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There’s a change coming to Android that most people won’t notice until it’s already happened. Starting September 2026, Google will require every app developer to register with them, sign a contract, pay a fee, and hand over government-issued ID before their app can be installed on Android devices. No registration, no install. Not even via sideloading, which is just a word the industry invented to …

There’s a story doing the rounds this week about Illinois Governor JB Pritzker moving to suspend tax incentives for data centres. He’s pausing new applications through the state’s commerce department after the legislature sat on its hands instead of putting guardrails around AI-specific facilities. It’s not a full revocation, just a pause on processing. Incremental. Cautious. Very much the …

There’s a particular kind of frustration reserved for software that was genuinely useful, and then gradually wasn’t. Netdata used to be exactly what I wanted. Install it, point a browser at port 19999, and immediately get a dense wall of real-time graphs showing exactly what your machine was doing. CPU, memory, disk IO, network throughput. All of it, updating every second, no configuration required. For a …

There’s a specific kind of online moment that only makes sense if you’re already inside it. From the outside it looks like nothing. From the inside it’s genuinely delightful. This week, a well-known figure in the local LLM community starred a GitHub repository. That’s it. That’s the whole event. He starred llama.cpp, the foundational codebase behind most of the quantised models that …

There’s a particular kind of workplace theatre that never quite makes it into the onboarding materials. You learn it the hard way, usually while standing in a corridor holding a laptop, watching people who absolutely know what time it is pretend they don’t. Someone posted about this recently and it landed with me. They had a room booked, a presentation to give, twenty people waiting. The room was occupied …

There’s a particular kind of frustration that comes from paying for something you don’t understand. Not outrage, just a slow, grinding sense that someone somewhere is relying on your inertia. That’s the feeling a lot of apartment owners seem to be having right now, judging by the conversations doing the rounds online. Someone put up a post about their strata levies climbing 30% since COVID, with …

There’s a video doing the rounds of a humanoid robot in what looks like a retail store, fumbling a shelf retrieval and making a bit of a mess. The kid nearby looks delighted. The internet, predictably, lost its mind. The comments split pretty cleanly into two camps. One camp found it charming, almost endearing, the robot equivalent of a new employee knocking over a display on their first day. The other camp …

May was a big month. Too big, arguably. Let me just talk about the things I actually care about. Update Cursor. Do It Now. I’ll lead with this because it’s the most urgent thing in the notes: CVE-2026-26268, rated 9.9 critical by NVD, affected Cursor versions prior to 2.5. The attack surface is uncomfortable to think about. Clone a malicious repository, let the AI agent start doing its autonomous Git …

There’s a concept doing the rounds at the moment called cognitive debt, and it’s been sitting in the back of my head for a few days now. The idea is straightforward. Tech debt is what happens when you cut corners on code quality to ship faster, and then spend the next year paying for it in maintenance hell. Cognitive debt is what happens when you outsource the thinking itself. You ship the thing, it …

I didn’t want to write about this. I sat with it for a couple of days first, which is about as long as I can manage before the pressure of having thoughts about something forces me to put them somewhere. Jodi Knott. A woman in mental health crisis, off her medication, trying to get help. What she got instead was an hour of sustained, deliberate cruelty from two NSW police officers who then sent the footage …