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Saw a story out of Ohio this week that made me put my coffee down for a second. A grand jury declined to indict a bloke charged with destroying a Flock camera, one of those automated licence plate readers that have been popping up on street corners across the US like bindis in a Melbourne backyard in February. No conviction. No real explanation, because grand juries don’t have to give one. Just twelve people …

There’s a saying in American legal circles that a grand jury will indict a ham sandwich. The bar is that low. So when a grand jury in Ohio looked at footage of a bloke smashing up a Flock surveillance camera, and declined to charge him, that’s not a small thing. That’s someone throwing the sandwich back. I’d never heard of Flock cameras until this story crossed my feed, but the shape of it is …

There’s a thread doing the rounds about whether you should put your self-hosted setup on your CV. A senior engineer at a big tech company said if they saw a serious homelab listed, they’d rate it highly. Reasonable take. But the replies are the interesting bit, because everyone has a different idea of what “serious” means, and a few people admitted to running their whole setup off gear they …

I spent an unreasonable amount of my Sunday reading a Reddit thread about someone running a 1-bit quantised version of a large language model on 8GB of VRAM, and I have no regrets. None. The thread is a monument to a very specific kind of joy: watching something extremely sophisticated fail in an extremely stupid way. For anyone who hasn’t fallen down this particular hole: quantisation is how you shrink a …

Saw a post doing the rounds this week: a guy explaining that if you’re permanent and frustrated with a toxic boss, don’t resign, negotiate a payout instead. Send a nicely worded email, mention Fair Work, mention the hassle you could cause, and watch the company hand you three to six months’ pay to walk away quietly. The comments section did what comments sections do best, which is tear the whole …

Real wages fell 0.6% again. I read that number the way I read most economic news these days: with the detached curiosity of someone watching a slow-motion car crash they’re also a passenger in. I ran my own numbers through one of those inflation calculators over the weekend, the way you’d poke a bruise to see if it still hurts. It still hurts. I’m doing fine relative to a lot of people, hybrid IT …

Saw the Anthropic protein design news this week and sat with it longer than I expected to. Claude apparently designed disease-targeting proteins autonomously, with actual wet-lab validation, and hit something like a 35% success rate against a human average of 10-15%. Not a benchmark. Not a demo. Real proteins, in a real lab, doing real things. That’s a different category of claim. My first reaction was the one …

Saw a story this week about a Chinese biotech team aiming to get a “smart” probiotic for type 2 diabetes onto US shelves within two years. Uses gut bacteria and GLP-1 pathways to help regulate blood sugar. Cheaper than Ozempic, apparently, and without the injections. My first thought wasn’t about the science. It was about what happens next, and whether “next” ever actually arrives. …

There’s a chart doing the rounds, built off Ramp’s spend data, showing AI expenditure per employee across companies. The top 1% are burning something like $660 a month per head. The median company is sitting somewhere near lunch money, a few hundred dollars, if that. I’ve seen this chart three times this week in different threads, which either means it’s genuinely interesting or I need to …

Someone sent me a photo last week of a Telstra payphone booth done up with a Futurama theme, Bender’s face grinning off the side of it. Cute, I thought. Nice bit of nostalgia marketing. Then I read the thread underneath it and realised half of Reddit was having a small existential crisis over the fact that in the actual first episode of Futurama, phone booths aren’t phone booths at all. They’re …