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I came across a discussion on r/privacy this morning about a US citizen rights group suing to force police to get a warrant before searching Flock Safety’s automatic number plate reader database. If you haven’t heard of Flock, they’re the company that’s quietly wired up thousands of intersections across America with cameras that read every plate that goes past, log the time and location, and …

There’s a story doing the rounds about a small Michigan township where the University of Michigan and Los Alamos National Labs want to build a “massive data centre.” Locals turned up to a town hall to say they’d never been consulted, and the meeting turned into something close to a rebellion. Turns out the whole thing is technically a supercomputer for fusion research, not a bog-standard AI …

Spent a chunk of Sunday reading a thread on r/selfhosted instead of doing anything useful, which is more or less how I spend most Sundays. The post was from someone who’s tried, for months, to fully replace Spotify with a self-hosted stack. Navidrome for serving, Lidarr for grabbing albums, slskd and qBittorrent doing the heavy lifting underneath, a rolling playlist tool on top. A proper setup. And still, at …

I’ve been lurking in r/LocalLLaMA for a few years now, the way you’d keep half an eye on a hobby forum for something you’ll probably never fully understand but find endlessly interesting anyway. Yesterday someone posted a one-liner that made me laugh out loud at my desk: a “flash” model, the supposedly lightweight, fast, cheap option, now clocks in at 512GB. A few years ago, a 100GB …

There’s a thread doing the rounds on r/auscorp today that’s basically a support group in disguise. Someone asks how to deal with colleagues who fire off an email, then ping you on Teams twice before lunch asking for an update, on a task with no actual deadline. Forty comments in, and the group has more or less converged on a philosophy. Don’t respond straight away. When you do respond, don’t …

Someone on r/AusFinance posted their home insurance renewal yesterday and it set off a stampede of people comparing notes like survivors swapping stories after a natural disaster, which, in a roundabout way, is exactly what this is about. The numbers are the kind of thing you read twice. One person’s premium jumped 35 percent. Not once, they went back and checked, it’s jumped roughly 35 percent every year …

Spent a chunk of my Sunday morning down a rabbit hole that started with r/singularity and ended with me reading a Millennium Prize problem statement I barely understood, which is roughly how most of my weekends go these days. The short version: OpenAI apparently threw a swarm of AI agents, something like ten thousand of them, at the Navier-Stokes existence and smoothness problem. That’s one of the seven Clay …

Saw a headline yesterday that stopped me mid-scroll: an AI-developed drug appeared to make patients biologically younger in a clinical trial. Mid-stage, small sample, plenty of caveats buried in paragraph four, but still. That’s a hell of a sentence to read on a Tuesday. My first reaction was the same one I get whenever a longevity story pops up: genuine fascination, followed almost immediately by a low hum of …

Spent a chunk of my Sunday morning down a Reddit rabbit hole on r/artificial instead of doing the thing I actually promised my daughter I’d help her with (a maths assignment, since you ask, and no, ChatGPT wasn’t allowed to touch it). Someone had posted about burning through $200 of API credits on a new “agentic” tool, expecting the AGI moment, and getting three broken outputs out of four for …

Canberra’s floated another one this week: opt-out laws for social media algorithms, letting people switch off the recommendation engine and go back to a plain chronological feed. Platforms would also be on the hook for “minimising and preventing harm.” It’s the kind of headline that makes you nod along at first, then start picking at the threads once you actually think about how these things …