There’s a particular kind of frustration that comes with finding your carefully curated music collection locked behind ransomware encryption. It’s not the sort of thing you expect to happen to a Raspberry Pi running a music server in your home network. Yet here we are, and someone in the self-hosting community just lived through exactly that scenario with want_to_cry, a relatively unknown ransomware variant that targets vulnerable SAMBA configurations.

What struck me reading through the thread wasn’t just the incident itself, but the follow-up discussion—and more importantly, how the person who got hit took ownership of their mistakes and shared them publicly. That takes guts, especially when admitting you didn’t fully understand what DMZ mode actually does on your home router.

I stumbled across something genuinely funny the other day while trawling through tech discussions during my lunch break—the kind of thing that makes you laugh, then immediately think about what it reveals about how these systems actually work. Someone had been testing a smaller language model (Qwen 0.6B, if you’re curious) and asked it to “write three times the word potato.” What happened next? It promptly returned a sentence about potatoes being something that shouldn’t be thought about, repeated three times, complete with what looked like a mild existential crisis and recommendations to contact helplines.

I’ve been reflecting on a story I came across recently about someone’s career rollercoaster over the past couple of years, and it really struck a chord with me. This person went from law to management consulting, got made redundant when the industry tanked, spent six months unemployed, took a massive pay cut to get back in the door, then worked themselves to the bone for nine months before finally landing a promotion that nearly doubled their previous salary.

The latest ABC report on Australia’s deepening baby recession has got me thinking about a conversation that’s been brewing in online forums and coffee shops across the country. The numbers are stark - our birth rate continues to plummet, and the reasons why are both complex and deeply personal.

Reading through the experiences shared by people across Australia, what strikes me most is how this isn’t just about abstract economic policy or demographic statistics. These are real people making incredibly difficult decisions about their futures, often choosing between financial security and the families they’d love to have.

Been scrolling through some heated discussions about OpenAI’s announcement of an “adult version” of ChatGPT, and honestly, it’s got me thinking about how quickly we’re sleepwalking into a surveillance state disguised as convenience.

The whole thing started with Sam Altman’s typical corporate speak about having “mitigated serious mental health issues” - which immediately set off my bullshit detector. When has a tech CEO ever genuinely solved a complex societal problem with a software update? It’s like saying we’ve cured loneliness by adding more emoji reactions to Facebook posts.

The news about T-Mobile customer data being intercepted from unencrypted satellite communications has been doing the rounds this week, and frankly, it’s left me both amazed and deeply concerned. University researchers with an $800 setup managed to intercept phone calls, text messages, and even military communications simply by pointing a dish at satellites and listening in. The kicker? None of it was encrypted.

Reading through the technical details, what strikes me most is the sheer naivety of the security approach. These companies were essentially broadcasting sensitive data in the clear, operating under the assumption that nobody would bother to look up and listen. It’s like leaving your house unlocked because you assume burglars don’t exist in your neighbourhood.

Google’s latest AI announcement has the tech world buzzing again. Apparently, they’ve built an AI that “learns from its own mistakes in real time.” Cue the usual chorus of “holy shit” reactions and breathless headlines about revolutionary breakthroughs. But hang on a minute – let’s take a step back and actually think about what this means.

Reading through the various reactions online, it’s fascinating to see the divide between those who understand the technical details and those who just see the marketing speak. The more technically-minded folks are pointing out that this sounds a lot like glorified RAG (Retrieval-Augmented Generation) – essentially fancy context management where the AI stores its reasoning process and refers back to it when similar problems arise. It’s not actually changing its core weights or truly “learning” in the way we might imagine.

The sound of 50,000 Australians booing the Star Spangled Banner at WWE Crown Jewel in Perth last week has been echoing through my mind for days now. There’s something deeply satisfying about that collective “nah, get stuffed” moment that perfectly encapsulates how many of us feel about America’s relentless cultural evangelism.

The whole thing started because WWE decided to play the American national anthem at an Australian event, despite most of the wrestlers not even being American. When someone pointed this out online, the responses were fascinating - ranging from genuine confusion about why they’d do this, to tales of American anthems being played at speedway events and rodeos across the country for decades.

Sometimes the internet restores my faith in humanity, and today was one of those days. I stumbled across a thread where someone had posted about their absolutely revolting dishwasher filter – we’re talking proper grim stuff that looked like it belonged in a horror movie. But what really got my attention wasn’t the gross factor (though my teenage daughter would definitely have gagged), it was what happened next.

A professional appliance installer saw the post and took time out of their day to create an entirely new thread, complete with diagrams, explaining a plumbing issue that could be causing similar problems for loads of people. No agenda, no selling anything – just genuine helpfulness. It’s the kind of thing that makes you realise the internet isn’t entirely broken.

Walking through the CBD today, you’d be forgiven for thinking Melbourne had turned into some sort of organised chaos festival. Police response vehicles lined up along Bourke Street, trams getting diverted left and right, and thousands of people gathering at the State Library. It’s become a fairly regular Sunday scene over the past couple of years, but it still gets me thinking about how we balance the right to protest with everyone else’s right to go about their day.