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Saw a thread this week that’s been rattling around my head longer than it probably deserves to. Someone posted about starting a new job in insurance, noticing a coworker occasionally putting on a pair of Meta Ray-Bans, scrolling through the CRM for a few minutes, then taking them off again. No proof of anything. Just a vague, uneasy feeling. Should they say something? I read the whole thread over batch brew on …

Saw a stat doing the rounds this week that stopped me mid-scroll. Fewer than 15% of full-time Australian workers earn $150,000 or more. The average full-time salary sits around $110k, the median closer to $90k. I had to read it twice, not because I doubted it, but because it doesn’t match the vibe you get from certain corners of the internet. Spend enough time on LinkedIn, or the finance side of Reddit, or even …

Someone sent me the clip of the Musk interview with The Economist on Sunday morning, the way people send you things now, with no context, just a link and a “have you seen this.” I watched it while the coffee was still too hot to drink. Worth doing, if only for the bit at the end where he predicts AI and robots will make money essentially meaningless within twenty years, then in the next breath predicts …

Someone posted a link to their own academic paper this week, analysing two decades of open-source commit data, and it’s been sitting in the back of my head since. The finding: big, mature projects grow at a steady, boring rate no matter what tech hype is happening around them. Smaller projects are chaotic, prone to bursts and stalls. And even with LLMs in the mix through early 2025, the mature projects …

There’s a story doing the rounds again about dental finally getting folded into Medicare, and I’ve noticed the same thing happens every time: a flicker of hope, a lot of “believe it when I see it,” and then quietly, nothing. My father-in-law used to say the same thing about the East Coast fast rail every federal election for about twenty years. Some promises age like wine. This one’s …

Mark 27 July 2026 in the calendar. Actually, don’t just mark it, set a second alarm for 1:55pm, because at 2pm sharp every compatible phone in the country is going to shriek at once. It’s the national test of AusAlert, the new emergency warning system, and I’ll admit my first reaction was mild interest followed almost immediately by “right, so that’s the day I need to remember to put my …

Someone on Reddit posted a photo this week of baby clothes that had gone through the wash and dryer with a brown crayon still in the pocket. The result looked, depending on who you asked, like toasted marshmallows, prehistoric fossils, shrimp chips, or a litter of newborn puppies. One person on shrooms saw puppies. I believed them. The actual question, “how do I fix this,” got buried fast under a …

Third time now we’ve stayed in Walhalla, and I still can’t quite explain what it is about the place. Officially it’s meant to be the most haunted town in Victoria. Unofficially, it’s the most peaceful few days I get all year. For anyone who hasn’t made the trip, Walhalla is a old gold-mining town tucked into a valley in Gippsland, a couple of hours east of the city. No mobile reception. …

I read about the Bitchat thing on my lunch break and thought about it for the rest of the afternoon, which is more attention than most tech news deserves these days. Quick version: Jack Dorsey built an app called Bitchat that lets nearby phones talk to each other over Bluetooth, no internet, no cell service, just device to device mesh networking. Useful at festivals, useful in national parks, useful anywhere the …

We don’t get many Cybertrucks here. Compliance rules, mostly; the thing barely scrapes past Australian design regs, and even if it didn’t, I can’t picture it navigating a servo forecourt in Cranbourne without clipping a bowser. But the internet has no borders, and I’ve spent an embarrassing amount of time lately reading Americans describe, in real time, the slow-motion collapse of a $100,000 …