Doug Rathbone 🦘🇦🇺👨‍💻

Fan of distributed systems. Previously HotDoc, Airtasker, AWS. Green energy afficiando. Opinions are my own.

[Doug Rathbone 🦘🇦🇺👨‍💻 @dougrathbone]

Our profession needs to reinvent our ways of working.

Most of software engineering craft - sprint planning, stand ups, backlogs, rfcs, code reviews - was made for a time where the cost of rework was huge, and high risk.

We always needed to slow down to speed up.

We simply don't live in that era anymore.

[Doug Rathbone 🦘🇦🇺👨‍💻 @dougrathbone]

Victoria continues delivering on the Californian playbook…

[Rahul @sairahul1]

Andrej Karpathy's advice for beginners getting into AI:

"Put in 10,000 hours of work."

He's right.

But most builders waste the first 1,000 hours on the wrong things.

They write code before understanding context windows.
They build agents before understanding token limits.
They ship products before understanding what models can't do.

The builders who compound fastest aren't the ones who code the most.

They're the ones who understood the fundamentals before touching a single line.

These are the 10 concepts that make the first 1,000 hours count ↓

Bookmark this before you start.

[blume @BlumeDotCodes]

Tired of constantlly telling your coding agent the same things?
Blume helps you build an agentic-native codebase with consistent and correct context.

Fewer mistakes, fewer headaches.

[Tim Soulo 🇺🇦 @timsoulo]

In the last 6 months at @Ahrefs, we analyzed over 1 billion data points across 14 studies. Here's what we learned about AI search optimization:

1) "Best X" blog listicles are the single most prominent content format cited by AI chatbots. They make up 43.8% of all page types cited by ChatGPT specifically.

2) 67% of ChatGPT's top 1,000 citations come from sources marketers can't influence: Wikipedia (29.7%), homepages (23.8%), app stores (6.6%). Only 32.3% are influenceable content like educational pages, reviews, news, and blog posts.

3) 28.3% of ChatGPT's most-cited pages have zero Google organic visibility. These pages get cited repeatedly by ChatGPT despite not ranking in Google at all. A completely separate discovery layer.

4) ChatGPT only cites about 50% of the URLs it retrieves. It fetches dozens of pages per query but uses half as background context without attribution. This means that being retrieved and being cited are very different things.

5) Adding schema markup had zero meaningful impact on AI citations. AI Overviews actually dipped −4.6%, while AI Mode (+2.4%) and ChatGPT (+2.2%) showed changes indistinguishable from zero.

6) YouTube mentions have the highest correlation (0.737) with AI brand visibility out of all the factors we studied (including all the conventional SEO metrics like backlinks, page count, DR, etc). This held true for both Google-owned and OpenAI products.

7) AI Overviews reduce clicks to the #1 result by 58%. That’s up from 34.5% just 10 months earlier. The trend is accelerating.

8) 99.9% of AI Overviews appear on informational intent queries. Transactional, navigational, and local searches are almost entirely AIO-free. Shopping triggers AIOs just 3.2% of the time.

9) For a given search query, Google’s AI Mode and AI Overviews reach the same conclusions 86% of the time — but cite almost entirely different sources (only 13.7% citation overlap).

10) AI Overviews change every 2.15 days on average, with 70% of content differing between consecutive observations. But semantic similarity stays at 0.95. The words, sources, and entities constantly shuffle, but the actual meaning barely moves.

[David Hendrickson @TeksEdge]

🌞This is big Local AI news! A new open-source Computer-Use LLM has just launched.

Holo 3.1 is H Company’s (🇫🇷) new local computer-use agent model that beats Qwen3.5-397B, Kimi-K2.5, and Sonnet 4.6!

Since it is built for local deployment →
⬩ Runs fully on your machine (MacBook, Windows PC, DGX Spark, RTX Spark)
⬩ Based on Qwen architecture, specialized for GUI understanding & computer control
⬩ Optimized checkpoints: NVFP4, FP8 & Q4 GGUF (0.8B to 35B sizes)
⬩ Strong gains: 79.3% on AndroidWorld benchmark (35B model)

💻 Comparison to Qwen3.5:
Holo 3.1 is fine-tuned specifically for computer-use agents (screen understanding, planning, clicking, navigation). Better at real GUI tasks than general-purpose Qwen3.5, especially when running locally.⚡

[TheNewPhysics @CharlesMullins2]

🚨 SPACEX JUST GOT FAA APPROVAL TO TEST ITS NEW “STARFALL” CAPSULES.

These are not regular reentry vehicles.
SpaceX’s new circular Starfall capsules are designed to bring up to 1,000 kg of payload back from orbit safely, repeatedly, and at scale.

They can launch on either Falcon 9 or Starship, perform in-space manufacturing, then reenter and splash down in the Pacific for rapid recovery.

