Either that number was wrong like you say OR (and I am unfamiliar with Bluesky) the URL is loaded via Bluesky's browser (like X) and therefore Bluesky's own server IP was used (instead of the user's).

Edit: Or (and more likely) cached/copies of the original.

Jesus Christ, this hit a little too close to home. I had booked a similar price hotel for a period of time during the World Cup next in Vancouver in June; 11 nights in total. I had only reserved it (via Booking.com) until today when I paid the balance. I have been worried about this happening to me ever since I booked it. The price I got was VERY good (considering the event).

I cannot fathom this. What an egregious waste of (assumed) public money.

Surely someone can request to see where this went? Even the original figure of $4.1m is insane.

Why? Its 4.1m AUD. Given the salary of devs and the scope of such a website, the original budget seemed pretty optimistic.

Because the ridiculous scope creep perhaps? And spending $96M of government money on an website (still with large faults that were backed out)

This was Accenture and Deloitte - not some backyard dev shop.

This is pretty standard for Accenture and Deloitte.

I'm of two minds about this comment. A glance at the website suggests it has a lot of content and a full overhaul for 4.1m AUD (2.6m USD) might not be that that high of a price.

But the problem is with the assumption that the website needs a full overhaul. So often a full overhaul is where projects go to balloon in cost by 20x. An outside agency sells the leadership on a big picture full of fluff about "modernization" without any connection to real improvements.

A better approach would be to determine the most important weaknesses of the existing website, and incrementally improve them. But big organizations struggle with this. Government agencies are probably even worse than big corporations, but big corporations are terrible too.

Agreed. I'm a regular user of the BoM website, and from my perspective the old version was absolutely fine. I wasn't one of the people instantly panning the redesign, but after using it for a while I haven't found positives to outweigh the minor annoyance of the change, let alone justify the expenditure. I can totally believe there were some accessibility issues that I was oblivious to, but it's hard to imagine they couldn't have been fixed in a much narrower, cheaper way.

(It was slightly weird that the old website didn't support https -- but on the other hand, I can't really think of a realistic case where that mattered. And I reckon they could have sorted it out for closer to $0m than $100m.)

>It was slightly weird that the old website didn't support https

It always did if you linked to https://reg.bom.gov.au , eg https://reg.bom.gov.au/products/IDN60801/IDN60801.94768.shtm... https://reg.bom.gov.au/products/IDR711.loop.shtml

Ironically it had HTTPS enabled and set up on the 'www' site as well, but it obnoxiously redirected you back to HTTP if you tried to change the URL. I've never seen that anywhere else, ever.

> Given the salary of devs

Devs are shocked to hear that their 500k salary makes the project cost more than a 50k they think it is worth.

Hahahaha, right. I wish. No developer in consulting is getting paid $500k.

Jesus, people hear one tidbit about prestige staff engineer positions at Microsoft, Meta, and Google, and then assume we're all getting those numbers.

5 person team, 5 overheads (dealing with the government no less), 200k/yr each that’s 2m a year + 50% margin would easily get you a 4m burn rate.

This happened to me for the first (and only time so far) the other day on a video that wasn’t even in another language but from an guy who sometimes posts in another language (but usually in English) but does have a strong German (I think) accent. I was so confused at first and it took me a while to figure out what was going on as I could tell his voice was weird and then noticed the audio was completely out of sync.

I assumed this was going to be about Stick Death but I was mistaken! I had never heard of XiaoXiao before this article...

Stick Death was online when I first starting used the WWW, I was obsessed with it! It was just incredibly to me that someone could easily make these animations and get them online for everyone to see! I believe this around the same time as 2advanced and the "Flash intro" craze...

I immediately thought of Animator vs Animation!

I came here to say this too. I’m really not sure he’d leave his very public personal email in there in purpose. I am not ashamed to say I still use my personal Gmail for testing in 2025.

By the way, this is not specific to MCP, could have happened to any package.

I maintain the Nodemailer library. Several years ago I used my personal email in a few usage examples. Developers still copy that old snippet, add their SMTP credentials and send test emails - which land in my inbox.

Framework for using your cars infotainment system as your screen/input device. Android has something similar called Android Auto.

> Meta Ray-Ban Display is part of our vision to build the next computing platform that puts people at the center so they can be more present, connected, and empowered in the world.

Err what? How do glasses that let you procrastinate when physically connecting to people help that?!

Also the video demo has no sound and one of the examples genuinely looked like the wearer was having a text a convo with someone whilst sat across from people at dinner…

> I answered

This is honestly the cause IMO. I refuse to any call from any number not in my phone book, UNLESS I am expecting a very specific call and if it’s not who I expect, I hang up with no conversation.