The tech world’s been buzzing lately about Google’s latest move to charge developers for app verification outside the Play Store ecosystem. What started as a promise of openness and choice in the Android world is rapidly becoming another corporate cash grab, and frankly, it’s getting under my skin.

Google’s decision to implement a tiered verification system for Android developers feels like a betrayal of everything the platform once stood for. Sure, they’re keeping a “free” tier for hobbyists and students, but with undefined installation limits and heavy encouragement to upgrade to the paid tier. The paid verification will cost developers $25 - the same as Play Store registration - just for the privilege of distributing apps outside Google’s walled garden.

The news about Apple pulling the ICEBlock app from their store has been doing the rounds this week, and frankly, it’s got me thinking about how easily our digital tools can become political weapons. For those who missed it, ICEBlock was an app designed to alert users about Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) activity in their area. The new Attorney General, Pam Bondi, claimed it put ICE agents at risk, the developer pushed back, and now it’s gone from the App Store.

Someone on Reddit recently announced Wizarr 2025.10.0, and buried in their feature list was this absolutely perfect line: “Overengineering solutions is in the essence of selfhosting and homelabbing!” The comments that followed were gold - people practically queuing up to admit they felt personally attacked by this statement. One user mentioned implementing single sign-on through Authentik for just two users. Another wrote their own log processor because they were fed up with their existing setup not working perfectly.

I’ve been following an interesting discussion online about what constitutes the most important AI paper of the decade, and it’s got me thinking about how we measure scientific breakthroughs and give credit where it’s due. The paper in question? “Attention Is All You Need” by Vaswani et al., published in 2017 - the one that introduced the transformer architecture that’s now powering everything from ChatGPT to the latest Google search improvements.

So Commonwealth Bank has finally admitted what many of us suspected all along - those 283 “redundancies” weren’t really redundancies at all. They’ve just shuffled the work offshore to India, where they now have a staggering 6,800 employees. The audacity of it all really gets under my skin.

Let me be clear about what’s happened here. CBA told 283 Australian workers their jobs were no longer needed, paid them redundancy packages (hopefully), and then quietly moved those exact same roles to cheaper overseas workers. This isn’t restructuring or efficiency - it’s corporate sleight of hand, and frankly, it should be illegal.

I’ve been mulling over this idea that’s been doing the rounds lately - reducing the pension age for people in physically demanding jobs. On the surface, it sounds reasonable enough. After all, we’ve all seen the tradie whose back is absolutely shot by 60, or the labourer who can barely walk without wincing. But the more I dig into it, the more I realise this isn’t just about fairness - it’s about the messy intersection of work, dignity, and how we value different types of labour in this country.

The internet has been buzzing about OpenAI’s Sora 2, and frankly, I’ve been staring at these videos for longer than I care to admit. There’s something deeply unsettling about watching a horse standing on another horse with such photorealistic detail that your brain starts doing mental gymnastics to reconcile what you’re seeing.

The technical achievement is undeniable. The muscle definition on the horses, the way light plays across surfaces, the subtle physics of movement – it’s the kind of thing that makes you do a double-take. But what’s really getting to me isn’t just the visual fidelity; it’s how this represents a fundamental shift in what we can trust with our eyes.

Well, well, well. Mercedes-Benz is apparently hitting the brakes on their touchscreen obsession and bringing back physical buttons. About bloody time, I say. This news has got me thinking about just how mental the whole car industry went with these tablet-sized screens controlling everything from your windshield wipers to your seat warmers.

The whole thing has been bonkers from the start, hasn’t it? For decades we’ve been told “don’t use your phone while driving” and “keep your eyes on the road,” then some genius in a boardroom decided to stick a massive computer screen right in the middle of our dashboards and make us navigate through seventeen different menus just to turn on the bloody air conditioning. The irony would be hilarious if it wasn’t so dangerous.

The internet has given us many things - instant global communication, access to vast repositories of knowledge, and the ability to order coffee beans from small roasters in Brunswick at 2am. It’s also given us the spectacle of a former US president sharing AI-generated videos promoting fictional alien healing technology, only to delete them after being thoroughly mocked online.

I’ve been following this bizarre story with a mixture of fascination and concern. The whole episode feels like something out of a science fiction parody, complete with references to “med beds” - supposedly alien technology that can cure any ailment. The fact that this wasn’t shared by some random conspiracy theorist in a Facebook group, but by someone who held the highest office in America (and might again), really drives home how weird our timeline has become.

There’s something oddly liberating about deciding to take control of your own grooming routine. Maybe it’s the dad in me, or perhaps it’s just reaching that age where practicality trumps vanity, but I’ve joined the ranks of blokes who’ve embraced the DIY haircut life. Every couple of months, out comes the clipper for a good buzz cut, and every fortnight or so, the facial hair gets trimmed back to respectable stubble.