There’s something deeply satisfying about tearing apart a black box and figuring out what makes it tick. It’s the same urge that drove me to pull apart computers as a teenager (much to my parents’ horror) and what keeps me engaged in my DevOps work today. But lately, I’ve been watching the AI agent space with a mixture of fascination and frustration.

I came across someone’s journey of learning AI agents from scratch, and it resonated with me on so many levels. They spent months wrestling with frameworks like LangChain and CrewAI, following tutorials that worked but never explained why they worked. When things broke, they were completely lost. Sound familiar?

There’s a particular kind of déjà vu that hits you when you work in IT long enough in Australia. It’s that moment when you read about an executive “shaking things up” at a major company, only to discover they’re actually just the same person who was shaking things up at their competitor six months ago. This week’s episode: Optus replacing their departing CIO with an ex-Telstra CIO.

Mark Potter is heading out after four years at Optus, and in comes someone from the very company they’re supposed to be competing against. The reaction online has been… well, let’s just say the cynicism is palpable, and honestly, I get it.

I came across an interesting discussion the other day that really struck a chord with me. Someone had recently doubled their income from $600 to $1,200 a week and was wondering if saving $300 weekly was enough to bother investing. The question itself highlights something I’ve been thinking about for years – how our perception of “enough” can either empower or paralyze us when it comes to financial decisions.

Here’s the thing that really got me: $300 a week isn’t just “something” – it’s $15,600 a year. That’s roughly equivalent to a second-hand car, or a decent chunk of a house deposit over time, or quite frankly, peace of mind. Yet there’s this pervasive feeling among people on lower and middle incomes that unless you’re throwing around tens of thousands at a time, you’re not really “investing.” That’s absolute rubbish, and it’s a mindset that keeps people stuck.

I’ve been following the AI hardware race pretty closely—comes with the territory when you work in IT—but I’ll admit the latest announcement about StarCloud planning to launch GPUs into space had me doing a double-take over my morning latte. The idea of a 4-kilometre-wide, 5-gigawatt datacenter orbiting Earth sounds like something straight out of a sci-fi novel, and honestly, I’m not entirely convinced it’s anything more than that.

Let me be clear from the start: this isn’t actually NVIDIA launching GPUs into space, despite what the initial buzz suggested. StarCloud is a startup that’s part of NVIDIA’s Inception program, which is essentially a support network for companies building on NVIDIA tech. The distinction matters because it shifts this from “tech giant’s ambitious project” to “startup’s moonshot pitch,” and those two things have very different probabilities of success.

There’s been some noise online about Amazon’s plans to replace 600,000 workers with robots by 2027, supposedly saving 30 cents per item. On the surface, it sounds like one of those efficiency wins that corporate types love to brag about in quarterly earnings calls. But dig a little deeper, and it’s just another chapter in the story of late-stage capitalism eating itself.

Let me be clear: I’m not a Luddite. I work in IT and DevOps, I’m fascinated by technological advancement, and I’ve spent enough time automating workflows to understand the appeal of efficiency. But there’s something deeply unsettling about the way we’re approaching this particular wave of automation.

There’s a running joke in travel forums about spotting Australians overseas—just look for the person with a permanently disappointed expression queuing up for yet another disappointing coffee. It’s not really a joke, though. It’s more of a national tragedy that we’ve collectively agreed to laugh about rather than seriously confront.

I stumbled across a discussion recently about how Australians seemingly can’t function without decent coffee when traveling, and honestly, it hit closer to home than I’d like to admit. The original poster mentioned getting headaches and losing focus when unable to find fresh ground coffee abroad, and the comment thread spiraled into this fascinating rabbit hole about caffeine dependency, ADHD, withdrawal symptoms, and the curious fact that Indonesia—literally where much of the world’s best coffee comes from—treats exceptional coffee as casually as we treat tap water.

You know that feeling when something goes wrong and you immediately know it’s going to become a story you’ll be rehashing for years? That’s basically what happened to someone recently whose mate came over for a few drinks and decided to take over dinner prep—only to transform a brand-new glass cooktop into what looks like a Jackson Pollock painting of destruction.

The internet had a field day with it, naturally. And while I scrolled through the comments, I found myself genuinely torn between finding it hilarious and feeling genuinely sympathetic for everyone involved. There’s a lot to unpack here, and it’s not just about a ruined stove.

I stumbled across a discussion recently about Airport West—that oddly-named suburb wedged between three major freeways—and found myself genuinely intrigued. Not because I’m considering a move there, but because the conversation really challenged some assumptions I had about what makes a suburb liveable. The more I read, the more it struck me that Airport West represents something worth examining: a place that’s geographically isolated in a way that might actually be its greatest strength.

I’ve been mulling over something that’s been doing the rounds online lately, and it’s gotten under my skin more than most things do. It’s about Amazon Ring, Flock Safety, and how we’ve somehow collectively sleepwalked into a surveillance apparatus that would make George Orwell take notes. The frustrating bit? We paid for it ourselves.

Here’s the thing that really gets me: we’re living through this bizarre inversion of totalitarianism. We used to worry about governments forcing surveillance on us, right? That was the whole China-versus-the-West narrative. But nobody talks about the fact that America has arguably built something far more insidious—and we voluntarily installed it in our homes. We bought the cameras. We connected them to the internet. We gave corporations and law enforcement the keys to our front doors, all for the convenience of checking if a parcel arrived while we’re at work.

There’s a peculiar kind of irony that’s been gnawing at me ever since I read about the recent hack targeting hundreds of DHS, ICE, and FBI officials. The headlines scream about doxing, threats to government workers, and the supposed wave of violence against law enforcement families. But buried in the details is something that deserves more attention than the performative outrage typically gets.

Let me be clear upfront: doxing—publishing private information with the intent to incite harassment or violence—is generally wrong. Full stop. It doesn’t matter who the target is. The moment you cross from whistleblowing into targeting people’s home addresses and phone numbers for harassment campaigns, you’ve ventured into ethically murky territory that I’m uncomfortable with, even when I deeply disagree with what those people do.