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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 …

Saw a post on r/auscorp this morning that put me right off my second coffee. Someone in Sydney resigned, gave a week’s notice like a decent human being, even offered to work the whole thing out. Their employer’s response was to withhold both weeks of pay, including leave entitlements already earned, and tell them they were “sick of entitled people.” For wanting to be paid for hours worked. The …

Saw a thread on r/AusFinance last night that stopped me scrolling: someone complaining about $43 steaks and $5 sushi rolls, asking how anyone affords eating out anymore. Six hundred and sixty-odd comments in a day. Normally that kind of post is just people venting about smashed avo, but this one turned into something more interesting, because the top reply wasn’t “cook at home, mate.” It was: a …

Spent a chunk of my Sunday morning reading a thread on r/singularity instead of doing anything useful, which is on brand for me lately. The post was from someone who’d worked at Anthropic, now out, doing interviews about how AI is going to end jobs as we know them and usher in something called Universal High Income. Not basic income, mind you. High income. The idea being that once AI does all the labour, the …

There was a story doing the rounds this week about a small clinical trial where some people with Type 1 diabetes were able to come off insulin entirely. Early days, small sample size, the usual caveats. But the headline alone was enough to light up the comments, and what I found in there was more interesting than the trial itself. A lot of people with Type 1, or parents of kids with it, showed up to basically say: …

Saw a stat this week that stuck with me: a Cambridge study found 51% of surveyed British novelists think AI will eventually replace their fiction-writing work entirely, and 39% say it’s already hurt their income. Someone on r/artificial replied to the headline with “only half?” and got a surprising number of upvotes. That reaction told me more than the survey did. I’ve got a soft spot for …

Someone on r/australia posted a headline yesterday that made me laugh out loud at my desk: “RBA Reassures Australians They’ll Stop Raising Interest Rates as Soon as Economy Collapses.” It’s satire, obviously, but it’s the kind of satire that lands because it’s barely exaggerating anything. A couple of hours later the top post on the same subreddit was a photo of a $7 Aldi air-fried …