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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 …

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 …