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Someone on r/australia posted a headline yesterday that made me laugh out loud at my desk: “RBA Reassures Australians They’ll Stop Raising Interest Rates as Soon as Economy Collapses.” It’s satire, obviously, but it’s the kind of satire that lands because it’s barely exaggerating anything. A couple of hours later the top post on the same subreddit was a photo of a $7 Aldi air-fried …

There’s a good argument happening over on r/AussieFrugal about the new card surcharge ban, and it’s the kind of argument I like: two reasonable positions, both partly right, neither one fully landing a knockout. For anyone who missed it, surcharges on debit and credit cards got banned this week. No more little sign at the counter saying “1.5% surcharge applies to card payments” or the extra …

Someone on r/CleaningTips posted a fairly innocent question yesterday about drying clothes indoors over a UK winter, and why everything smells faintly off when it comes off the rack. Three hundred comments later it had turned into something close to a dehumidifier fan club. I read the whole thread with the quiet recognition of a man who has hung a wet towel over a clothes horse in a closed spare room and come back …

Spent a bit of time this morning down a Reddit hole, the good kind, and it’s stuck with me all day. A bloke posted in r/Melbourne. He lost his wife to ovarian cancer two months ago. Going through old photos he found one of her from 1998, taken on a day trip somewhere in the eastern half of the state. Neither of them had ever written down where it was, and now there’s no one left who remembers. He wanted …

There’s a post doing the rounds on r/privacy about Flock Safety, the US company whose number-plate reading cameras have been getting ripped down in city after city amid lawsuits and public pressure, only for the same councils to turn around and sign contracts with Axon or Motorola or Rekor instead. Same technology. Same database. Same cop who can pull up everywhere your car has been in the last six months. …

A county in Florida found 14 licence plate reading cameras bolted up around town that nobody in local government had authorised. Eleven of them are still up there, humming away, because the official response wasn’t “take them down and work out who put them there.” It was a bag over the lens and a little note, like someone’s left a shopping trolley in a car park and the council’s waiting …

Spent a bit of time down a rabbit hole on r/selfhosted last night, the way you do when you tell yourself you’re just checking one thread before bed and then it’s 11:40pm and you’re reading about a uni student in his dorm running eight services off a laptop and a Pod running AdGuard Home, because that’s all he’s got. The post that got me was from a med student, no real money, self-hosting …

Spent a chunk of my Sunday morning reading a thread on r/LocalLLaMA titled, more or less, “why do Americans lag so far behind in open LLMs”. The poster’s logic ran like this: DeepSeek, Kimi, GLM, MiniMax, the Chinese labs are shipping open weight models constantly, and the big American labs mostly aren’t. Shouldn’t that bother people more than it seems to? I don’t know the full …

Quiet month for model releases, loud month for everything around them. Opus 5.5 and Sonnet 5.5 turned up, both solid, neither surprising. Same context window, same pricing tier, a benchmark bump that Anthropic measured on its own scaffold so I’ll believe it once someone outside the building confirms it. Fine. Switch the defaults, move on. The thing that actually kept me up reading changelogs was Claude Code …

Saw a thread on r/auscorp this morning that stopped me mid-scroll. Someone posted that their colleague is quietly working two full-time remote jobs, software engineering gigs, no overlap in required hours, both employers apparently fine with it (or at least not actively looking). The original poster wasn’t outraged. If anything they sounded a bit envious, which, fair enough. What got me wasn’t the …