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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 …

There’s a post doing the rounds on r/selfhosted right now with a title that made me laugh before it made me think: something like “another reason to self-host, your data might get bombed.” Someone was pointing out that people who lost data during actual conflict zones, homes destroyed, servers gone, and using it as a talking point for why self-hosting beats the cloud. The comment section did what …

I’ve been down a rabbit hole on r/LocalLLaMA again. It’s my equivalent of other people’s fishing forums, I think, except instead of lures and knots it’s people arguing about VRAM bandwidth and whether a Chinese mining card can be soldered into behaving like a proper GPU. Yesterday someone posted a build: twelve secondhand CMP170HX cards, 64GB each, strung together with fibre to a second rig, …

Saw a thread on r/auscorp yesterday that had no business making me laugh as much as it did. Someone posted about the phrase “I’ll give you back five minutes” when a meeting wraps early, and how much it grinds their gears. Not the early finish, obviously, everyone loves an early finish. It’s the framing. Like the meeting organiser is a benevolent king pardoning a prisoner three days before the …

I filled up on the weekend and the number on the pump felt like a personal insult. Not shocking exactly, more like watching a slow-motion car crash you already knew was coming. Ninety-eight cents a litre more than a month ago, and everyone from roadhouse owners to freight companies is saying the same thing: this is just the start. Fuel surcharges are creeping back onto invoices, diesel is up, and somewhere in the …

I spent longer than I’d like to admit last night reading through a Reddit thread about AI labs supposedly sitting on solutions to major unsolved maths problems. Not releasing them. Just… holding them back, apparently, because the last time one of these companies claimed a breakthrough, the maths community set fire to it within about six hours. If you missed it, there was a whole saga a few weeks back …

Saw a headline yesterday about a gut bacterium from an amphibian that wiped out cancer cells in rats, 100% effective, no survivors on the tumour side of the ledger. Cool result. Genuinely cool. Then I made the mistake of reading the comments, which is always where the real story lives, and the top one was something like “rats getting universal healthcare before us, not fair.” Dozens of people piled on …

Someone on r/artificial posted something this week that stuck with me. The title was basically a cry for help: “I don’t know where to go anymore. No AI community will accept me.” Turns out they’re pro-AI in general but worried about surveillance, corporate power, environmental cost, the usual list. For that, apparently, they got run out of the pro-AI subreddits as a closet doomer. Meanwhile …

Saw a story doing the rounds yesterday about a boss who handed out cupcakes for R U OK? Day and then told staff they’d need to stay back to make up the twenty minutes it took to eat them. I read it twice because I assumed it was satire. It wasn’t. And judging by the pile-on in the comments, it hit a nerve that a lot of people have been nursing quietly for years.