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Wait, let me redo that properly. title: “Blaming the Robot: When AI Becomes the Perfect Corporate Alibi” date: 2025-05-28T09:15:00+10:00 draft: false tags: [“work”, “ai”, “australia”, “workplace-culture”, “corporate-accountability”] I came across a thread on r/auscorp yesterday about a Sydney marketing agency, The Big Smoke Media Group, going …

There’s a post doing the rounds on r/AusFinance at the moment that I read three times, once with sympathy and twice with the specific irritation you get when you know someone’s technically right but you can’t quite bring yourself to feel sorry for them. Bloke on $200k base gets told he’s getting a $100k bonus. Chuffed, obviously, who wouldn’t be. It lands. It’s just over $50k. He …

Spent a chunk of Sunday arvo down a r/singularity rabbit hole instead of doing the thing I was supposed to be doing, which was cleaning the gutters before the next storm rolls through. The gutters can wait. This couldn’t, apparently. The thread that got me was about a reported OpenAI model, apparently codenamed Astra, that’s meant to do something called “latent space reasoning” or …

Saw a story out of the US this week that made me put my coffee down for a second. A company called Flock, best known for selling automated licence plate readers to police departments, apparently wanted to bolt their cameras onto 350,000 Uber and Lyft cars. Turn the entire rideshare fleet into a rolling surveillance network. The partnership fell through, for now, but “for now” is doing a lot of work in …

Spent a chunk of this month reading through vendor changelogs so you don’t have to, and the pattern that emerged wasn’t “new model, slightly better benchmark.” It was infrastructure. Everyone’s building for agents that run unattended for hours, not the polite little back-and-forth chat pattern we all started with. That’s the actual story this month, and it’s more interesting …

The Lowy Institute poll dropped this week and the headline made me put my coffee down for a second: the largest ever recorded decline in support for cultural diversity in Australia. Pauline Hanson is out there talking about a “monoculture” again, like it’s 1996 and nothing has changed except the resolution of the TV. Meanwhile Canberra gets held up as some kind of multicultural beacon, which, no …

Saw a post on r/AussieFrugal this morning from someone moving into a new place, staring down the barrel of buying everything from scratch. Bed, cutlery, crockery, the lot. Their question was the one everyone asks in that situation: is there a way to turn all this forced spending into points, cashback, some kind of win hiding inside the expense? It’s a fair question. It’s also one I’ve asked myself, …

I fell down a Reddit hole yesterday that had nothing to do with tech and everything to do with dish soap. A young intern at a small healthcare business posted asking whether it was unreasonable that a senior staff member told her off for taking longer than ten minutes to wash up after a shared lunch for six people. Plates, bowls, the works, one set of hands, one tea towel, and someone standing over her with a …

Someone posted their bill from Maison Bâtard on r/Melbourne last night, and buried in the total was a dollar charge they hadn’t asked for. Not a service fee, not GST, a “charity donation” for something called the Collective Foundation, dedicated apparently to “professional development across the hospitality sector.” Opt-out, not opt-in. You had to notice it, then ask for it to be …

I read something this morning that made me put my coffee down for a second. A town called Alpharetta, just outside Atlanta, has about 120 police officers and a few dozen of those Flock automatic number plate cameras dotted around. Nothing unusual there, plenty of places have them now. What stopped me was the scale of the data sharing. That handful of cameras feeds into a network where over 2,000 police departments, …