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There’s a thread doing the rounds on r/australia today about pregnancy discrimination pushing women out of the workforce, and the comments underneath it are the kind of reading that makes you put your coffee down and stare at the wall for a bit. Woman after woman describing the same scene: a job interview, a question that’s been illegal since the Sex Discrimination Act in 1984, and an interviewer who asks …

Saw a post doing the rounds on r/AussieFrugal this week, someone sharing a genuinely useful tip: how to get ten bulk billed telehealth psychologist sessions a year through a Mental Health Care Plan. Get the plan from a bulk billing GP, send it to one of a handful of online services, and you’ve got six sessions, then four more after a quick GP check-in. No gap fee. Decent engagement, the comments doing what …

Someone on a cleaning forum posted something small and honest this week: a reminder to themselves that it’s okay to not finish. They’d done ten things, felt like garbage about the two they hadn’t got to, and had to actively talk themselves down from it. Three hundred and forty upvotes later, it’s clear a lot of people needed to hear that too. What got me, though, wasn’t the original …

Someone on r/Melbourne went to the Dog + Cat Lovers Show this week, the first time in a few years, and came back reporting the place was about 80% AI slop. Not just stallholders cutting corners either. The show itself was using AI artwork to promote the event. A show about actual, real, photographable animals, advertised with images of animals that don’t exist. There’s something almost poetic about that, …

There’s a story doing the rounds about a woman in New Jersey who got fired after her employer’s “AI productivity software” photographed her, in her own living room, every three minutes. Not screenshots of her screen. Photos of her. Her home. Her couch, her bookshelf, whatever she happened to be wearing on a Tuesday afternoon. The quote that stuck with me, from someone commenting on it, was …

Saw a headline yesterday that made me put my coffee down for a second. Some tech CEO, running a company that pays people to sell their personal data for AI training, reckons AI critics are hypocrites because they’d never actually give up ChatGPT. The logic being: you use the product, therefore you have no standing to complain about the enormous data centres chewing through water and electricity to make the …

Spent a chunk of Sunday arvo reading a thread on r/selfhosted instead of doing the things I was supposed to be doing, which is more or less how I spend most Sundays. Someone had a Navidrome instance (a self-hosted music streamer, think your own private Spotify) running on a mini PC at home, and they wanted to listen to it from outside the house without, in their words, “exposing my home IP.” Their …

I’ve spent a chunk of the last couple of years doing something mildly ridiculous for a man my age: downloading enormous language models onto a home server and seeing if my power bill can survive the experiment. It’s a hobby that sits somewhere between model trains and amateur radio, except the parts are free and the forum is r/LocalLLaMA. Yesterday that forum was in a bit of a flap, and for once it …

Spent a bit of time this morning reading a thread from r/auscorp that scratched a very specific itch of mine. Someone on a dev team had inherited a “fancy looking dashboard” that a colleague had vibe-coded into existence with AI. Worked fine for two months. Then it needed a change, nobody who’d built it understood how it worked, and a contractor got paid real money to untangle something that was …

The unemployment figures dropped yesterday, 4.6% to 4.7%, and r/AusFinance did what it always does with economic data: turned it into a 400-comment slugfest about who’s to blame and whether the RBA is secretly trying to ruin everyone’s life. I read the thread with my coffee this morning and came away with the same feeling I get most weeks when I check the news properly instead of doom-scrolling headlines: …