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Someone posted recently about being asked to share their phone’s precise location just to watch sport they’d already paid for. Not approximate location. Not a suburb. GPS coordinates, essentially, handed over to a streaming company as the price of admission to content you’ve already purchased. That landed with me. There’s a specific kind of frustration that comes from paying for something and …

Someone in a local community group recently asked about the cheapest way to send money overseas, specifically comparing Remitly and Wise. The thread filled up quickly, which tells you something: this is a thing a lot of people are quietly dealing with and nobody really talks about until someone asks. I’ve used Wise a few times. It does what it says. The exchange rate is close to mid-market, the fees are visible …

There is a particular kind of horror that comes from discovering something is living in your shower. Not mould. Not a spider doing its best. Actual larvae. Wriggling. Multiplying. Apparently unbothered by the amount of hot water and tile cleaner you throw at them. Someone posted about exactly this recently, and the comment section delivered the full spectrum: practical advice, genuine disgust, dark humour, and at …

Someone dumped what appears to be asbestos sheeting in a bin at a children’s play park in Coburg. Not a skip on a renovation site. Not a back corner of a vacant lot. A bin. At a kids’ park. There’s a version of this story where you give the person the benefit of the doubt. Maybe they didn’t know. Maybe they found the boards blowing around and thought they were being helpful. The thing is, the …

There’s a warning going around this week telling parents not to share photos of their children online because of AI abuse risks. Deepfakes, training data, image manipulation. The usual horror show. My daughter is sixteen. She’s been on the internet long enough to manage her own privacy better than most adults I know. But I think about the kids who weren’t afforded that choice, whose entire childhood …

The founder of the Video Game History Foundation said something recently that should probably embarrass the entire industry: piracy is still the most reliable method we have for preserving games. Not archives. Not publishers. Not governments. Pirates. Sit with that for a moment. There’s a version of this conversation that gets immediately derailed into a debate about intellectual property and whether stealing …

Something came across my feed this week that I’ve been sitting with. A developer released a self-hosted web player called YT-DLP Web Player, built on top of yt-dlp, that essentially lets you watch YouTube (and most other video sites) without ads, with SponsorBlock built in, and with a player that doesn’t treat you like a hostile entity who needs to be managed. The reaction in the comments was roughly what …

There’s a clip doing the rounds where a senior figure at Nvidia makes the case that AGI is not coming, that OpenAI and Anthropic are building walled gardens the same way AOL and Prodigy built closed internets in the nineties, and that the future belongs to every business running its own customised open source model. He says it with the calm confidence of someone who has thought about this for a long time.

June was a lot. Not in a good way, mostly. A few genuinely useful things shipped, but the month will be remembered for a US export control order that took down Claude globally for 18 days, a billing change that nearly caused a mass exodus, and Google deciding to close-source a project that 6,000 community contributors had spent a year building. Let’s take these in order of how much they made me stare at the …

There’s a video going around where someone does a bit: they’re roleplaying as an AI assistant, answering questions, doing the whole performance. Hedging constantly. Offering unsolicited disclaimers. Restructuring every answer into a tidy three-part framework nobody asked for. The accuracy is uncomfortable in a way that a lot of good comedy is. You laugh because there’s nowhere else to put it. …