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Someone posted this week about being locked out of their Reddit account entirely until they handed over photo ID to a third-party verification service. Not locked out of adult content. Locked out of everything. Account settings. The ability to delete their own account. The works. Just a popup from a company called Persona, sitting there blocking the door. That’s a fairly significant thing to happen without much …

Someone posted recently about their company running a leaderboard tracking AI token usage. Top 25 users got called “Champions.” People who barely used it were labelled “Sleepers.” The champions had collectively burned through $850,000 since January first. It took me a minute to fully absorb that. The kicker is that the Sleeper who posted about it seemed genuinely worried about being at the …

A while back I came across someone’s write-up of a 1U firewall appliance they’d picked up from AliExpress for $290. Intel N100, four 2.5G Intel i226-V ports, a PCIe slot for SFP+ modules. Runs pfSense. One year on, they reported zero freezes, zero reboots, quiet as you like, cool enough in a home office with no air conditioning. That last detail stuck with me. No AC and it just keeps going. That’s …

There’s a thread doing the rounds about the US government moving to individually approve access to frontier AI models. GPT 5.6, apparently, is now something you need permission to use. I’ve been sitting with this for a few days, turning it over, and I still don’t know whether to be more disturbed by the policy itself or by how unsurprised I am. Let’s be honest about what’s actually …

There’s a thread doing the rounds that started as a shitpost about RM Williams boots and somehow became a genuinely interesting argument about class, value, and what men do to signal competence in an office. The original post was about feeling like a “weapon of an operator” after dropping close to a grand on boots. People were complimenting him at the urinal. Under the stall. That sort of thing. The …

Someone posted on r/AusFinance recently feeling genuinely bad about themselves. Sub-six-figure salary, low five figures in investments, super that wouldn’t cover a long weekend. In their forties. Their words: fat and bald. They wanted to know how to stop feeling jealous every time they opened the app. It’s an honest post. More honest than most of what surrounds it. Here’s the thing about a finance …

There’s a clip going around of a Japanese animator using an AI video tool called Seedance to render anime-style animation from basic 3D models. The person behind it has over a decade of industry experience, with credits on TRIGUN STAMPEDE. He’s doing the motion capture himself. He’s designing the characters and backgrounds himself. He’s feeding all of that in as reference material, and then …

Someone posted recently about nearly failing a college course because an AI detector flagged their entirely human-written paper. Seven pages, ten citations, written over several days. One sentence got flagged because it started with the word “studies.” I’ve been sitting with that for a bit, because it’s a genuinely awful situation that’s going to keep happening to more people. The core …

There’s a photo doing the rounds of a Voss water bottle sitting on a Salvos shelf with a $2.50 price tag on it. The comments are split between people laughing at the absurdity and people saying, actually, that’s a pretty decent deal. I’m in the second camp, and I’ll explain why. The Voss bottle is, stripped of its branding, a well-made glass bottle with a lid that seals properly. That’s …

Someone on the internet spent what sounds like several weeks in hand-to-hand combat with a tube of Aquaphor that survived a full laundry cycle, including the dryer, and lived to stain several garments. They documented everything. Eleven things that failed. One absurd three-step ritual that finally worked. The whole post reads like a boss fight walkthrough, and I mean that as a compliment. The winning method involved …