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There’s a story doing the rounds online that I keep thinking about. A single parent, working full time, goes to auction fifteen years ago. She’s the only person there who actually wants to live in the house. Everyone else is an investor. She wins, barely, but pays more than she should have because a cluster of people with existing wealth decided that her future home was a line item on their tax return.

There’s a post doing the rounds this week about GPT-5.5 cracking something called ProgramBench for the first time. It’s a software engineering benchmark that’s been resistant to frontier models until now, and the result is genuinely interesting. But the discussion underneath it is, predictably, a mess. Some of it is the usual stuff: people declaring their preferred model the winner, others pointing …

There’s a particular kind of story that lands differently when you work in tech. Not the breathless “AI is coming for your job” stuff, or the utopian “AI will cure cancer” counter-spin. The stories that actually stick with me are the mundane ones. The ones where something fails in a way that’s almost boring in its familiarity, except the consequences are genuinely unsettling. This …

There was a discussion online recently about burnout and who should foot the bill for it. The comments were, as you’d expect, a mix of exhausted workers comparing war stories and the occasional person who still genuinely believes that “reasonable overtime” is a reasonable concept. One comment stuck with me. Someone pointed out that if you strip the word “burnout” away and describe it …

Someone posted in a forum recently about trying to feed three kids, soon to be four, on a single parent pension. No car. Burnt out. A high-income household one day, then not. Trying to hold the line at $100 to $150 a week for groceries while pregnant and relying on delivery because she can’t drive. The responses were mostly generous and practical. Bulk cooking, freezer meals, slow cookers, food banks, jacket …

There’s a particular kind of catastrophe that isn’t dangerous, isn’t expensive in any serious way, and isn’t going to make the news. It’s just quietly, completely awful. Thirty ounces of caramel sauce into a kitchen cabinet is that kind of catastrophe. Someone posted about this recently and the thread that followed was one of the more honest corners of the internet I’ve stumbled …

There are shipping containers parked in front of The Emerson on Chapel Street now. Not temporarily. Not for a renovation. To stop people shooting through the front door. That’s where we are. I’ve been watching the discussion around this online, and the thing that strikes me isn’t the debate about whether shipping containers are actually bulletproof (they’re not, particularly, though apparently …

Canvas went dark last week. If you’re not in education or don’t have a kid at uni, you might have missed it entirely. Canvas is the learning management system that a significant chunk of the world’s schools and universities use to run coursework: assignment submissions, grades, direct messages between students and staff. The whole administrative scaffolding of modern education, basically. Hackers …

There’s a piece doing the rounds this week claiming Meta is dying. The comments underneath it are, predictably, a mess. Half the people are dunking on the headline without reading past it. The other half are pointing out, correctly, that a company pulling $200 billion in annual ad revenue is not exactly on life support. Both groups are sort of right, which is the annoying thing. The article isn’t really …

There are two reasons to pay attention to the Kavita v0.9.0 release. One is urgent. The other is genuinely good news. Start with the urgent one. Two medium-severity CVEs have been disclosed against Kavita. The details are still making their way through the official CVE publication process, but the fix is already out. If you’re running Kavita on your home server or NAS, update to v0.9.0 now. Medium severity …