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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, …

Bernie Sanders wants to introduce a bill banning Flock’s automatic licence plate readers in the US. It’s the kind of headline that makes you feel briefly good about the world, then makes you think for a bit longer and feel worse. Flock is the company that’s quietly wired thousands of American towns up with cameras that read every passing numberplate, log it, timestamp it, and hand the whole database …

I fell down a r/LocalLLaMA hole last night instead of doing anything sensible, and came out the other side with a thought I can’t quite shake: the open source AI crowd isn’t winning because they’re smarter than OpenAI or Anthropic. They’re winning because they’re not allowed to keep secrets from each other. There’s a thread doing the rounds with a fairly simple thesis: closed labs …

There’s a thread doing the rounds on r/auscorp about graduate law jobs, and it’s stuck with me for a couple of days now. MinterEllison cut its grad intake by almost a third this year, and they’re not hiding why: AI. Other big firms are cutting too but keeping quiet about the reason, which is its own kind of tell. Meanwhile the UK is seeing paralegal vacancies down more than 60 per cent since 2023.

Someone on r/AusFinance posted a leaked bit of market research from a bank testing the waters on subscription tiers for personal banking. Not a fee here or there, an actual Netflix-style ladder: basic, plus, premium, max. Pay more, get more of your own money’s basic functions unlocked. The post ended with a line I want stitched onto a cushion: “I DON’T WANT TO FUCKING SUBSCRIBE TO A BANK.” …

Amazon is closing down Mechanical Turk at the end of September. If you’ve never heard of it, Turk was the internet’s odd-job board: tiny, tedious tasks (tagging images, transcribing audio, answering surveys) farmed out to a global pool of humans for a few cents a pop. It’s been running since 2005, longer than the iPhone, and it quietly became one of the engines behind the AI boom. Somebody had to …