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Canberra’s floated another one this week: opt-out laws for social media algorithms, letting people switch off the recommendation engine and go back to a plain chronological feed. Platforms would also be on the hook for “minimising and preventing harm.” It’s the kind of headline that makes you nod along at first, then start picking at the threads once you actually think about how these things …

Someone on r/AussieFrugal did something I wish more people would do before they open their mouths about grocery prices: they actually priced three dinners, ingredient by ingredient, at both Coles and Woolworths, and showed their working. Butter chicken, beef lasagna, chana masala. Full spreadsheet, per-serve cost, the lot. It’s the kind of post that makes you sit up a bit, because it’s rare to see someone …

I went looking for something light on r/CleaningTips this morning. Stain removal, maybe a satisfying before-and-after with a stainless steel sink. Instead I found a post that’s been sitting with me all day, and it wasn’t about stains at all. A woman wrote in about her husband, who’s been fighting severe depression for most of the year. She wasn’t asking how to fix him. She was asking how to …

Saw a story this morning that’s been chewing on me all day. Yarra council was set to install a naloxone dispensing machine in North Richmond, one of those vending-machine-style units that hands out the overdose reversal drug for free, no questions asked. Then the mayor, Stephen Jolly, stepped in and got the location scrapped. He’d rather it went somewhere else, apparently near the safe injecting room …

There’s a post doing the rounds on r/privacy this morning with a headline that made me laugh out loud: “Turns out Brits would quite like their private messages to stay private.” Nearly a thousand upvotes, which tells you something about the appetite for stating the obvious. Apparently the UK government ran an ad campaign trying to soften people up for chat control style legislation, and the public …

I’ve been half-following this story about the White House launching a little arcade of parody games to promote deportation policy, and my first reaction wasn’t outrage. It was something closer to secondhand embarrassment. Someone in a government office, presumably paid a public salary, sat down and made a knock-off Tetris. Not a clever one. A bad one, by the sound of it, where the lines don’t even …

Spent a bit of time on r/selfhosted last night, which is normally a nice quiet corner of the internet where people show off their NAS builds and argue about whether Proxmox or bare Debian is the “purer” way to live. Last night it was something else: a small, slow-motion group therapy session about RAM prices. The post that kicked it off was from someone who’d just discovered self-hosting. Old …

I’ve had a browser tab open for two days now with a Reddit thread from r/LocalLLaMA titled “Bernie Sanders proposes to ban AI.” I keep coming back to it, not because I think the bill is going anywhere (it isn’t), but because the argument underneath it is one I genuinely don’t know how to resolve. The bill, as summarised in the thread, would ban AI systems that exceed human cognitive …

Wait, let me redo that properly. title: “Blaming the Robot: When AI Becomes the Perfect Corporate Alibi” date: 2025-05-28T09:15:00+10:00 draft: false tags: [“work”, “ai”, “australia”, “workplace-culture”, “corporate-accountability”] I came across a thread on r/auscorp yesterday about a Sydney marketing agency, The Big Smoke Media Group, going …

There’s a post doing the rounds on r/AusFinance at the moment that I read three times, once with sympathy and twice with the specific irritation you get when you know someone’s technically right but you can’t quite bring yourself to feel sorry for them. Bloke on $200k base gets told he’s getting a $100k bonus. Chuffed, obviously, who wouldn’t be. It lands. It’s just over $50k. He …