Marcus

@utf9k

I use computers for work during the day and to write letters to the government at night

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Marcus@utf9k· 4d

@exocomics.com Every Detective Beans release, I think to myself I need to go to the bookstore and then I forget so I have finally atoned for my sins The cashier at Little Unity asked if I wanted a loyalty card and I said despite appearances, I don't find myself shopping for kids books *that* often

A photo of three Detective Beans books by Li Chen spread out on a table

Marcus@utf9k· 6d

@apenwarr.ca Between the cookie banner and the conference banners, my reaction was surprise at first but actually I guess it means you successfully crossed the chasm and been forced into needing the marketing signals that the slow adopters require so it's actually secretly a good thing (?)🕴️

A screenshot of the Tailscale homepage. There is a cookie banner at the bottom.

Marcus@utf9k· 23d

As part of this, I had ordered a shirt with the TOP logo rotated upside down but only to receive a regular TOP shirt instead. Anyway, I received an email this morning from the TOP merch store saying they received conflicting advice on hats and that if you have a TOP hat, you should hide it for now

An email from Iain Lees-Galloway at 6:46 AM

It says the following:

Kia ora Marcus,

You have received this email because you purchased merchandise from the Opportunity Shop earlier this year.

This email is only for people who purchased Opportunity Party branded caps. If you did not purchase a cap, please disregard this email.

We have received conflicting advice from the Electoral Commission regarding the caps.
Previously, they were not considered election advertisements and did not require a "promoter statement" (the text that starts Authorised by...").

However, recent advice has called that into question. Right now, it is unclear to us whether caps require the promotor statement. The cap(s) you purchased do not have the promoter statement.

While we clarify this, please keep your cap(s) out of sight. Put them away in your wardrobe or a drawer. Displaying an election advertisement without the promoter statement is a criminal offence and could be referred to the Police.

Marcus@utf9k· 24d

This TV has a casting feature in the hotel menu but it doesn't seem to work with the apps I wanted to cast from because they just buffer forever. The hotel menu is boring HTML served via a network so what if I just served my own HTML instead...

A photo of a Macbook Pro. An ethernet cable is plugged into it via a USB-C to ethernet adapter. An ethernet cable runs from the laptop behind an LG TV. The TV displays a poorly drawn screen that reads "Marcus's better hotel menu :)" with a single "play content" button below it.

Marcus@utf9k· Jul 13

DIA published 304 pages of advice documents around the citizenship test changes which had this fun little reminder www.dia.govt.nz/diawebsite.n...

Heading: The Ministry of Justice highlighted differences in how the responsibility relating to obeying the law is worded in citizenship material

31. In the current citizenship by grant application form and in guidance on govt.nz, one of the responsibilities of New Zealand citizenship is listed as 'obey and promote the laws of New Zealand'. The Ministry of Justice has highlighted that there is no legal obligation on citizens to promote New Zealand laws, only to obey them.

Marcus@utf9k· Jun 30

Ah, of course

A screenshot of a chart titled "Increasing alignment and savings". The time scale shows "FY25/26", "FY26/27", "FY27/28" and "Outyears". There are three arrows (one green and two blue) that say "Alignment and savings". They start faint and get stronger as they flow towards the right.

Marcus@utf9k· Jun 26

I got a copy of the Patlabor 2 4K remaster bluray, which is one of my favourite films, and I was surprised to find it came with a copy of the entire storyboard in booklet form!

The box for Patlabor 2 The Movie 4K Remaster Collection sitting on a desk

A copy of Patlabor 2 The Movie Storyboard, a grey book sitting on a desk. The cover shows the white head of a Patlabor

A photo of the Patlabor 2 storyboard minibook showing 10 different sketched frames. Visible is a woman loading a gun and looking out at decaying buildings while on a boat.

A photo of the Patlabor 2 storyboard book showing 10 sketched frames. A news reporter can be seen presenting a broken bridge which is then bombed by a fighter jet

Marcus@utf9k· Jun 22

Here's an oddity from the recent PSC Briefing to the Incoming Minister The left image comes from digital.govt.nz published in February 2026. The right redacted image is from the April 2026 briefing. How is that commercial? They're generic concepts?! www.publicservice.govt.nz/assets/Direc...

A screenshot of the Digital Target State diagram. In the centre is a box titled Digital Public Infrastructure which contains generic software concepts such as "Notifications & Messaging System", "Data Dictionary", "Rules Library" and so on.

A screenshot of the Digital Target State diagram. In the centre is a box that is redacted with "9(2)(i) Prejudice to commercial activities" and "9(2)(j) Preduce to negotiations" marked as reasons.