Why this matters:
• Enables true commercial in-space manufacturing (microgravity + vacuum) that can be returned to Earth
• Could become a “proliferated successor” to the ISS for self-sustaining space industry
• Opens the door to rapid point-to-point cargo delivery from orbit to anywhere on Earth
• Directly competes with companies like Varda that have been flying similar missions on SpaceX rockets

The deeper implication is massive:
We are moving from “occasional experiments in space” to routine manufacturing and logistics in orbit.

If Starfall works at scale, companies could build factories in space, produce high-value materials that can’t be made on Earth, and ship them back down regularly all without needing a full space station.

This is one of the clearest steps yet toward a real, self-sustaining commercial space economy.

What do you think will in-space manufacturing finally become a serious industry, or is this still too early?

Follow for more frontier space and future technology.

[Pete Oxenham @peteoxenham]

strava mcp launched today lfg

[Doug Rathbone 🦘🇦🇺👨‍💻 @dougrathbone]

Theory, meet application

[Swati Gupta @hrswatigupta]

Anthropic pays $750,000+ a year for engineers who can build LLM architectures from scratch. Stanford taught the entire thing in 1 hour lecture & released it for free.

Bookmark & watch this today before someone takes it down and read this article below

[Derek Thompson @DKThomp]

This has quietly been a miracle month in medicine.

In the last 5 weeks we’ve got news on:

- retatrutide, the triple agonist GLP-1 from Lilly, basically melting fat and body-wide inflammation at record levels
- RevMed’s new pancreatic cancer drug showing unprecedented abilities to extend life
- small trial of a one-and-done PCSK9 gene editing therapy for slashing LDL cholesterol
- Mayo’s AI-assisted radiology showing vastly improved cancer detection
- this new therapy for metastatic solid tumors

This stuff is at varying levels of evidence. Retatrutide is ~100% on its way, other stuff needs more clinical trial data. But put it together and we’re maybe on the verge of majorly reducing the mortality of heart disease and cancer, the two leading causes of death in America.

[Doug Rathbone 🦘🇦🇺👨‍💻 @dougrathbone]

@cybrgalaxy Your dad sounds as sharp as a tack at 95 - what a legend to be still exploring the world with such curiosity and openness.

Give that guy a huge hug and high five from all of us.

[Doug Rathbone 🦘🇦🇺👨‍💻 @dougrathbone]

I can only hope I can live to witness such marvels in my lifetime.

[CYBRGAL @cybrgalaxy]

Interviewed my almost 95 year old dad about his experience with his one month old Tesla Y. Here’s what he said both the good and the bad. Please show anyone on the fence about getting a Tesla Full a self Driving car or truck. It may change their mind.

[Doug Rathbone 🦘🇦🇺👨‍💻 @dougrathbone]

Well there goes my next year's gadget budget savings...

[Dylan Malyasov | 🧐 @DylanMalyasov]

A Chinese company is now selling spray-on coating that makes drones harder for radar to detect, available in buckets and applied with a spray gun. What was once a classified military technology is now a commercial product sold by the kilogram.

https://t.co/UpXkLFFw6d

[Reserve Bank of Property @RBASHAGGER]

ALBO’s property
Portfolio Startup to pay
Grandfathered 47% CGT

[Doug Rathbone 🦘🇦🇺👨‍💻 @dougrathbone]

Mark Twain was wrong - history doesn’t rhyme, it repeats itself.

[Victorian Department of Health @VicGovDH]

Victoria is rolling out naloxone dispensing machines. They offer free, 24/7 access to medication that can reverse an opioid overdose. 20 machines will roll out across metro and regional areas where they’re needed most.

Find out more: https://t.co/wfqIrvZzF2

[Doug Rathbone 🦘🇦🇺👨‍💻 @dougrathbone]

“What is it… ahhh. that you’d say you do here?”

“as i said before, i take the requirements from the customers, and i take them to the LLMs”

[Doug Rathbone 🦘🇦🇺👨‍💻 @dougrathbone]

@RaminNasibov

[Datacurve @datacurve]

Opus 4.8 is now on DeepSWE.

On the default high thinking effort, it scores 6% higher than Opus 4.7 xhigh, while also lowering average cost per task.

[WorldofAI @intheworldofai]

🚨BREAKING: OpenAI's Codex is now completely FREE to run locally with Ollama.

No API costs. No rate limits. 100% private on your machine.

You can now use both the Codex App and Codex CLI with powerful open-source models like DeepSeek V4, Gemma 4, and Qwen 3.6.

Here's how to set it up in minutes:

[Doug Rathbone 🦘🇦🇺👨‍💻 @dougrathbone]

Remember folks - 90% of young people will be better off. Those who worked hard and saved for a house though... that's part of the 10%

[7NEWS Sydney @7NewsSydney]

Thousands of first homebuyers who purchased under the Albanese government's five per cent deposit scheme are facing a ticking time bomb.

Property prices are expected to plunge due to the budget, meaning many could owe more on their mortgages than their houses are actually worth.