Did you know that the annual linux.conf.au gathering was held in Christchurch last month? And that Linus Torvalds was there, wandering around the Canterbury University campus? Neither did I. Radio New Zealand’s Mediawatch program from a couple of weeks ago goes into the reasons why there was no media coverage of the event. Partly they might have been put off by some of the more esoteric and technical subjects being discussed. But in among them were some topics that should be considered more relevant to the “mainstream”, such as how automation could be doing away with many jobs being done by humans, leaving only the low-paying ones. The item includes an interview with NZOSS president Dave Lane, in which he incidentally mentions that Radio New Zealand’s online presence is built on Open Source, and that stuff.co.nz was, until recently, doing the same, and was also the one part of the Fairfax online media empire that was making money. Until that system was replaced with one based on expensive and proprietary Adobe products. And now they are not making nearly as much money. Coincidence? You be the judge. <https://www.radionz.co.nz/national/programmes/mediawatch/audio/2018680533/geeks-gathering-goes-under-the-media-radar> By the way, it seems they have stopped making Ogg versions of items like these available for playback or download -- the links for the above one are only for an MP3 version. Also, I don’t agree that the distinction between “artificial intelligence” and “machine learning” is that clear-cut. I did a graduate course on AI back in the day, and it was already a pretty fuzzy concept back then. Except for one quite concise, mathematically-based definition I came across that appealed to me: “solving NP problems in polynomial time”.