Marcus@utf9k· Jun 17

Just wait until you play P4 and hear "The Almighty" at which point you'll be able to cry on demand simply by listening

A photo of Persona 4 Golden for the Playstation Vita. It's signed by David Farrier of Tickled Fame in the bottom right corner.

Marcus@utf9k· Jun 17

I thought this headline seemed to contradict the recent move-on orders unless...

A still from the TV series Trailer Park Boys where the character Ricky is handing Jim a $100 Canadian bill. The subtitles read "I'm gonna pay you $100 to fuck off"

Marcus@utf9k· Jun 15

For the nerds, I got some .hack books today 🫡

A photo of Encyclopedia .hack and .hack//Analysis on a white desk

A photo of .hack//Analysis open across two pages. The left page contains two columns of text in Japanese with headings that use an email icon. On the right is a black page with two yellow strips that read "GATE HACKING" and above the centre is some Japanese text in red bold letters. It's unclear from the photo but the right page looks almost like a static-filled CRT image due to some transparency paper in front of it.

A photo of .hack//Analysis open to two pages. The right page contains a number of .hack world concepts such as "The World: 2000" and a FMD virtual reality headset

A photo of Encyclopedia .hack although only the right page is really visible. It contains a few screenshots of various .hack concepts with explainer text in Japanese.

Marcus@utf9k· Jun 15

I wonder if there's a limit to how long a question response can be? questions.parliament.nz/written-ques...

A screenshot of a Written Question to Parliament which says the following:

Teanau Tuiono to the Minister for State Owned Enterprises: What advice, reports, briefings, emails, aide memoires, or any other documents has the Minister or any member of their Office seen, if any, about WorkSafe New Zealand safety requirements for fuel storage tanks?
Hon Simeon Brown: As I said in Written Parliamentary Questions 10889 (2025), 11147 (2025), 14770 (2025), 18421 (2025), 19559 (2025), 20746 (2025), 22412 (2025), 27507 (2025), 28436 (2025), 30419 (2025), 30991 (2025), 31535 (2025), 32421 (2025), 33193 (2025), 34522 (2025), 35938 (2025), 37794 (2025), 38920 (2025), 39747 (2025), 41640 (2025), 42857 (2025) , 44980 (2025), 4594 (2025), 48408 (2025), 49591 (2025), 50437 (2025), 51143 (2025), 51949 (2025), 52883 (2025), 53446 (2025), 54774 (2025) 55541 (2025), 57127 (2025), 982 (2026), 723 (2026), 4196 (2026), 4299 (2026), 4402 (2026), 4507 (2026), 5769 (2026), 5875 (2026), 6395 (2026), 7771 (2026), 7877 (2026), 8911 (2026), 10970 (2026), 11077 (2026), 9128 (2026), 9247 (2026), 11485 (2026), 11558 (2026), 12455 (2026), 12597 (2026), 13459 (2026), 13609 (2026), 16629 (2026), 17535 (2026), 18356 (2026), 19298 (2026), 24632 (2026), and 27221 (2026) I refer the Member to the answer to Written Parliamentary Question 6125 (2025).

Marcus@utf9k· Jun 10

I updated to the iOS 27 Developer Beta yesterday and was cropping a screenshot of a manga panel just before when Apple Photos suggested that I could "extend" the image using on-device AI Unsurprisingly, it invented two whole characters out of nowhere visible on the bottom left and far right

A panel from Chapter 35 of Smoking Behind The Supermarket With You. Sasaki is caught red handed overspending on fish out of jealousy.

The same panel from Chapter 35 but with an extra panel on the far right. In it, a man in a suit says something like "Yey Yer Eorpreny Sere?". He is slightly translucent with barbed wire as his suit material. He is clearly a weird clone of Sasaki, not that it's intentional. On the far left is half a frame. Half of a man looking right is visible with the cut off text "cat" above his head.

A screenshot of the iOS Photos UI with the Tools feature selected and the Extend tool in use. An Original label suggests that the visible manga panel is pre-extension by AI

A screenshot of the iOS Photos UI. The extended manga panel is visible with text at the bottom saying "Your photo has been extended"

Marcus@utf9k· Jun 8

I like whatever the hell this is

A bookshelf with a number of books facing the camera. One is bright red with a smiley face on it.

Marcus@utf9k· May 26

The Privacy Commissioner's Phase 2 report is expected to cover the following www.privacy.org.nz/focus-areas/...

