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There’s a term doing the rounds right now: surveillance pricing. The short version is that a company uses data it has collected about you, your location, your browsing habits, your income bracket, your postcode, to decide what price to show you for a product. Not a universal price. Your price. The one an algorithm has decided you’re likely to pay. The Washington Post is now facing a class action over …

There’s a story doing the rounds about the Flock AI licence plate reader system, and how at least 18 police officers in the US have been arrested for using it to stalk romantic partners. Eighteen that we know of. Arrested. Meaning the actual number of people who used it that way is almost certainly higher, because most of them didn’t get caught, and some who got caught probably didn’t get arrested.

Someone reverse engineered the Bluetooth protocol of a $7 smart ring from Temu, built their own iOS app from scratch, and open sourced the whole thing. The app keeps your health data local, has an optional AI coach, and costs nothing beyond whatever you spend on API keys. I’ve been thinking about this for a couple of days now and I can’t quite let it go. The backstory is worth understanding. The person …

There’s a thing that happens in the AI space, reliably, almost rhythmically: a new model drops, the benchmarks are suspiciously curated, the blog post reads like it was written by a marketing department that just discovered the word “unprecedented,” and within 48 hours someone on Reddit has found the caveats buried in appendix C. Rinse, repeat. So when Moonshot AI put out Kimi K2.7 Code this week, I …

There’s a story doing the rounds online at the moment. A team member gets a redundancy email. Manager fights up the chain, gets nowhere, then goes straight to the Chair of the Board, five layers above their pay grade. The GM’s decision gets overturned. Role is saved. Everyone breathes out. The comments are predictably split between “what a legend” and “that manager is cooked.” Both …

Someone shared an article about Australia’s productivity slump in one of the finance forums I occasionally dip into, and the comments section was exactly what you’d expect: half the people blaming migrants, half blaming “LNP cronies,” and a handful of people actually engaging with the substance. The article itself was worth reading. The response to it was a decent snapshot of why we …

Someone posted a graph this week. Model version number on the Y-axis, release date on the X-axis. The line goes up and to the right. The title called it “not quite exponential, but progress is progress.” It was a shitpost. A pretty good one. The comments, predictably, split into three camps. First, the people who got it immediately and just typed “lol.” Second, the people who genuinely started …

There’s a thing that happens in tech where a capability goes from “theoretical concern” to “completely normal” without anyone really deciding that transition was okay. I’ve been watching it happen with AI agents over the past year or so, and it’s starting to sit uncomfortably with me. Not long ago, the conversation was about chatbots giving wrong answers. Hallucinating …

There’s a particular kind of political figure who seems to exist outside the normal rules of consequence. Not untouchable exactly, more like teflon-coated by a combination of low expectations and regional loyalty. Barnaby Joyce is that figure. This week he’s been on the telly again, making noises about abortion. Specifically, that women should not have easy access to it. That it represents a moral …

Someone posted about this in a local group recently and I nearly scrolled past it. Glad I didn’t. Compost Revolution is a social enterprise that partners with local councils to subsidise composting gear. We’re talking up to 80% off worm farms, compost bins, bokashi systems. Delivered to your door. You put in your address, it finds your local government area, and shows you what’s on offer through …