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I spent a chunk of Sunday arvo down a Reddit hole on r/singularity, which is never a great sign for my mental health but always good for a blog post. Among the usual parade of “AI did an amazing thing” clips, two items stuck with me. One: a Google model apparently built a whole photorealistic pagoda complex in Blender from a single prompt, agents critiquing their own work like a tiny obsessive design …

Saw a story yesterday about Google launching TPU chips into orbit to test the idea of space-based data centres. My first reaction was the same as most of r/technews: a kind of tired, raised-eyebrow “of course they are.” My second reaction, a few minutes later, was genuine curiosity. Both of those feel correct, which is annoying, because I’d prefer to just pick one. The pitch is simple enough. Solar …

Saw a headline on r/artificial this morning that made me put my coffee down for a second. Apparently a Palantir exec reckons AI researchers are taking up smoking again, on the logic that AI will cure cancer before it gets around to killing them. I read it twice to make sure I hadn’t misunderstood. I hadn’t. Now, I don’t know how widespread this actually is, and I’m deeply suspicious of any …

There was a Welcome to Country at the Australia Cup final on the weekend, and a chunk of the crowd booed it. Then, a day or so later, a well known Greek-Australian advocate said he felt ashamed to be Greek after Greek fans were among those doing the booing. Both threads blew up on r/australia, and I’ve been turning the whole thing over since, mostly because the easy explanations don’t quite hold.

Fell down a rabbit hole on r/CleaningTips last night, which is not a sentence I expected to type, but here we are. A woman posted asking whether other people find it rude when relatives clean their house uninvited. Her mother-in-law can’t help herself, apparently. Comes over, finds something to scrub, says cleaning is her hobby. The post had over three hundred comments by the time I got to it, and the mood was …

There’s a thread doing the rounds on r/Melbourne at the moment asking a question I’ve been silently fuming about for weeks: what is going on with the nature strips and road medians around this city. Someone in Melbourne’s south-east finally said it out loud, and the replies came in fast, which tells you this isn’t just one bloke’s pet grievance. It’s a genuine, shared, low-grade …

Someone on r/privacy ran an experiment this week that’s been rattling around my head since I read it. They loaded a single AP News article, nothing exotic, just a news story, and checked what their browser had picked up before they’d even clicked “accept” or “reject” on the cookie banner. The answer: 618 cookies, from 163 different companies. Six hundred and eighteen. For one …

Been thinking about a couple of things that landed on my radar this week, and they’re really the same story told twice. A US school district rolled out Google Gemini for its students, then a few weeks later banned AI outright across every grade. And separately, there’s a study doing the rounds claiming that just ten minutes of AI use measurably erodes your ability to persist at hard things. Put those next …

Someone on r/selfhosted posted about Microsoft quietly changing the OneDrive storage deal on 365 Family subscriptions, going from 1TB per family member to 2TB shared across the whole household. Sounds like more storage until you do the maths and realise five people sharing 2TB is a downgrade dressed up as a gift. The top comment called it “the shittiest of enshittification,” and I had to laugh, because …

Spent a bit of time on r/LocalLLaMA last night, which is usually where I go when I want to feel simultaneously excited and slightly nauseous about where AI is heading. Yesterday’s top post was a good one: someone noticed that a project called Strata had quietly rewritten its entire Git history. Every commit that used to say “Co-Authored by Claude” had been scrubbed. Not deleted, not hidden, actually …