Phase two of the Inquiry is likely to cover:

- Whether patients were properly asked for authorisation before a MMH account was established for them and information was stored in that account.
- Whether patients received adequate information about how the portal would be used.
- Retention and deletion of information within the portal.
- The quality of communications about the breach.
- Whether the notifications to OPC and to affected patients met the requirements of the Privacy Act.
- Whether the breach caused a disproportionate impact on any group, particularly Northland Māori.

Marcus@utf9k· May 26

Big fan of searching random keywords in Hansard and seeing what falls out Too bad Parliament TV doesn't seem to go back that far

What did John Key say yesterday? Oh, they have issued them with iPads. They have issued them with iPads. That is going to help when you are faced with somebody screaming and ranting, high on P—when you hold up your iPad! I hope that it is on Pokémon GO and you can get the nearest Zubat. Is that what it is going to be? Is that what the answer is to out-of-control crime because of this Government’s failure to resource the police properly? Well, I tell you what: the rest of New Zealand cares. And, of course, the Government has now discovered, because David Farrar has told it, that the rest of New Zealand cares and expects something better.

Marcus@utf9k· May 24

"We need to ensure that these fantasy stories are accurately summarised and cited"

A table with the title "Principle 8: How will you ensure that the information used is correct?"

It says: We rely on the information in the nomination and the letters of support and do not check their accuracy. This is a feature of the current system and we do not propose to change it. As to whether Parata's citation is accurate, an Honours Unit staff member will check the citation for accuracy against the original nomination and letters of support before it is considered by the APH Committee. The same (or similar) prompt will be used in Parata to instruct it to prepare the summary, for consistency and to reduce bias.

Marcus@utf9k· May 23

WorkSafe NZ would like to use Microsoft Copilot to aid in preparing OIA responses

A screenshot of a table with the heading "WorkSafe NZ" and the subheading "CoPilot Chat Proof of Concept"

The summary reads "Demonstrate the value of introducing CoPilot Chat with two use cases including OIA responses and guidance material"

It is in the "Plan & Design" activity stage with Microsoft and other government agencies as their key partners.

Marcus@utf9k· May 23

Statistics New Zealand would like to use an OpenAI model to aid in scraping ecommerce websites A similar entry for Stats explicitly mentions extracting pricing metadata from ecommerce websites

A screenshot of a table with the heading "Statistics New Zealand" and the subheading "Price Web Scraping"

The summary reads "Web Scraping in our unit is difficult due to websites changing often. In order to fix it currently we go back to our scrapers and manually adjust the HTML selectors and code. The idea is to use a GPT model as a 'processor' to extract price data from HTML body text. This will hypothetically eliminate the need for HTML selectors and specific code"

It is in the "Operate & Use" activity stage with OpenAI as their key partner.

Marcus@utf9k· May 23

Statistics New Zealand would like to use Generative AI to create illustrations for internal communications

A screenshot of a table with the heading "Statistics New Zealand" and the subheading "AI Image Generation for Communications"

The summary reads "Need for engaging and illustrative images to improve internal communications and articles. Using AI image generation tools to create visual content for internal communications, articles, and publications"

It is in the "Plan & Design" activity stage with Microsoft Copilot as their key partner.

Marcus@utf9k· May 23

The Reserve Bank of New Zealand would like to use AI to analyse public submissions

A screenshot of a table with the heading "Reserve Bank of New Zealand" and the subheading "Digital Cash - Public Consulation"

The summary reads "The Digital Cash programme has been exploring the high level design options for digital cash, and asking for public feedback on the proposed design features. We received over 18,000 survey responses, and over 500 written responses. This was identified as a good candidate for an AI Proof of Concept (PoC) because of the otherwise heavy manual effort required to analyse the responses and because the nature of the data lent itself well to standard Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) approaches. The AI PoC had the following objectives: Explore AI for analysing Digital Cash Consultation responses and performing sentiment analysis of unstructured datasets. Determine AI's potential to reduce manual effort and uncover new insights. The team approached the PoC by: Using generative AI tools, specifically Microsoft Co-Pilot Studio, to build a chatbot that was deployed as a Microsoft Teams application. Leveraging RAG technique to quickly build an AI application without having to train the AI on submission data."

It is in the "Plan & Design" activity stage with Microsoft, Azure and Copilot as their key partners.

