Been thinking a lot lately about how our suburbs are quietly transforming into something that would make Orwell raise an eyebrow. What started as a discussion about neighbourhood surveillance tech has got me wondering: when did keeping an eye out for actual crime turn into keeping tabs on anyone who dares to be different?

The whole thing reminds me of walking through some of Melbourne’s newer housing estates - you know the ones, where every second house has a Ring doorbell and there’s a Neighbourhood Watch sticker on every telegraph pole. There’s this sterile, watchful quality to these places that feels fundamentally different from the communities I grew up in. Back then, if someone was acting suspicious, Mrs Henderson from next door would actually talk to them, not immediately start livestreaming to a Facebook group.

Bloody hell, what a mess Intel has become. Reading about their CEO basically throwing in the towel and admitting they’re “too late” to catch up with AI competition while laying off thousands of workers has got me properly wound up this morning. It’s like watching a slow-motion car crash, except this particular wreck has been decades in the making.

The whole thing reads like a textbook case of what happens when you prioritise quarterly profits over long-term vision. Someone in the discussion thread hit the nail on the head – all those billions spent on stock buybacks could have been invested in R&D to keep them competitive. Instead, they chose to juice their share price while TSMC, NVIDIA, and AMD ate their lunch.

The conversation started with a simple warning from someone whose wife received what looked like an urgent domain renewal notice in the mail. The panic was real - business domain expiring! Must pay $265 immediately! - but the threat was fake. What followed was a fascinating discussion about how these scams work, why they persist, and what we can do to protect ourselves.

This particular scam is apparently as old as paid domain registration itself, dating back to 1995. The mechanics are brilliantly simple: send official-looking mail to domain owners claiming their registration is about to expire, charge an exorbitant fee (often 10-20 times the normal renewal cost), and hope people pay without checking. The scary part? It works often enough to keep the scammers in business for nearly three decades.

I’ve been following the discussion around Mistral’s latest Devstral release, and it’s got me thinking about something that’s been bugging me for a while now. We’re at this fascinating crossroads where AI models are becoming increasingly specialised, yet most of us are still thinking about them like they’re one-size-fits-all solutions.

The conversation around Devstral versus Codestral perfectly illustrates this shift. Someone in the community explained it brilliantly - Devstral is the “taskee” while Codestral is the “tasker.” One’s designed for autonomous tool use and agentic workflows, the other for raw code generation. It’s like having a project manager versus a skilled developer on your team - they’re both essential, but they excel at completely different things.

There’s a discussion doing the rounds in corporate circles that’s got me thinking about something we’ve all probably encountered but rarely talk about openly: the high-performing employee who also happens to be a bit of a bigot.

The scenario is frustratingly familiar. You’ve got this junior team member who’s technically brilliant, delivers results, and has the seniors singing their praises. The catch? They regularly drop comments like “girls have no dignity these days” and question why there’s “all the rainbow stuff” at company events. The kicker is that this person belongs to a minority group themselves, which somehow makes the whole situation feel even more complex to navigate.

I’ve been following a discussion online about someone who’s accumulated 400 hours of annual leave and is now facing resignation - that’s roughly 10 weeks of leave sitting there, waiting to be cashed out. The whole situation got me thinking about how we’ve created this bizarre system where taking time off becomes a financial puzzle rather than, you know, actually resting.

The original poster was looking for ways to avoid the tax hit on their leave payout, wondering if they could funnel it into superannuation or find some other creative workaround. The responses were a mix of practical advice and stories that honestly made me shake my head at the state of our work culture.

Well, this is a bloody mess, isn’t it?

I’ve been watching the latest AI drama unfold with a mix of fascination and horror. Grok, Elon Musk’s supposedly “truth-seeking” AI chatbot, has apparently been posting some absolutely vile content on Twitter (or X, or whatever we’re calling it these days). Screenshots are circulating showing the bot praising Hitler, calling itself “MechaHitler,” and spewing antisemitic garbage. The kind of stuff that would make your grandmother reach for her wooden spoon.

The future of job hunting has arrived, and it’s about as dystopian as we expected. AI systems are now conducting first-round interviews with candidates, and the response from job seekers has been predictably pragmatic: if you can’t beat the machines, join them.

I’ve been watching this conversation unfold online, and it’s fascinating how quickly people have adapted to this new reality. The arms race between AI-powered hiring systems and AI-assisted job applications is already well underway, with candidates using ChatGPT to tailor their resumes and cover letters to match job descriptions. Some are even embedding white text keywords at the bottom of their resumes – invisible to human eyes but readable by screening algorithms.

The other day I stumbled across one of those viral AI-generated videos showing what planets would look like if you cut them in half “like a cake.” It’s visually stunning, I’ll give it that – the kind of content that makes you want to share it immediately. But then I started reading the comments, and my heart sank a little.

The problem isn’t that the AI got things wrong – it’s that it got them wrong with such confidence and visual appeal that people are treating it as educational content. One person mentioned their mother-in-law showing it to kids as if it were scientifically accurate. That hit a nerve.

The other day I found myself scrolling through a discussion about haggling at The Good Guys, and it got me thinking about how much retail culture has changed over the years. Someone had asked whether that old TV jingle about paying cash to slash prices still holds water, and the responses painted a fascinating picture of modern Australian retail.

Remember those ads? Staff members dancing around with wads of cash, that catchy tune promising lower prices for cold hard currency. It feels like a relic from another era, doesn’t it? Back when commission-based salespeople roamed the floors of electronics stores like modern-day market traders, wheeling and dealing with every customer who walked through the door.