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There’s a post doing the rounds on r/privacy about Flock Safety, the US company whose number-plate reading cameras have been getting ripped down in city after city amid lawsuits and public pressure, only for the same councils to turn around and sign contracts with Axon or Motorola or Rekor instead. Same technology. Same database. Same cop who can pull up everywhere your car has been in the last six months. …

A county in Florida found 14 licence plate reading cameras bolted up around town that nobody in local government had authorised. Eleven of them are still up there, humming away, because the official response wasn’t “take them down and work out who put them there.” It was a bag over the lens and a little note, like someone’s left a shopping trolley in a car park and the council’s waiting …

Spent a bit of time down a rabbit hole on r/selfhosted last night, the way you do when you tell yourself you’re just checking one thread before bed and then it’s 11:40pm and you’re reading about a uni student in his dorm running eight services off a laptop and a Pod running AdGuard Home, because that’s all he’s got. The post that got me was from a med student, no real money, self-hosting …

Spent a chunk of my Sunday morning reading a thread on r/LocalLLaMA titled, more or less, “why do Americans lag so far behind in open LLMs”. The poster’s logic ran like this: DeepSeek, Kimi, GLM, MiniMax, the Chinese labs are shipping open weight models constantly, and the big American labs mostly aren’t. Shouldn’t that bother people more than it seems to? I don’t know the full …

Quiet month for model releases, loud month for everything around them. Opus 5.5 and Sonnet 5.5 turned up, both solid, neither surprising. Same context window, same pricing tier, a benchmark bump that Anthropic measured on its own scaffold so I’ll believe it once someone outside the building confirms it. Fine. Switch the defaults, move on. The thing that actually kept me up reading changelogs was Claude Code …

Saw a thread on r/auscorp this morning that stopped me mid-scroll. Someone posted that their colleague is quietly working two full-time remote jobs, software engineering gigs, no overlap in required hours, both employers apparently fine with it (or at least not actively looking). The original poster wasn’t outraged. If anything they sounded a bit envious, which, fair enough. What got me wasn’t the …

There’s a thread doing the rounds on r/AusFinance about the ban on card surcharges, and it’s one of those topics that looks simple from a distance and gets more interesting the longer you sit with it. The original post was blunt: why is everyone losing their minds over a 1% fee disappearing from the bottom of a coffee receipt? A $5 coffee already bakes in the beans, the milk, the rent, the wages. Why does …

I’ve been rationing my AI news intake lately, the way you ration anything that’s genuinely bad for you but also genuinely interesting. Most days it’s the same churn: a new model benchmark, a funding round, someone on X declaring the singularity is either three weeks away or a scam cooked up by venture capitalists. I scroll past most of it with the same flat interest I give cricket scores from a …

I’ve been chewing on something I read on r/artificial instead of doing anything productive with my evening, which is roughly how most of my AI curiosity ends up. Someone had gone through the actual system card for a new model release, not the press summary, the 30-page document nobody but the truly committed reads. Buried in it was a section on “sandbagging”: can the model deliberately underperform …

There’s a post doing the rounds on r/australia this morning, a young woman sharing a photo of her leg from a few years back, the scar left after they cut a melanoma in situ out of what had looked like an innocent freckle. She posts this every year, apparently, as a PSA. Get your skin checked. Don’t assume you’re too young. Don’t assume the mole is fine because it looks fine.