Marcus@utf9k· May 23

The New Zealand Trade and Enterprise would like to use AI to build a CRM Agent whose purpose is redacted under Section 9(2)(ba)(i) of the Official Information Act, which is to do with protecting information supplied in confidence, where revealing it would prevent further information being supplied

A screenshot of a table with the heading "New Zealand Trade and Enterprise" and the subheading "CRM Agent"

The summary is redacted under Section 9(2)(ba)(i) of the Official Information Act

It is in the "Plan & Design" activity stage with TBC as their key partner. That is not a name, it is to be decided.

Marcus@utf9k· May 23

New Zealand Qualifications Authority are using AI to mark literacy exams

A screenshot of a table with the heading "New Zealand Qualifications Authority" and the subheading "Automated text scoring"

The summary reads "Use of essay scoring model powered by AI to mark the literacy exam"

It is in the "Operate & Use" activity stage with New Data Solutions as their key partner.

Marcus@utf9k· May 23

The New Zealand Defence Force has 3 different AI use-cases redacted under Section 6(b)(i) of the Official Information Act, which is to do with the entrusting of information to the NZ Government in confidence by an agency or government of another country

A screenshot of a table with the heading "New Zealand Defence Force" and the subheading is redacted under Section 6(b)(i) of the Official Information Act

The summary is redacted under Section 6(b)(i)

It is in the "Plan & Design" activity stage with redacted key partners.

Marcus@utf9k· May 23

The New Zealand Defence Force has 4 different AI use-cases redacted under Section 6(a) of the Official Information Act, which is to do with security and defence of NZ, or international relations of the Government

A screenshot of a table with the heading "New Zealand Defence Force" and the subheading is redacted under Section 6(a) of the Official Information Act

The summary is redacted under Section 6(a)

It is in the "Plan & Design" activity stage with redacted key partners.

Marcus@utf9k· May 23

Nelson City Council is using LLMs to analyse public submissions

A screenshot of a table with the heading "Nelson City Council" and the subheading "Analysis of submissions"

The summary reads "Problem Statement: With limited time to process community feedback on the Long Term Plan, an innovative approach was needed to efficiency review submissions and deliver insights to elected members. AI Solution: Partnering with a local AI specialist, a secure tool was developed to streamline the analysis of public submissions. Using OpenAI technology, the tool processed over 1,500 entries from a submissions database, undertaking sentiment analysis and identifying key themes. While staff reviewed and verified outputs, the AI tool provided structured, auditable data that informed reporting and supported decision-making. The tool also enabled real-time responses to queries during meetings and was later used to draft personalized replies to submitters, reflecting Council decisions. Benefits and Outcomes: Enabled deeper understanding of community feedback to inform decision making; Reduced manual workload, allowing staff to focus on strategic tasks; Designed for reuse across various consultation types; Delivered timely, data-driven insights that improved the quality speed of Concil deliberations"

It is in the "Operate & Use" activity stage with AI Factory as a key partner.

Marcus@utf9k· May 23

The Natural Hazards Commission is using LLMs to analyse file notes for settlement claims

A screenshot of a table with the heading "Natural Hazards Commission" and the subheading "Land Assessment Data from Claim File Notes"

The summary reads "Analysing file notes for settlement information. The goal is to identify whether claims were settled based on remediation or valuation. This involves using AI to parse through the settlement notes and extract key information, such as the basis of settlement and specific details like square meterage. This use case aims to automate the extraction of structured data from unstructured text in settlement notes."

It is in the "Plan & Design" activity stage with no key partners.

Marcus@utf9k· May 23

The Ministry of Social Development would like to use AI to summarise and search through case notes when a case is opened for investigation

A screenshot of a table with the heading "Ministry of Social Development" and the subheading "AI Client case note search"

The summary reads "Cases are opened for investigation. Part of the investigation process is reading large volumes of case notes from a client management system. This is a challenge due to the large amount of case notes, as well as the inconsistent structure of case notes. AI can create a summary of a case note that is: Neutral in tone, Consistent in language, highlights important setences, create(s) a narrative sumary. In addition, it can help people find information inside of unstructured case notes. This includes the generation of synthetic case notes as part of the testing process."

It is in the "Develop" activity stage with Deloitte as key partners.

Marcus@utf9k· May 23

The Ministry of Māori Development would like to use AI to review public submissions

A screenshot of a table with the heading "Ministry of Māori Development - Te Puni Kōkiri" and the subheading "Submission review"

The summary reads "We are in the early stages of considering how we can use AI to review submissions to various legislation changes, to speed up the processing of public submissions"

It is in the "Plan & Design" activity stage with no key partners.

Marcus@utf9k· May 23

The Ministry of Justice is experimenting with AI to speed up retrieving and collation of responses for OIAs