There’s a particular kind of frustration that builds up slowly when you’re dealing with the modern web. You need to do something simple — resize a photo, strip some metadata, blur a face — and suddenly you’re being asked to sign up for a free trial, verify your email, and “unlock premium features” just to do what should take thirty seconds. It’s exhausting. And it’s gotten worse, not better.

So when I stumbled across a project this week — essentially Stirling-PDF but built for images — I found myself genuinely interested. The pitch is clean: one Docker container, browser-based, everything runs locally, your files never leave your machine. Thirty-plus tools covering the usual suspects like resize, crop, rotate, compress, and convert, but also some more interesting stuff like background removal, face and licence plate blurring, OCR, and object erasing. The developer is building it openly, asking for feedback, and has explicitly said they’re not interested in making it another “AI-wrapped gimmick or subscription trap.”

So I’ve been down a rabbit hole this Easter weekend, and it has nothing to do with chocolate eggs. Google DeepMind dropped Gemma 4, and the local AI community has basically lost its collective mind — in the best possible way.

For those not deep in the weeds on this stuff, Gemma is Google’s family of open-weights AI models. The new Gemma 4 lineup ranges from tiny models designed to run on phones all the way up to a 31 billion parameter beast that’ll give your home server a decent workout. And the specs are genuinely impressive: multimodal input handling text, images, video and audio, context windows up to 256K tokens, native tool calling, built-in reasoning modes, and support for over 140 languages. That last point is actually more significant than most people give it credit for — more on that in a moment.

Someone posted online recently about their office being 80% empty — down from 50 people on a floor to about 10 — and honestly, the responses were gold. A mix of envy, recognition, and the occasional sharp observation about management having heads equally as empty as the office. Relatable content for a Thursday morning.

It got me thinking about how dramatically the whole “where do we work” conversation has shifted over the past few years. Because we’re not really arguing about it anymore, are we? The great Return-to-Office wars of 2022 and 2023 feel like they’ve quietly fizzled into a kind of uneasy truce. Most places have landed somewhere between “come in when it makes sense” and “we’re not paying for all this real estate for it to sit empty, so please just show up occasionally.”

Been following the fuel situation pretty closely this week, and there’s a lot to unpack. Roger Cook invoking emergency powers in WA under the Fuel, Energy and Power Resources Act 1972 has got people either cheering or crying government overreach — and honestly, I think a lot of the critics are missing the point entirely.

Let’s be clear about what actually happened here. This wasn’t some dramatic state of emergency like we saw during COVID. Cook used specific legislative powers to force fuel companies to disclose how much fuel they actually have and where it’s stored. That’s it. The reason? Companies were apparently hiding behind “supply contract confidentiality” clauses to avoid sharing that information. Which means Gina Rinehart’s operations, BHP, Rio, Twiggy’s empire — they potentially have millions of litres sitting at their mine sites while the rest of WA is sweating about supplies. The audacity is genuinely breathtaking.

March was a genuinely busy month in this space, and I’ve been sitting with a few of these developments over the past week trying to work out what’s noise and what actually changes how I work. Let me get into the things that stuck.

Sonnet 4.6 Is the Real Story, Not Opus

I’ll be honest — I’d been running Opus 4.6 as my default in Claude Code because it felt like the “serious” choice. That calculus is now just wrong.

Right, so I’ve been down a bit of a rabbit hole this week, and honestly I’m still not entirely sure how to process what I’ve seen.

Chinese state media has released a second episode of their AI-generated animated series about the Iran conflict. Yes, you read that correctly. State-produced. AI-generated. Animated. War coverage. It’s a sentence I genuinely never expected to type, and yet here we are in 2025 where apparently this is just… a thing that exists now.

So researchers have just announced a new fibre optic record that could theoretically allow 50 million movies to be streamed simultaneously through a single cable. Fifty million. My brain genuinely struggles to wrap itself around that number. The comment sections online were predictably full of jokes — “finally, I can watch all the Saw movies at once” — and honestly, fair enough. Sometimes the absurdity of a headline just demands a bit of silliness.

There’s a peculiar satisfaction that comes from watching a tech giant finally hit the brakes on something they’ve been forcing down everyone’s throats. Microsoft’s recent decision to scale back their aggressive Copilot integration across Windows 11 and Office apps feels like that moment when you finally get someone to stop talking about their crypto portfolio at a barbecue—blessed relief.

I’ve been watching this unfold with equal parts amusement and frustration over the past year. Working in IT, I’ve had a front-row seat to the chaos that ensues when Microsoft decides to “innovate” without considering whether anyone actually asked for it. And mate, the Copilot rollout has been a masterclass in corporate tone-deafness.

I’ve been watching the AI layoff theatre with growing frustration, and there’s something fundamentally broken about how this whole thing is playing out.

Block cuts 4,000 people and blames AI. Atlassian drops 1,600. Shopify literally tells employees to prove AI can’t do their job before they can get more headcount. The CEO makes the announcement, the stock price nudges upward, and everyone nods along like this makes perfect sense. Except it doesn’t, because six months later, 55% of those same CEOs admit they regret the cuts, and companies like Klarna are quietly rehiring the humans they replaced after their AI-driven customer service quality went off a cliff.

There’s a particularly delicious irony unfolding right now that would be funny if it wasn’t so utterly predictable. The same people who’ve spent years railing against renewable energy—telling us solar and wind are unreliable, that we need to stick with good old fossil fuels—are now the loudest voices complaining about fuel prices shooting through the roof.

You genuinely couldn’t write this stuff.

The whole situation has been brought into sharp focus with the current fuel crisis, and the responses I’ve been seeing online range from the darkly comedic to the genuinely infuriating. Someone pointed out that Barnaby Joyce was on ABC Insiders talking about building a new oil refinery. The same Barnaby Joyce whose government shut down six refineries when he was in power. The cognitive dissonance is absolutely staggering.