So I’ve been down a rabbit hole this Easter weekend, and it has nothing to do with chocolate eggs. Google DeepMind dropped Gemma 4, and the local AI community has basically lost its collective mind — in the best possible way.

For those not deep in the weeds on this stuff, Gemma is Google’s family of open-weights AI models. The new Gemma 4 lineup ranges from tiny models designed to run on phones all the way up to a 31 billion parameter beast that’ll give your home server a decent workout. And the specs are genuinely impressive: multimodal input handling text, images, video and audio, context windows up to 256K tokens, native tool calling, built-in reasoning modes, and support for over 140 languages. That last point is actually more significant than most people give it credit for — more on that in a moment.

Someone posted online recently about their office being 80% empty — down from 50 people on a floor to about 10 — and honestly, the responses were gold. A mix of envy, recognition, and the occasional sharp observation about management having heads equally as empty as the office. Relatable content for a Thursday morning.

It got me thinking about how dramatically the whole “where do we work” conversation has shifted over the past few years. Because we’re not really arguing about it anymore, are we? The great Return-to-Office wars of 2022 and 2023 feel like they’ve quietly fizzled into a kind of uneasy truce. Most places have landed somewhere between “come in when it makes sense” and “we’re not paying for all this real estate for it to sit empty, so please just show up occasionally.”

Been following the fuel situation pretty closely this week, and there’s a lot to unpack. Roger Cook invoking emergency powers in WA under the Fuel, Energy and Power Resources Act 1972 has got people either cheering or crying government overreach — and honestly, I think a lot of the critics are missing the point entirely.

Let’s be clear about what actually happened here. This wasn’t some dramatic state of emergency like we saw during COVID. Cook used specific legislative powers to force fuel companies to disclose how much fuel they actually have and where it’s stored. That’s it. The reason? Companies were apparently hiding behind “supply contract confidentiality” clauses to avoid sharing that information. Which means Gina Rinehart’s operations, BHP, Rio, Twiggy’s empire — they potentially have millions of litres sitting at their mine sites while the rest of WA is sweating about supplies. The audacity is genuinely breathtaking.