I’ve been watching an interesting phenomenon unfold online lately, and it’s left me equal parts amused and frustrated. There’s this persistent belief floating around anti-AI circles that if the big tech companies collapse or stop developing AI models, then somehow all AI capabilities will just… vanish. Like it’s some kind of cloud-based subscription service that gets shut off when the bills aren’t paid.

It’s a genuinely baffling misunderstanding of how technology actually works.

I stumbled across an interesting discussion online the other day that made me pause mid-sip of my latte. Someone was asking whether they could join in on the workplace banter about attractive celebrities, seeing as their female colleagues were openly discussing Jason Momoa in the team chat. The twist? They wanted to share their own list, which included… well, let’s just say it escalated from Margaret Qualley to some rather specific fantasies involving WWE wrestlers and, bizarrely, Pauline Hanson.

There’s a statistic doing the rounds that’s been gnawing at me for days now: nearly half of all full-time workers in Australia earn over $100,000 a year. When I first read that, my initial reaction was disbelief. Then I remembered what my salary was a decade ago, what it is now, and how much less I seem to have in my pocket at the end of each month despite earning considerably more on paper.

Right, so I stepped away from my desk for a latte run this morning – proper batch brew from the little place down the road – and came back to discover that not one but two major AI models had dropped. Anthropic released Sonnet 4.6, and apparently Grok 4.2 decided to join the party. The AI world moves at a pace that would make even Melbourne’s weather changes look predictable.

There’s something almost poetic about watching a tech platform shoot itself in the foot so spectacularly that users flee en masse to a service most people thought had been relegated to the dustbin of internet history. TeamSpeak, of all things, is experiencing a renaissance. TeamSpeak! The voice chat platform I last used during my Counter-Strike days is now being overwhelmed by refugees from Discord. If that doesn’t tell you something about the state of modern tech platforms, I don’t know what does.

There’s something deeply cynical happening in Hollywood right now, and it’s making me wonder whether we’ve learned anything from the past two decades of tech hype cycles.

Roger Avary, who co-wrote Pulp Fiction, recently revealed that after struggling to get traditional films funded, he started an AI production company and suddenly had investors throwing money at him. Three films in production, just like that. His quote really drives it home: “Just put AI in front of it and all of a sudden you’re in production on three features.”

There’s something deeply embarrassing about watching an online discussion turn into a collective therapy session about the quality of Australian passports. Yet here we are in 2025, and apparently the most reliable way to keep our travel documents flat is to place them under a cookbook and hope for the best.

I stumbled across this bizarre conversation the other day, and it struck a nerve. Here we are, paying close to $400 for a passport renewal (or well over $300 for a new adult passport), and the bloody things arrive pre-warped like they’ve already completed a round-the-world trip in someone’s back pocket. The fact that someone needed to ask for advice on keeping their passport flat – and received hundreds of responses – tells you everything you need to know about the state of government procurement in this country.

You know what’s weirdly satisfying? Finding the perfect solution to a mundane problem that’s been annoying you for ages. I was scrolling through some online discussions the other day and stumbled upon a thread about cleaning car windshields – specifically, those infuriating streaks that appear when the sun hits just right or when oncoming headlights illuminate every imperfection at night.

What started as a simple question turned into this fascinating deep dive into automotive cleaning chemistry, and honestly, it’s the kind of practical knowledge that makes me wish I’d known years ago.

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about what it takes to build genuine community in 2025. Not the algorithmic kind where you’re fed content based on what keeps you scrolling, but the real, messy, face-to-face kind where you actually have to look people in the eye and remember their names.

There’s something happening in Wantirna South that’s been quietly growing over the past couple of years, and it’s exactly the kind of thing that gives me hope when I’m feeling particularly pessimistic about the state of human connection. Someone has been running a weekly board game group at Knox Library, and from what I can see, it’s become a proper community hub. They started small, advertising on Facebook and Meetup, and now they’re getting close to 70 people turning up on Sundays to play everything from Catan to Blood on the Clocktower.

There’s something deeply unsettling about watching the people who are supposed to be investigating serious crimes get caught up in what looks like political surveillance theater. The recent photos of Attorney General Pam Bondi’s binder showing search histories of Congress members looking through unredacted Epstein files has me thinking about just how far down the rabbit hole we’ve gone when it comes to privacy, power, and who’s watching whom.

The whole situation is a mess of contradictions that would be almost comical if it weren’t so serious. On one hand, we’ve got lawmakers accessing sensitive documents on government systems—systems that are, by design, monitored. That’s not exactly shocking. Anyone who’s worked in IT (and I’ve spent enough years in the trenches) knows that everything you do on a work computer is logged. Every search, every file access, every email. It’s Security 101.