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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: …

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.