There’s something deeply moving about Voyager 1 still beeping away out there in the cosmic darkness, nearly fifty years after it left Earth. Every signal it sends back is like getting a postcard from your mate who’s been backpacking for decades and somehow keeps finding wifi in the most remote corners of the universe.

The engineering marvel of it all really gets to me. Here we have a spacecraft built with 1970s technology – we’re talking about the era when a pocket calculator was cutting-edge – and it’s still functioning beyond anything its creators dared to imagine. It’s like finding your old Nokia 3310 in a drawer and discovering it still has three bars of battery life and can somehow receive text messages from Alpha Centauri.

I’ve been thinking about how AI is creeping into every corner of our lives lately, and a discussion I stumbled across online really got under my skin. Someone mentioned how estate agents are now using AI tools to show potential buyers what rundown properties could look like after renovation. On the surface, it sounds helpful, right? But the more I think about it, the more it feels like we’re entering dangerous territory.

There’s something deeply satisfying about stepping into your backyard and plucking fresh lettuce leaves for tonight’s sandwich, or grabbing a handful of rocket to toss into a salad. Recently, I’ve been diving into various online discussions about growing vegetables from seeds, and honestly, it’s got me questioning why I’ve been spending so much on pre-packaged greens at the supermarket.

The conversations I’ve been following have opened my eyes to just how simple - and cheap - it can be to grow your own produce. What strikes me most is how many people stumble into successful gardening almost by accident. Someone mentioned they threw some mustard and rocket seeds onto a garden bed years ago, and they’ve been harvesting ever since. Another person discovered that letting herbs like coriander and parsley go to seed means they’ll have a perpetual supply without any effort.

The rental market has gone completely mental, and I’m not just talking about the prices. I’ve been reading through some discussions about the absurd amount of personal information real estate agents are demanding from prospective tenants these days, and honestly, it’s left me equal parts frustrated and genuinely concerned about where we’re heading as a society.

Someone mentioned they were asked for their social media accounts during a rental application in Melbourne’s CBD. Social media accounts. Think about that for a moment. We’re talking about handing over the keys to your digital life just for the privilege of paying someone else’s mortgage. What’s next? DNA samples? A detailed psychological profile? Your browser history?

Right, I need to talk about something that made me wince harder than watching someone scratch their nails down a blackboard. Someone online shared photos of their stainless steel fridge after what can only be described as a cleaning catastrophe, and honestly, it’s given me flashbacks to my own household disasters over the years.

The poor soul had used a stainless steel sink cleaner on their fridge – nothing wrong with that in theory – but they’d gone at it with the rough side of a sponge, scrubbing against the grain like they were trying to remove barnacles from a ship’s hull. The result? Their entire fridge door now looks like it’s been attacked by an angry cat with metal claws. Deep, swirling scratches everywhere, completely destroying that smooth brushed finish that probably cost them a pretty penny.

The news hit me like a punch to the gut yesterday. Two kids – a 12-year-old and a 15-year-old – stabbed to death in Cobblebank, not far from where I live here in Melbourne’s west. Twelve years old. That’s barely older than my daughter was just a few years back, when her biggest worry was whether she’d make the school basketball team.

I’ve been scrolling through the discussions online, and the range of emotions is palpable. There’s grief, obviously – how could there not be? There’s anger, frustration, and a deep sense that something is fundamentally broken in how we’re handling youth crime in this state. But what’s really getting to me is the feeling that we’re all talking past each other when we should be finding solutions.

The news hit this week that Google copped a $425 million fine for collecting user data despite privacy controls being in place. My first reaction? A weary shake of the head and a muttered “here we go again.” The more I read about it, the more frustrated I became - not just with Google, but with our entire approach to holding tech giants accountable.

The discussion threads I’ve been following are filled with the predictable mix of outrage and resignation. Someone pointed out that this fine represents roughly 0.7% of Google’s 2023 profit of $60 billion. To put that in perspective, if you earned $100,000 last year, this would be equivalent to a $700 fine. Would that stop you from doing something lucrative but legally questionable? Probably not.

Geoffrey Hinton’s latest warning about AI making “a few people much richer and most people poorer” has been bouncing around in my head for days now. The man who helped birth modern AI is essentially telling us we’ve created a monster that’s going to eat our economic lunch. And honestly? Looking at the conversations swirling around this topic, I’m starting to think he might be understating the problem.

What strikes me most about the online discussions is how many people see this coming and feel utterly powerless to stop it. Someone pointed out that Hinton has upgraded from “AI will kill us all” to “AI will make us all destitute” – which, let’s be honest, isn’t exactly cause for celebration. Poverty kills people too, just more slowly and with less dramatic headlines.

There’s something beautifully ironic about stumbling across a newsletter dedicated to self-hosted software updates. While the rest of the world seems obsessed with cramming everything into the cloud and paying monthly subscriptions for the privilege, there’s this thriving community of digital tinkerers who’ve decided to take matters into their own hands.

The Self-Host Weekly newsletter caught my attention this week, particularly because of the delicious contradiction in the comments section. Someone was apparently complaining about too many project updates in a newsletter literally designed to showcase… project updates. It’s like complaining that a coffee shop has too many coffee options – mate, that’s literally why we’re here.

I’ve been noticing something increasingly frustrating in my corner of the IT world lately. Every job posting I come across, even for the most mundane technical roles, seems to have “AI experience” slapped on as a requirement. It’s like someone in HR discovered a new magic word and decided to sprinkle it on everything like fairy dust.

The whole situation reminds me of those early 2000s job ads that demanded “5 years of experience in a technology that had only existed for 2 years.” Except now it’s worse, because at least back then people generally understood what they were asking for, even if the timeline was unrealistic.