Sometimes the news throws you a curveball that’s so absurd you have to read the headline three times before it sinks in. This week, it was the story of a Palestinian man who escaped Gaza to Italy on a jetski—with ChatGPT’s help. Well, sort of.

The internet had a field day with this one, and honestly, I can see why. It reads like someone played Mad Libs with current events: “Palestinian man uses [AI chatbot] to calculate fuel for [watercraft] escape to [European country].” The punchline? ChatGPT got the math wrong, and they ran out of fuel 20 kilometres short of their destination.

I stumbled across a video the other day that’s been rattling around in my head ever since. It showed someone using an AI voice interface to give personality to a hammer – and not just any personality, but one that desperately wanted to fulfill its purpose. “Let’s hit something. Now. Right now,” it pleaded with genuine enthusiasm. What should have been a quirky tech demo instead left me feeling deeply unsettled about where we’re heading.

I’ve been thinking about something that popped up in one of the frugal communities I follow online recently. The moderators were asking for feedback about how to manage their referral code threads better, and it got me reflecting on the peculiar nature of online bargain-hunting communities and how they evolve.

The issue they’re facing is quite fascinating from a community management perspective. Their subreddit has grown to the point where their monthly and fortnightly megathreads for sharing referral codes are becoming unwieldy. Too many people posting the same handful of referral links, creating digital noise rather than useful signal. One user pointed out something that really resonated with me: once you’ve signed up for the major cashback sites and banks, you’re done. The fifteenth person posting their ShopBack referral code isn’t adding any value.

The news broke quietly, almost like the government hoped we wouldn’t notice until it was too late. Come December, Australians will need to verify their age to access adult content online. The eSafety Commissioner’s office frames it as protecting children, but scratch beneath the surface and you’ll find a privacy nightmare that would make George Orwell reach for his laptop.

Reading through the discussions online, it’s clear I’m not alone in feeling deeply uncomfortable about this entire scheme. The technical realities are stark - major sites like Pornhub have already started geo-blocking entire regions rather than deal with age verification requirements. They did it in Texas, they’ll do it here. We’re not special enough to warrant custom compliance systems.

I stumbled across an interesting thread yesterday that got me thinking about our relationship with stuff. Someone was asking for help cleaning their discolored flip-flops - they’d tried soap, scrubbing, dish soap, vinegar, the whole nine yards. The responses were fascinating and really divided into two camps: those saying “just bin them and buy new ones” and others offering actual cleaning solutions.

What struck me most wasn’t the cleaning advice itself, but the underlying tension between our throwaway culture and environmental consciousness. The original poster mentioned their flip-flops cost $40 USD (which is about $60 AUD these days), and they’d been wearing them for three years. When they finally found success with a magic eraser, they added an update that really resonated with me: “I refuse to throw away what is still perfectly good but not as pretty anymore. Our landfills are full and we are drowning in fast fashion.”

There’s something beautifully ordinary about watching kids have meltdowns at birthday parties. This weekend, someone shared their experience observing three different families - Asian, Caucasian, and Indian - all navigating the chaos of children’s birthday celebrations at a play centre in Heidelberg. What struck them most wasn’t the differences between these families, but the remarkable similarities: tantruming birthday kids, complaints about overpriced venues, parking struggles, allergy concerns, and yes, even AFL discussions (with two families unfortunately backing the Bombers).

There’s something almost comically ironic about my current predicament. Here I am, a DevOps engineer who spends his days wrestling with code, infrastructure, and the endless march of technological progress, and I’ve stumbled across a question that’s been gnawing at me for weeks now.

It started with a post on Reddit that made me pause mid-scroll. Someone was asking whether the Go programming language itself could be a privacy concern, simply because Google created it. At first glance, it sounds almost absurd – worrying about the privacy implications of a programming language is like being suspicious of the pencil because you don’t trust the company that made the graphite. But the more I thought about it, the more I realised this question touches on something much deeper about our relationship with technology in 2024.

Sitting at my desk this morning, scrolling through the news about Charlie Kirk’s assassination, I found myself staring at my screen in a kind of bewildered horror. The 22-year-old shooter had engraved bullets with internet memes. Not political manifestos. Not ideological screeds. Memes. One of them literally read “Notices bulges OWO what’s this?” - a furry roleplay joke that’s been floating around the darker corners of the internet for over a decade.

I stumbled across something interesting the other day that got me thinking about the state of academic research tools. Someone has built an open-source academic search engine called Paperion that indexes 80 million papers, and honestly, it highlights just how broken the current system is for anyone trying to access and organize research.

The creator mentioned being shocked by the “lack of tools in the academia world” for paper search and annotation, and that really resonated with me. Even though I’m not in academia, I find myself diving into research papers constantly, especially anything related to AI and machine learning. The rapid pace of development in these fields means staying current requires consuming a lot of academic content, but the tools we have for doing this are frankly terrible.

Sometimes the tech industry throws you a curveball that makes you stop and think. This week, it came in the form of a small Korean startup called Trillion Labs announcing they’d just released the world’s first 70B parameter model with complete intermediate checkpoints - and they’re doing it all under an Apache 2.0 license while being, in their own words, “still broke.”

The audacity of it all is honestly refreshing. Here’s a one-year-old company going up against tech giants with essentially unlimited resources, and instead of trying to compete on pure performance, they’re doubling down on transparency. They’re not just giving us the final model - they’re showing us the entire training journey, from 0.5B all the way up to 70B parameters. It’s like getting the director’s cut, behind-the-scenes footage, and blooper reel all in one package.