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Survivorship Bias and the End of the World
Why “We’ve Survived Before” Is the Most Dangerous Argument There’s a famous image from World War II, a diagram of a bomber covered in red dots, each one marking where returning planes had been hit by enemy fire. The military’s first instinct was obvious: reinforce the areas with the most bullet holes. Protect the parts…
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The Taboo of Survival: Why Capitalism Won’t Let Us Save Each Other
It is January 2026. If you look at the stock market, we just finished a year of record growth. If you look at the real world, however, the picture is very different. Since the start of the year, I have been watching the global stage with a sense of dread. The potential breakup of NATO,…
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The Machine Doesn’t Believe Us
When AI Thinks 2026 Is Too Crazy to Be Real I asked Gemini to help me with something routine, just a bit of research about current events in 2026. It panicked. Not because the request was inappropriate or dangerous. It panicked because it thought I was lying to it. It thought I was testing it,…
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The White-Collar Cliff: Why Higher-Level Jobs Aren’t Safe
People are fundamentally misunderstanding what’s happening with AI and the job market. The conversation is stuck on ‘AI will help you write code faster,’ but that’s missing the cliff we’re standing on. It’s not just the grunt work that’s disappearing, it’s the higher-level functions we thought were safe Take Business Analysts. I’ve had to fill…
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Migrating WordPress from Lightsail to S3 + CloudFront
After almost a decade of running MannanLive.com on WordPress via Amazon Lightsail, I finally decided to pull the plug and move everything to a simpler, static setup using Amazon S3 and CloudFront. Why the change? A few reasons, really. First, while Lightsail is pretty affordable at $5 USD a month, the cost adds up –…
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Serverless Backup Magic: Exporting Aurora Snapshots to S3
Automating Daily Database Backups from Aurora to S3 with AWS CloudFormation Running a successful business like RosterPortal.com.au since 2007, I’ve always relied on MS SQL Server for database management. Our daily text exports to S3 have been an invaluable part of our backup strategy. Now, as we migrate to Babelfish Aurora PostgreSQL, we’re faced with new challenges, one of which is…
MannanLive
Tech, Travel & Thoughts
This is how it all started…
MannanLive.com began back in June 2012, during one of the most exciting early chapters of my career. I was a graduate software engineer working at a financial company in Australia when I was sent on a month-long work trip to China to collaborate with our contracting partners at ThoughtWorks. It was my first time working overseas, and I wanted a place to document the experience – not just for others, but for myself.
What started as a simple travel log quickly grew into something more. I found myself writing not only about the places I visited but also the things I was learning along the way – technical problems I solved, tools I was discovering, and the odd bit of geeky enthusiasm that didn’t quite fit into a formal work report.
Even before then, tech had always been part of my story. From tinkering on my parents’ word processor as a kid, to studying IT in high school and uni, to launching my own rostering SaaS while still at university (which – somehow – is still alive and well today at RosterPortal.com.au).
These days, I use MannanLive.com as a hybrid of sorts: part personal journal, part technical reference. It’s where I post walkthroughs of problems I’ve solved (mostly so I can remember what I did!), share side projects, and occasionally reflect on where this journey is taking me.
Mannan
Tech Enthusiast and Mocha Lover
