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.

There’s something profoundly moving about reading someone’s journey from redundancy to triumph. I came across a post recently that had me genuinely emotional – someone sharing their experience of being made redundant, facing countless rejections, and then landing their absolute dream role with a $20k pay bump and senior title to boot.

Reading through their story, I found myself nodding along with every twist and turn. The shock of redundancy after years of loyalty. The brutal reality of today’s job market where applications seem to vanish into the digital void. The well-meaning friends suggesting your CV is “too long” (mate, if you’ve got 20 years of experience, you’ve earned the right to a few extra pages). And then that moment of deciding to throw caution to the wind and apply for something that feels completely out of reach.

There’s something deeply unsettling about watching someone potentially waste thousands of dollars while you’re powerless to help them. That’s exactly what’s happening to a Queensland homeowner who’s been receiving insurance correspondence for a mysterious “GJW” – someone who’s been paying premiums on their house for over 15 years, totalling potentially $15,000 or more.

The story reads like something out of a Kafka novel. The current homeowners have tried everything: returning mail, contacting the bank, even going to AFCA. Nothing works. The insurance company just keeps happily taking GJW’s money, year after year, for a policy they could never claim on because they don’t own the contents.

I’ve been watching this fascinating discussion unfold online about Google’s new image enhancement AI, and it’s got me thinking about something that extends far beyond just pretty pictures. Someone used this “nano banana” feature to clean up a photo of what looked like a pretty grotty digital scale, transforming it from something that looked like it had been through a small explosion to pristine, showroom condition. The transformation was honestly incredible – and that’s exactly the problem.