The internet is buzzing again with another supermarket pricing controversy, this time involving a yellow ticket at Coles that’s causing quite a stir. Looking at the heated discussions online, it’s fascinating how a simple shelf tag can generate such passionate debate.

Let’s be real here - our major supermarkets aren’t exactly winning popularity contests lately. With grocery prices continuing to climb, many of us are feeling the pinch every time we do our weekly shop. Walking through my local supermarket near Brunswick Street yesterday, I noticed prices had crept up yet again on several staples.

The internet never fails to provide fascinating glimpses into the everyday struggles of rental living. Today’s hot topic? A wooden toilet seat that looks like it’s been around since the dawn of indoor plumbing. The photos making rounds online show a wooden toilet seat that’s clearly seen better days - perhaps during the Hawke era.

Living in rental properties often means dealing with landlords who have interesting interpretations of what constitutes “acceptable condition.” Looking at this particular specimen, with its deteriorating finish and mysterious blue-green patina, brings back memories of my first rental in Carlton. The property manager tried to convince me that the 1970s kitchen appliances had “character.” Sure, if by character you mean potentially lethal.

Sometimes the most remarkable displays of human resilience come wrapped in humor. Recently, I came across a story about a local garage sale that perfectly captured this spirit - a woman going through a divorce who advertised her sale with the wickedly clever tagline “Husband Left Me… His Stuff Has Got To Go! (Lawyers Are Expensive).”

The beauty of this story isn’t just in the humor, though that’s certainly part of it. It’s in how this simple garage sale transformed into an impromptu community gathering, with neighbors dropping by not just to browse but to share a drink and offer support. Living in the suburbs of Melbourne, I’ve witnessed similar moments of community connection, though perhaps not quite as entertainingly marketed.

Remember when mobile apps were just fun little diversions? Looking at the recent Wired article about location tracking through apps feels like watching a horror movie where the call is coming from inside the house. The scale of surveillance through seemingly innocent apps like Candy Crush and MyFitnessPal is staggering.

The tech industry has been playing fast and loose with our data for years, but this revelation takes it to a new level. Even when you explicitly deny location permissions, advertisers can still track you through IP addresses, WiFi networks, and even Bluetooth signals. The sheer number of compromised apps - over 15,000 - is mind-boggling. Just scrolling through the list made my stomach turn.

The tech world has taken quite a turn lately, hasn’t it? Meta’s recent announcement about dropping fact-checking, combined with Zuckerberg’s peculiar image transformation and Tim Cook’s political donations, paints a disturbing picture of where we’re heading.

From my desk in Richmond, watching these tech billionaires realign themselves feels like observing the final act of a particularly grim play. Gone are the days when Silicon Valley at least pretended to care about making the world a better place. Now, it’s all about naked power grabs and political maneuvering.

The recent buzz around self-hosted alternatives to Google services has got me thinking about my own digital autonomy journey. Don’t get me wrong - this isn’t about bashing Google. Their services are polished and convenient, but there’s something deeply satisfying about taking control of your digital life.

My home server, humming away in the study, has become quite the Swiss Army knife of services. The star of the show lately has been Immich, a remarkably capable alternative to Google Photos. What started as a curious experiment has turned into my primary photo management solution. The face recognition feature works surprisingly well, even on my modest hardware, and the ability to share libraries between family members is brilliant.

The tech community is buzzing about Moondream’s latest 2B vision-language model release, particularly its gaze detection capabilities. While the technical achievement is impressive, the implications are giving me serious pause.

Picture this: an AI system that can track exactly where people are looking in any video. The possibilities range from fascinating to frightening. Some developers are already working on scripts to implement this technology on webcams and existing video footage. The enthusiasm in the tech community is palpable, with creators rushing to build tools and applications around this capability.

Reading through online discussions about corporate life lately has triggered some deep reflection about my own twenty-plus years in the tech industry. The recurring theme? We might all be faking it to some degree.

The tech world is particularly prone to this phenomenon. Job descriptions read like someone threw a technical dictionary at a wall and listed whatever stuck. Must have expertise in seventeen programming languages, four cloud platforms, quantum computing, and the ability to time travel? Sure, why not. These wishlists have become so detached from reality that they’re almost comical.

The recent news about private schools spending $2.5 billion on capital projects while public schools grapple with overcrowding has reignited the perpetual debate about school funding in Australia. Twenty years of working in tech has taught me that following the money often reveals the true story, and this situation is no different.

Looking at the numbers, elite private schools like Cranbrook receive around $4,000 per student in government funding, which is less than 10% of their total funding per student. Meanwhile, many public schools struggle with basic infrastructure needs. The argument that “private schools save the government money” keeps surfacing, but this overlooks a fundamental question: should we be subsidizing private choices with public money at all?

The tech world’s narrative about artificial intelligence has taken quite the turn lately. Reading through online discussions about AI safety and the future of humanity, I found myself getting increasingly frustrated with the cognitive dissonance displayed by some of our most prominent tech leaders.

Sam Altman’s journey from “humanity is important” to simultaneously warning about AI potentially ending the world while building exactly that kind of technology perfectly encapsulates the bizarre reality we’re living in. It’s like watching someone construct a nuclear reactor in their backyard while casually mentioning it might explode – but hey, the electricity bills will be great until then!