I’ve been reading about this new ICE facial recognition app called Mobile Fortify, and honestly, it’s keeping me up at night. Not in the “oh that’s mildly concerning” way, but in the “this is genuinely terrifying and we’ve crossed a line we can’t uncross” way.

The headline itself is bad enough - mandatory facial scans, 15 years of data retention regardless of citizenship status. But it’s the detail buried in the reporting that really got me: ICE officials can apparently treat a biometric match from this app as “definitive” and ignore actual evidence of American citizenship, including birth certificates.

There’s something oddly humbling about discovering your “secure” setup isn’t quite as bulletproof as you thought. I came across a discussion recently where someone found their Minecraft server had been visited by an unknown player, despite being confident it was locked down behind Tailscale with proper firewall rules. The kicker? They’d left port 443 open at some point “by mistake.”

Look, I get it. We’ve all been there. You set something up, you think you’ve got all your ducks in a row, and then reality comes knocking with a gentle reminder that security is less about a single tool and more about layers of careful configuration. What struck me about this discussion wasn’t just the breach itself, but the fascinating ecosystem of Minecraft server crawlers and griefers that apparently exists out there in the digital wilderness.

Something caught my eye this week that made me feel genuinely optimistic about the AI space, which is saying something given how much hand-wringing I usually do about this technology. The team at Hugging Face just dropped a 200+ page guide on how to train large language models. Not a high-level marketing fluff piece, but actual nitty-gritty details about what works, what doesn’t, and how to make it all run reliably at scale.

There’s something quietly devastating about watching someone leave a workplace after 15 years with nothing more than a perfunctory goodbye. Recently, I came across a discussion from someone who’d just witnessed exactly that – a colleague retiring after a decade and a half of service, and not a single morning tea or farewell gift materialised. Just… nothing.

It got me thinking about who actually does this work in our offices, and more importantly, why it so often doesn’t happen at all.

There’s a conversation happening right now that’s making a lot of people uncomfortable, and it needs to be had. I’ve been watching the NDIS debate unfold over the past few years, and what started as a genuinely progressive piece of social policy is turning into something that’s distorting our entire labour market in ways I don’t think anyone anticipated.

Three mates leaving their trades to become disability support workers. That’s not an isolated incident – it’s a trend. And while I’m all for people having career choices and disabilities being properly supported, something’s fundamentally broken when an auto mechanic or plumber can earn more taking someone to play bingo than they can after years of developing a skilled trade.

So 1X Technologies just dropped their Neo robot, and the internet did exactly what you’d expect: half the discussion veered into whether you can have sex with it, the other half contemplated its potential as a murder weapon, and somewhere in between, a few of us actually wondered if this thing could, you know, do the washing up.

Look, I’ll admit the concept is fascinating. We’re living through this moment where humanoid robots are transitioning from science fiction to actual products you can pre-order for $20,000. That’s simultaneously incredible and slightly terrifying. But after watching the promotional material and then digging into the Wall Street Journal’s hands-on review, I’m left with more questions than answers – and a gnawing sense that we’re rushing headlong into a future we haven’t quite thought through.

I’ve been watching the AI hype train for a couple of years now, equal parts fascinated and concerned. The technology is genuinely impressive in some ways, but there’s always been this nagging worry at the back of my mind about what happens when we hand over our critical thinking to machines that don’t actually think.

Recent research showing that ChatGPT, Gemini, DeepSeek, and Grok are serving up Russian propaganda about the Ukraine invasion feels like that worry manifesting in real time. It’s not surprising, but it’s deeply frustrating.

There’s something oddly humbling about watching AI-generated footage of a cheetah absolutely smoking a human sprinter at the finish line. I came across this video the other day – an entire “Human vs Animal Olympics” dreamed up by artificial intelligence – and it’s been rattling around in my head ever since.

The concept is simple enough: what if animals could compete in the Olympics? The execution? Well, that’s where it gets interesting. We’re talking gorillas bench-pressing weights that would flatten most humans, bears arm wrestling, alligators swimming (with a digital clock that jumps mysteriously from 09.0 to 39.7 seconds, because of course someone spent ages generating and editing these clips together). The stadium crowds look real. The tension feels genuine. And the message is pretty clear: we’d get absolutely demolished in most events.

I’ve been thinking a lot about health insurance lately, and honestly, it’s one of those things that makes me simultaneously grateful for the system we have and frustrated by how bloody complicated it all is. Private health insurance in Australia has become this weird game where you need to be part actuary, part detective to work out if you’re getting decent value or just paying through the nose for coverage you’ll never use.

I’ve been following the recent news about two Australian women cricketers being inappropriately touched during the Women’s World Cup in India, and honestly, it’s left me equal parts angry and frustrated. Not surprised, sadly, but definitely frustrated.

What really gets under my skin isn’t just the incident itself—though that’s appalling enough—it’s the ICC’s initial response that essentially amounted to “well, they shouldn’t have left without an escort.” Victim blaming at its finest. The organisation’s first instinct was to protect itself rather than address the fundamental problem: women athletes shouldn’t need Secret Service-level protection just to walk to a bloody café.