Lead @yimbymelbourne // Chief @inflectionptswk // Boundless (2027, Pantera Press) // Emergent Ventures // jonathan@jonobri.com
Joined July 2013
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516 Photos and videos
Pinned Tweet
Mar 1
Australia faces three major crises: housing, energy, and productivity. Boundless is a book about how we might confront these great problems of our time, and it’s coming out in 2027.
Co-written with the excellent @HowardFMaclean and published by also-excellent @PanteraPress.
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Jonathan O'Brien retweeted
Jun 13
Fable isn't the first.
In 1999 the department of defense blocked exports of the PowerMac G4 for crossing the 1 gigaflop threshold.
Steve Jobs turned it into an ad.
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Jonathan O'Brien retweeted
Jun 10
I gave @AnthropicAI's new Fable 5 my hardest challenge: explain the Riemann Hypothesis — math's most famous unsolved problem — to anyone. Two prompts later: a full interactive site this video, scored with music composed from the zeta zeros themselves 🤯🎵 riemann.adilmoujahid.com
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Jonathan O'Brien retweeted
Jun 9
Fable 5 is state-of-the-art on nearly all tested benchmarks, with exceptional performance in software engineering, knowledge work, scientific research, and vision.
The longer and more complex the task, the larger Fable 5’s lead over our other models.
ALT Benchmark table titled Mythos 5 & Fable 5, comparing Claude Mythos 5 and Fable 5 against Claude Mythos Preview, Claude Opus 4.8, GPT 5.5, and Gemini 3.1 Pro.
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Jonathan O'Brien retweeted
@danielleiwood, Chair of @ozprodcom, makes the case against "performative regulation" in her essay the Red Tape Impulse.
Diagnosing the incentives which push politicians to overregulate, she calls for greater ambition in addressing regulatory hairballs.
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Jonathan O'Brien retweeted
Jun 9
Planners take credit for upzoning in Auckland (which doubled construction and slashed rent).
Fine.
If Australian planners advocated something similar I'd cheer them on.
Instead, they do the opposite. They side with NIMBYs and oppose increased density.
thefifthestate.com.au/column…
Jun 9
Fantastic news that @pia_planning has finally accepted the evidence on Auckland. Broad upzoning works, and it’s great to see the PIA get instep with the evidence.
But the strategic planning process made Auckland’s reforms worse: the process locked up wealthy inner-city areas.
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Jun 9
Fantastic news that @pia_planning has finally accepted the evidence on Auckland. Broad upzoning works, and it’s great to see the PIA get instep with the evidence.
But the strategic planning process made Auckland’s reforms worse: the process locked up wealthy inner-city areas.
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Jun 9
Look at the charts below. There is more low-density zoning within 5km of Auckland’s CBD—and within wealthy suburbs—than anywhere else in the city. Does this really pass the “Good Strategic Planning” sniff test?
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Jun 9
It’s great to see the PIA moving in a positive direction, but the historic revisionism is frustrating to see. The good news is that upzoning ~75% of land doesn’t count as broad-based. So that gives us a good steer for future reform!
x.com/db_econ/status/2064304…
Just incredible work to show a chart that shows zoning going from 96% low-density to 75% medium-high density and then having your next sentence be:
'That is not a story of blanket upzoning'
Utterly magnificent stuff.
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Jonathan O'Brien retweeted
Jun 8
Its so dumb to have this opinion in australia, a country that has already pulled the biggest lever available in regional development in putting its entire federal government in a made up town. And yet it still struggles to attract people
Jun 7
One of the hills I will dig in on is that Australia should have deliberately pushed for larger regional cities rather than letting greater Sydney and Melbourne grow wildly - now pushing 6 m - with Brisbane/SE Qld rapidly catching up.
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Jonathan O'Brien retweeted
Jun 9
This is the green and golden bell frog. In 2023 it was endangered. A team in Australia set out to save it by building habitat. But environmental regulations held up the minor construction required for years. By the time of approval, it was locally extinct. (1/2)
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Jonathan O'Brien retweeted
At some point after decades of trying to do de-centralisation, we've got to face up to the fact that there's a reason why more people want to live in our larger cities, even in the face of higher housing costs, and longer commutes, and respect that choice.
Jun 7
One of the hills I will dig in on is that Australia should have deliberately pushed for larger regional cities rather than letting greater Sydney and Melbourne grow wildly - now pushing 6 m - with Brisbane/SE Qld rapidly catching up.
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Jun 8
Regulation is an easy answer to difficult problems. It's also often not very effective.
The new @inflectionptswk essay from Danielle Wood has landed right up top on the front page of the @FinancialReview.
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Jun 8
As regulation accumulates, it ends up looking a lot more like a Pollock than a tapestry. You can read Dani's piece about how to fix it here: inflectionpoints.work/articl…
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You see this take a lot but it's just not true that growing the regions is easier than growing cities.
- Regional NIMBYism is often more virulent
- The regions don't have legacy infrastructure, it all has to be built new
- Genuine environmental challenges in many coastal towns
Jun 7
One of the hills I will dig in on is that Australia should have deliberately pushed for larger regional cities rather than letting greater Sydney and Melbourne grow wildly - now pushing 6 m - with Brisbane/SE Qld rapidly catching up.
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Jonathan O'Brien retweeted
Jun 7
people (in this case @jonobri) haven’t given up on the dream of making ABS data machine readable and easy to use. You love to see it github.com/jonobri/readabs-m…
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Jonathan O'Brien retweeted
He mastered this app in 72 hours in a way I haven’t been able to do in almost 9 years
All you can do is tip your cap
Jun 4
Do I look like I’m a part of the elite oligarch class. This was taken at a super 8 motel off I95 by the way.
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