Left 4
More.

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 …

A Stanford study did the rounds this week confirming something a lot of people already suspected: AI is hitting entry-level jobs hardest. Not middle managers, not senior architects with twenty years of scar tissue, but the graduates and juniors who used to get their start doing the unglamorous, repetitive stuff that taught them the job. I’ve been in IT long enough to remember being that person, and long enough …

Saw a thread this week about AI agents now burning through five times more tokens than humans do for the same tasks. Someone asked, quite reasonably, what a “human token” even is. Someone else answered: it’s the moment on a Monday morning when your boss makes the dumbest request of the week, and you decide to swallow it and get on with your day instead of telling him where to shove it. That’s …

My daughter came home a while back and mentioned, almost as an aside, that a boy in her year got pulled up for something he said to a teacher. She didn’t elaborate much, and I didn’t push. But it stuck with me, the way she said it. Not shocked. Just tired. I’ve been reading the discussion this week about female teachers dealing with Nazi salutes and Epstein jokes in classrooms, and the thread …

Saw a thread this week from someone in Perth with the flu, needing a medical certificate, and running into the particular indignity of modern Australian healthcare: you’re too contagious to sit in a GP waiting room, but somehow not too contagious to be denied a bulk billed appointment. The pharmacist charged them fifty bucks for a certificate. Fifty dollars, to confirm what a rapid test already told them, so …