Four months ago, someone lost their job. Now they’re staring at job listings showing 1,746 applications and wondering if they’ll ever hear back. Meanwhile, their mortgage repayments are about to get squeezed by another interest rate rise. It’s a scenario that’s playing out across Australia right now, and honestly, it’s both more complicated and less dire than those numbers suggest.

I’ve been thinking about this a lot lately, partly because I work in IT and DevOps where the job market has become particularly weird, and partly because those application numbers are genuinely bonkers. But here’s the thing that emerged from a discussion I saw recently: those numbers are essentially meaningless.

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about what numbers mean to us. Not in a mathematical sense, but in that psychological way where certain figures become cultural markers. You know, like how $1 million used to be the definition of wealth, or how $100,000 was once the salary that meant you’d “made it.”

That second one particularly interests me because I’ve been watching it lose its lustre in real-time. Someone online recently pointed out that the median full-time salary in Australia is now sitting just over $104,500. Let that sink in for a moment. The median – meaning half of all full-time workers earn more than this. A hundred grand isn’t aspirational anymore; it’s literally average.

I’ve been watching the conversation around Seedance 2.0’s Matrix recreation unfold online, and I’ll admit – this one’s got me thinking. For the first time in a while, I’m genuinely caught between being impressed and slightly unsettled by how far AI video generation has come.

The demo shows Neo fighting Agent Smith in what’s essentially an AI-generated action sequence, and it’s… good. Actually, scratch that – it’s surprisingly good. The physics feel right, the choreography flows, and the whole thing maintains a level of consistency that would’ve seemed impossible just a year ago. Someone pointed out that the sunglasses help mask the eye rendering issues that usually plague these systems, which is a clever observation. But there’s more to it than just hiding the weak spots.