanLive.com on WordPress via Amazon Lightsail, I finally decided to pull the plug and move everything to a simpler, static setup using Amazon S3 and CloudFront. Why the change? A few reasons, really. First, while Lightsail is pretty affordable at $5 USD a month, the cost adds up –…
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Serverless Backup Magic: Exporting Aurora Snapshots to S3
Automating Daily Database Backups from Aurora to S3 with AWS CloudFormation Running a successful business like RosterPortal.com.au since 2007, I’ve always relied on MS SQL Server for database management. Our daily text exports to S3 have been an invaluable part of our backup strategy. Now, as we migrate to Babelfish Aurora PostgreSQL, we’re faced with new challenges, one of which is…
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Streamlining Ticket Migration: A Journey from Assembla to GitHub
Background In the tech world, adaptability is key. As our startup, Roster Portal, evolved over the years, so did our needs. We started our journey with Assembla.com back in 2011, leveraging its robust source control and ticketing system. For reference on just how old that is, we were using Subversion – not Git back then!…
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Supporting a Grieving Coworker – Tech Industry Perspective
Recently my family went through a loss of a loved one. When I tried talking about it to my coworkers, it was clear that they were wanting to be supportive. However the condolences they gave to us were very difficult to respond to, and at times impossible. I am sure anyone that has been in…
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Generic IIS URL Rewrite Rules – Three common scenarios
Download & install rewrite module The first hurdle in achieving this is that you don’t want to use the Redirect IIS module, but the Rewrite one which has to be downloaded separately. You can download it from here, but I script my server bootstrapping so preferred to use PowerShell for this. See below for an…
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Mt Tamborine – Final COVID-19 Honeymoon Part 3
Deciding to make the most of the facilities at the InterContinental, I decided to try out the pool. There is a super heated spa, a heated pool and an artificial beach (think South Bank) pool. As the entire hotel was inundated with guests for the long weekend, the only one that was almost empty was…