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A student posted on r/privacy this week asking for help with a class debate. The question was whether a school should monitor its students’ social media accounts. The sides get assigned randomly, so they might end up arguing the opposite of what they believe. Most of their classmates were against the idea. Then someone raised the “what if it prevents an attack” scenario, and the room started to …

Somewhere in the middle of the weekend-adjacent Microsoft 365 outage, a user on Reddit wrote that the situation was inefficient because they could still do their tasks without Copilot and Outlook. They asked Microsoft to please make it worse. It was marked as a joke, but it didn’t read like one. The outage ran past fifteen hours. Each fix failed in its own interesting way. By the time Europe was heading home …

Someone on r/selfhosted posted a write-up this week about bad RAM. I haven’t stopped thinking about it. It’s the sort of story that makes you want to go and check things, and then makes you a bit sad about what you might find. The short version goes like this. A Proxmox host, running on a small Lenovo box with non-ECC memory, started kernel panicking. The logs said nothing useful. The panic record, buried …

I spend a fair bit of my working life depending on things I don’t control. A container registry, a package mirror, a GitHub Action somebody wrote in 2021 and then wandered off from. Every DevOps person learns early that the question isn’t whether a dependency will change under you. It’s when, and whether you kept a copy. That’s the thought I had reading r/LocalLLaMA over the last day. The two …

Someone on r/auscorp posted overnight about their fourth redundancy in six years. A senior manager and a self-described high performer. Great feedback every time, nothing negative on file. Each time the direct boss looked upset in the meeting and said it wasn’t about performance. The post ended with a line that stuck with me: I’m not sure why I’m posting this, maybe to get it off my chest more than …

Someone on r/AusFinance asked why there’s so much hostility towards investing on a finance forum. Their post said investors get called leeches, people want them taxed more, and there’s a general “anti-aspiration” mood. The thread ran to hundreds of comments. I read a good chunk of it between meetings, which is a sensible use of a work day. My first reaction was sympathy for the poster. It …

A post on r/singularity went around yesterday with a headline that said Anthropic had hit its internal tripwire and achieved a 2x acceleration in AI research. The body went further. Recursive self-improvement was basically here, all white collar jobs were now replaceable, and we were off to the races. I read it before my first coffee, and my stomach dropped a bit. Then I read the top comment, and it dropped in a …

There’s a thread on r/technews about wearable sleep trackers using your brainwaves to train AI models without explicit consent. The top comment says that if you don’t sleep with a brainwave headband on, you’re safe. Fair enough. Most of us don’t own one. Still, I’ve been turning it over for a day. I should say up front that I haven’t read the underlying article closely, and the …

My daughter showed me a video last week of a dog supposedly playing fetch with a toddler in a backyard somewhere in America. Within about two seconds she said “that’s fake” and kept scrolling. I made her go back. I looked at it for a solid thirty seconds, squinting, trying to find the tell. The shadows were fine. The movement was fine. I genuinely could not tell you with confidence whether that dog …

There’s a thread doing the rounds on r/australia today about pregnancy discrimination pushing women out of the workforce, and the comments underneath it are the kind of reading that makes you put your coffee down and stare at the wall for a bit. Woman after woman describing the same scene: a job interview, a question that’s been illegal since the Sex Discrimination Act in 1984, and an interviewer who asks …