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Been down a bit of a rabbit hole this week, the kind that starts with one Reddit thread and ends with you closing forty tabs at midnight wondering if you should cover your webcam with something more substantial than a Post-it note. The thread was on r/privacy, about a security researcher who built a map of every Flock Safety camera location in the US, pulled from a leak in Flock’s own database. Flock makes …

There’s a story doing the rounds about a company called Flock, which makes automated licence plate reader cameras that have quietly gone up on poles all over the US, and now increasingly here too. A security researcher built a detailed public map showing where these cameras actually are. Flock’s response was to try and get the map taken down. Not the cameras. The map showing where the cameras are. I read …

Someone on r/selfhosted posted something this week that landed harder than they probably intended. Paraphrasing: they got into self-hosting for control, and now they’re more paranoid than when they were just handing everything to Google and Dropbox. Backups, updates, exposed ports, drives quietly dying in the background, the general sense that somewhere out there a bored teenager in a different timezone is …

I fell down a Reddit hole yesterday, the way you do, and ended up on r/LocalLLaMA reading a thread about someone running a 256GB Mac Studio with an M5 Ultra chip, trying to squeeze usable speeds out of a model called GLM-5.3-Flash. Not exactly light bedtime reading. But stick with me, because underneath the acronyms there’s something genuinely interesting going on, and it says a fair bit about where we’re …

Spent a chunk of my weekend reading through r/auscorp, which is a bit like doom-scrolling but with better production values. There’s always a resignation-or-termination saga to gawk at, but the one that actually stuck with me was from a 40-year-old IT worker who got his start in the early 2000s doing the jobs nobody senior wanted to touch because they refused to learn email. He was asking, genuinely, whether …

Choice put out a report yesterday saying grocery prices are up 7% across Coles, Woolworths, IGA and Aldi. Not over a year. Over three months. I read that on the train and then spent the rest of the trip doing the maths on my own shop, which is a genuinely depressing way to pass twenty minutes. The comments under the story on r/AusFinance did what these threads always do: split into two camps that talk past each …

I spent a chunk of my Sunday morning coffee reading a thread on r/singularity about a meme video, the kind where various AI labs get cast as characters in some kind of race. Google barely rates a mention anymore, apparently, which the commenters found hilarious. Musk gets cast because he’s famous, not because Grok is winning anything. Someone in the comments compared it to casting Christian Bale as Moses: not …

I’ve been reading about London’s pushback against smart glasses this week, pubs and shops putting up “cameras off” signs, staff getting fed up with punters wandering in wearing Ray-Ban Metas recording everything for content. It’s a small story on the surface. Underneath it, there’s something that’s been bugging me for a while: we’ve quietly lost the ability to know when …

There’s a piece doing the rounds about older Australians who say they’d be happy to see house prices fall, for their kids’ sake. Not the usual “back in my day a Chiko Roll cost ten cents” grumbling. Actual homeowners, sitting on actual equity, saying they’d take the hit. I read it twice because it felt like spotting a parking spot right out the front of the shops: nice, but …

I fell down a Reddit hole last night that started with anti-bacterial wipes and ended, four hundred comments later, with a bloke describing how he lets his dogs lick the plates clean before they go in the dishwasher. Somewhere in between, roughly two hundred strangers had a genuinely heated argument about laundry powder versus pods. Not powder versus pods for clothes. For the dishwasher. I didn’t know this was …