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The Prime Minister was in the Philippines for the ASEAN summit, signed a new defence pact, and also let slip that Jollibee is coming to Australia. One of those made the front page of r/australia with 500-odd upvotes. I’ll let you guess which. Someone in the comments pointed out the obvious. Announcements like this are what the foreign affairs people like to do. You sign the serious paper about drones and joint …

Someone on r/AussieFrugal did the sums on their daily coffee this week. $5.50 a day, about $1,300 a year, roughly $120k over 30 years if it had gone into an index fund instead. They’d seen the maths on an ad in a bathroom, which is a fairly bleak place to be sold a philosophy of life. Then they kept going. Uber Eats, forgotten subscriptions, the 6pm Woolies dash that turns into $55 of snacks. Half a million …

Someone on r/CleaningTips asked a question I think many of us have quietly had. Why do clothes and sheets smell stale after months in storage, when they came out of the wash smelling lovely? The poster had done most things right. Odour remover in the wash, an air purifier in the bedroom, the door shut while cooking. They’d even tucked dryer sheets into the storage tubs. The smell showed up anyway. I felt for …

Someone on r/Melbourne posted a map this week of where the jobs on Seek were. It was a short video of dots appearing across the city. There’s a big bright knot in the CBD and a lot of scattered dots out in the suburbs. The poster built it because two jobs both listed as “Melbourne” can mean wildly different commutes, and he wanted to see the difference. I’ve been thinking about it since. Not …

A student posted on r/privacy this week asking for help with a class debate. The question was whether a school should monitor its students’ social media accounts. The sides get assigned randomly, so they might end up arguing the opposite of what they believe. Most of their classmates were against the idea. Then someone raised the “what if it prevents an attack” scenario, and the room started to …

Somewhere in the middle of the weekend-adjacent Microsoft 365 outage, a user on Reddit wrote that the situation was inefficient because they could still do their tasks without Copilot and Outlook. They asked Microsoft to please make it worse. It was marked as a joke, but it didn’t read like one. The outage ran past fifteen hours. Each fix failed in its own interesting way. By the time Europe was heading home …

Someone on r/selfhosted posted a write-up this week about bad RAM. I haven’t stopped thinking about it. It’s the sort of story that makes you want to go and check things, and then makes you a bit sad about what you might find. The short version goes like this. A Proxmox host, running on a small Lenovo box with non-ECC memory, started kernel panicking. The logs said nothing useful. The panic record, buried …

I spend a fair bit of my working life depending on things I don’t control. A container registry, a package mirror, a GitHub Action somebody wrote in 2021 and then wandered off from. Every DevOps person learns early that the question isn’t whether a dependency will change under you. It’s when, and whether you kept a copy. That’s the thought I had reading r/LocalLLaMA over the last day. The two …

Someone on r/auscorp posted overnight about their fourth redundancy in six years. A senior manager and a self-described high performer. Great feedback every time, nothing negative on file. Each time the direct boss looked upset in the meeting and said it wasn’t about performance. The post ended with a line that stuck with me: I’m not sure why I’m posting this, maybe to get it off my chest more than …

Someone on r/AusFinance asked why there’s so much hostility towards investing on a finance forum. Their post said investors get called leeches, people want them taxed more, and there’s a general “anti-aspiration” mood. The thread ran to hundreds of comments. I read a good chunk of it between meetings, which is a sensible use of a work day. My first reaction was sympathy for the poster. It …