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Spent a chunk of my weekend reading through r/auscorp, which is a bit like doom-scrolling but with better production values. There’s always a resignation-or-termination saga to gawk at, but the one that actually stuck with me was from a 40-year-old IT worker who got his start in the early 2000s doing the jobs nobody senior wanted to touch because they refused to learn email. He was asking, genuinely, whether …

Choice put out a report yesterday saying grocery prices are up 7% across Coles, Woolworths, IGA and Aldi. Not over a year. Over three months. I read that on the train and then spent the rest of the trip doing the maths on my own shop, which is a genuinely depressing way to pass twenty minutes. The comments under the story on r/AusFinance did what these threads always do: split into two camps that talk past each …

I spent a chunk of my Sunday morning coffee reading a thread on r/singularity about a meme video, the kind where various AI labs get cast as characters in some kind of race. Google barely rates a mention anymore, apparently, which the commenters found hilarious. Musk gets cast because he’s famous, not because Grok is winning anything. Someone in the comments compared it to casting Christian Bale as Moses: not …

I’ve been reading about London’s pushback against smart glasses this week, pubs and shops putting up “cameras off” signs, staff getting fed up with punters wandering in wearing Ray-Ban Metas recording everything for content. It’s a small story on the surface. Underneath it, there’s something that’s been bugging me for a while: we’ve quietly lost the ability to know when …

There’s a piece doing the rounds about older Australians who say they’d be happy to see house prices fall, for their kids’ sake. Not the usual “back in my day a Chiko Roll cost ten cents” grumbling. Actual homeowners, sitting on actual equity, saying they’d take the hit. I read it twice because it felt like spotting a parking spot right out the front of the shops: nice, but …

I fell down a Reddit hole last night that started with anti-bacterial wipes and ended, four hundred comments later, with a bloke describing how he lets his dogs lick the plates clean before they go in the dishwasher. Somewhere in between, roughly two hundred strangers had a genuinely heated argument about laundry powder versus pods. Not powder versus pods for clothes. For the dishwasher. I didn’t know this was …

There’s a thread doing the rounds on r/CleaningTips about those magic eraser sponges, the white ones that seem to make grime vanish with almost no effort. Turns out they’re made of melamine foam, which is essentially a very fine, very hard plastic that behaves like sandpaper at a microscopic level. Every time you scrub with one, it’s shedding itself into your sink, your dishes, your water supply, by …

There was a thread on r/Melbourne this week from a 21-year-old woman asking whether her parents were right to forbid her from catching PTV after dark. Her folks were driving out to collect her mid-trip, even after she’d texted to say she was fine. She wanted to know if that was reasonable, or whether she just had to learn to live with the risk like everyone else does. I read it as someone with a teenage …

I’ve been reading about a company called Flock Safety this week, an American outfit that runs automatic licence plate readers, and it’s put me in a bit of a mood. Not the theatrical kind. The quieter, more useful kind of annoyed that makes you want to actually think something through. Here’s the setup. A Californian resident, using rights that California’s privacy law is supposed to give him, …

Saw a piece doing the rounds on r/technology about graduates in “AI-exposed” majors ending up stacking shelves and pulling coffees instead of doing the white-collar work they trained for. The comments were the usual mix of grim humour and old wounds reopening. One line stuck with me: someone pointed out this has been happening since 2008, long before ChatGPT existed. AI is getting blamed for a problem …