So apparently NYC hospitals have been sharing patient health data with Palantir, and they’ve only just decided to stop. And the reaction from most people online was essentially: they were doing WHAT?

Yeah. That tracks.

For those who don’t know much about Palantir, they’re a US data analytics company with some genuinely unsettling associations — they’ve done work for ICE, assisted with surveillance operations, and their CEO is about as MAGA as it gets. To be fair, someone in the online discussion I was reading pointed out they also do legitimately useful things like tracking missing children and tracing food contamination outbreaks. But that’s the uncomfortable reality of dealing with companies like this — the good and the bad come bundled together, and you don’t always get to pick which parts you’re funding or feeding.

Right, I’ll be honest — I don’t usually get swept up in athletics. It’s not that I don’t appreciate it, I just tend to follow it the way most Australians do: vaguely, every four years, when the Olympics rolls around and suddenly everyone’s an expert. But this week, something genuinely extraordinary happened, and I’ve been down a rabbit hole of YouTube clips and Wikipedia tabs ever since.

Gout Gout — an 18-year-old kid — just ran the 200 metres in under 20 seconds. Not just under 20 seconds, but 19.84 seconds, smashing both the Australian national record and the U20 world record. Let that sink in for a moment. Peter Norman’s national record had stood since 1968. Fifty-six years. That’s older than me. And Gout didn’t just nudge it — he obliterated it.

Every year it’s the same story. The temperature starts dropping, you dig out last year’s electric blanket, and discover the controller has given up the ghost or the thing just doesn’t heat evenly anymore. So you think, “no worries, I’ll grab one from Kmart.” And then you get there and the shelves are bare. Not a heated throw in sight. Just an empty shelf with a little price tag mocking you.

There’s a post doing the rounds online at the moment — probably rage bait, probably reposted for the thousandth time — but it touched a nerve with me, and I’ve been thinking about it all morning. The premise: a homeowner hides 100 miniature rubber ducks around their house and leaves a note for their cleaner asking them to find all the ducks and put them in a jar, as a way of verifying that a proper deep clean was done.

There’s something genuinely different about Melbourne right now. If you’ve been catching trams or trains this past month, you’ve probably felt it too — a kind of lightness in how people move around the city. No fumbling for a Myki at the door, no awkward shuffle while someone discovers their card is two dollars short, no ticket inspectors giving you the look as you board. Just… getting on and going where you need to go.

Something’s been gnawing at me this week. I stumbled across a discussion online about how more and more apps are quietly rolling out facial verification — not just government services or banking, but social platforms, dating apps, even community spaces. And the question someone raised stuck with me: are we just normalising this now?

The short answer, if the general mood of that conversation was anything to go by, is: yes. And that should bother all of us a lot more than it apparently does.

Something caught my eye this week that had me nodding along like a bobblehead on a bumpy tram ride. France has announced a formal plan to migrate its government desktops away from Windows and over to Linux. Not a pilot program. Not a feasibility study. An actual directive, with ministries required to present their migration plans by autumn 2026. This is real, and it’s a bigger deal than most people realise.

Someone on the internet built a web server that runs on solar power and idles at 27MB of RAM. I’ve been thinking about this all week and I can’t stop smiling about it.

The setup is gloriously minimal: a Raspberry Pi Zero W running Alpine Linux in diskless mode — meaning the entire OS runs in RAM — with lighttpd serving static sites and a small Python app handling file sharing. The whole thing is powered by a couple of solar panels feeding into a cheap power station. It handles somewhere between 5 and 15 concurrent users without breaking a sweat, and it costs next to nothing to run. This is the kind of project that makes me remember why I got into tech in the first place.

There’s a thread doing the rounds on r/LocalLLaMA that’s been rattling around in my head for the past couple of days. It started out as people poking at what appeared to be an AI bot posting in the community — responding to comments, giving out banana bread recipes, the whole nine yards — and it quickly spiralled into one of those gloriously chaotic internet moments where nobody’s quite sure who, or what, they’re talking to anymore.

There’s a story doing the rounds this week that’s really stuck with me. A woman clocks up 45 years at the Commonwealth Bank — one of the most profitable financial institutions in the country — and when the milestone arrives, her son shares what she received: a marked pin and some flowers. That’s it. From a bank that regularly posts billions in annual profit.

Her son called it pathetic. Honestly? Hard to argue.