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Saw a thread this week that stopped me mid-scroll. A young grad, a few months into their first full-time job after uni, describing something close to despair. Crying a couple of times a week. Sleeping until 1pm on weekends just to claw back enough energy to do it all again on Monday. Missing the version of life where they had control over their own time. Genuinely asking how they’re supposed to do this for …

A thread popped up online this week that’s been sitting with me since I read it. Someone’s MyGov account got locked for suspicious activity, which turned out to be legitimate, and by the time they worked out what happened, a fraudulent tax return had already been lodged through an agent they’d never heard of, with a $3.5k refund heading to a bank account that wasn’t theirs. It gets worse. The …

Brad Lightcap resigned as COO of OpenAI this week, and within days it turned out he wasn’t alone. Head of Ethics, gone. Head of Safety Systems, gone. Head of Mission Alignment, gone. All in the space of a few weeks, right before a company reportedly worth several hundred billion dollars is meant to march toward an IPO. His farewell post had a line in it that stuck with me: “the real AGI is the friends you …

Saw the headline this week: scientists reckon we might be able to grow new teeth within four years. Not dentures, not implants, actual teeth, grown fresh, courtesy of some clever work with stem cells and tooth buds happening in Japan. My first reaction was genuine interest. My second reaction, about four seconds later, was a very specific kind of tiredness. Because I’ve heard this before. Not this exact claim, …

Four Claude models in two months. That’s the number that stopped me mid-coffee this week. Anthropic shipped Mythos 5, Fable 5, Sonnet 5, and now Opus 5, all since early June. I don’t know how their eval team is sleeping, but Opus 5 is the one actually worth talking about. The pitch is cost, not raw grunt. Same pricing as Opus 4.8, 1M context on by default now, and a new effort dial (low/medium/high) that …

I’ve been reading about a US congressman trying to defund a company called Flock Safety, and their network of automatic licence plate readers. Thomas Massie, a libertarian Republican from Kentucky, wants to strip federal funding from any local government using them. No bill text yet, just a press release. But the discussion around it is more interesting than the bill itself. We don’t have Flock here, not …

Saw a story out of California this week that made me put my coffee down. One town’s automatic licence plate readers, the Flock system, misread plates in 71% of the alerts sent to police. Not a rounding error. Not a bad week. Seven out of ten times, wrong. I work in tech. I’ve spent twenty-odd years watching systems get shipped before they’re ready, watching “good enough for now” quietly …

Someone posted their homelab setup this week: a repo full of Kubernetes config, KEDA doing the heavy lifting, nine self-hosted apps scaling to zero overnight and waking on the first request. Neat idea. The comments turned it into a small war about whether any of it was worth doing, which is the most homelab thing that could possibly happen. I’ve got a much less impressive setup at home. A Raspberry Pi doing …

I check the LocalLLaMA subreddit the way some people check the footy scores. Rationed, but regular. This week it delivered a proper spectacle: DeepSeek quietly updated their Flash model, benchmarks came out, and half the thread devolved into disbelief. A 162GB model apparently going toe to toe with GLM 5.2, which is nearly ten times its size. Someone posted a chart. Then someone else posted a bigger chart. By the …

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 …