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Spent a bit of time this morning reading a thread from r/auscorp that scratched a very specific itch of mine. Someone on a dev team had inherited a “fancy looking dashboard” that a colleague had vibe-coded into existence with AI. Worked fine for two months. Then it needed a change, nobody who’d built it understood how it worked, and a contractor got paid real money to untangle something that was …

The unemployment figures dropped yesterday, 4.6% to 4.7%, and r/AusFinance did what it always does with economic data: turned it into a 400-comment slugfest about who’s to blame and whether the RBA is secretly trying to ruin everyone’s life. I read the thread with my coffee this morning and came away with the same feeling I get most weeks when I check the news properly instead of doom-scrolling headlines: …

I spent a chunk of Sunday arvo down a Reddit hole on r/singularity, which is never a great sign for my mental health but always good for a blog post. Among the usual parade of “AI did an amazing thing” clips, two items stuck with me. One: a Google model apparently built a whole photorealistic pagoda complex in Blender from a single prompt, agents critiquing their own work like a tiny obsessive design …

Saw a story yesterday about Google launching TPU chips into orbit to test the idea of space-based data centres. My first reaction was the same as most of r/technews: a kind of tired, raised-eyebrow “of course they are.” My second reaction, a few minutes later, was genuine curiosity. Both of those feel correct, which is annoying, because I’d prefer to just pick one. The pitch is simple enough. Solar …

Saw a headline on r/artificial this morning that made me put my coffee down for a second. Apparently a Palantir exec reckons AI researchers are taking up smoking again, on the logic that AI will cure cancer before it gets around to killing them. I read it twice to make sure I hadn’t misunderstood. I hadn’t. Now, I don’t know how widespread this actually is, and I’m deeply suspicious of any …

There was a Welcome to Country at the Australia Cup final on the weekend, and a chunk of the crowd booed it. Then, a day or so later, a well known Greek-Australian advocate said he felt ashamed to be Greek after Greek fans were among those doing the booing. Both threads blew up on r/australia, and I’ve been turning the whole thing over since, mostly because the easy explanations don’t quite hold.

Fell down a rabbit hole on r/CleaningTips last night, which is not a sentence I expected to type, but here we are. A woman posted asking whether other people find it rude when relatives clean their house uninvited. Her mother-in-law can’t help herself, apparently. Comes over, finds something to scrub, says cleaning is her hobby. The post had over three hundred comments by the time I got to it, and the mood was …

There’s a thread doing the rounds on r/Melbourne at the moment asking a question I’ve been silently fuming about for weeks: what is going on with the nature strips and road medians around this city. Someone in Melbourne’s south-east finally said it out loud, and the replies came in fast, which tells you this isn’t just one bloke’s pet grievance. It’s a genuine, shared, low-grade …

Someone on r/privacy ran an experiment this week that’s been rattling around my head since I read it. They loaded a single AP News article, nothing exotic, just a news story, and checked what their browser had picked up before they’d even clicked “accept” or “reject” on the cookie banner. The answer: 618 cookies, from 163 different companies. Six hundred and eighteen. For one …

Been thinking about a couple of things that landed on my radar this week, and they’re really the same story told twice. A US school district rolled out Google Gemini for its students, then a few weeks later banned AI outright across every grade. And separately, there’s a study doing the rounds claiming that just ten minutes of AI use measurably erodes your ability to persist at hard things. Put those next …