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There’s a post doing the rounds on r/privacy this morning with a headline that made me laugh out loud: “Turns out Brits would quite like their private messages to stay private.” Nearly a thousand upvotes, which tells you something about the appetite for stating the obvious. Apparently the UK government ran an ad campaign trying to soften people up for chat control style legislation, and the public …

I’ve been half-following this story about the White House launching a little arcade of parody games to promote deportation policy, and my first reaction wasn’t outrage. It was something closer to secondhand embarrassment. Someone in a government office, presumably paid a public salary, sat down and made a knock-off Tetris. Not a clever one. A bad one, by the sound of it, where the lines don’t even …

Spent a bit of time on r/selfhosted last night, which is normally a nice quiet corner of the internet where people show off their NAS builds and argue about whether Proxmox or bare Debian is the “purer” way to live. Last night it was something else: a small, slow-motion group therapy session about RAM prices. The post that kicked it off was from someone who’d just discovered self-hosting. Old …

I’ve had a browser tab open for two days now with a Reddit thread from r/LocalLLaMA titled “Bernie Sanders proposes to ban AI.” I keep coming back to it, not because I think the bill is going anywhere (it isn’t), but because the argument underneath it is one I genuinely don’t know how to resolve. The bill, as summarised in the thread, would ban AI systems that exceed human cognitive …

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 …