There’s something deeply unsettling about watching evidence vanish in real-time. Yesterday, the US Department of Justice accidentally published documents from the Epstein files that were… let’s just say, significantly more revealing than they intended. Within hours, the document was gone from the government website. But here’s the thing about the internet in 2025 – nothing ever truly disappears, does it?

I’ve been working in IT for over two decades now, and one of the first things you learn is that data deletion is rarely absolute. There are backups, archives, and in this case, thousands of people who downloaded those PDFs the moment they appeared. The DOJ’s fumble – whether intentional or through sheer incompetence – has created a situation where the evidence is simultaneously everywhere and nowhere. It’s on hard drives around the world, but officially, according to the US government, it was never meant to exist in the public sphere.

I’ve been running Immich for a while now as my self-hosted photo management solution, and it’s been brilliant. For those who haven’t heard of it, Immich is essentially an open-source alternative to Google Photos that you can run on your own hardware. No subscription fees, no cloud storage limits, and most importantly, complete control over your data. It’s exactly the kind of project that makes the open-source ecosystem so valuable.

I’ve been watching the AI space with that peculiar mix of fascination and dread that’s become my default setting these days. This week, something genuinely interesting caught my attention: LingBot-World, an open-source world model that’s apparently giving Google’s Genie 3 a run for its money. And before you roll your eyes at yet another “AGI is just around the corner!” proclamation, stick with me here.

The technical details are impressive enough – 16 frames per second, emergent spatial memory that can track objects for up to 60 seconds after they’ve left the frame, and the ability to handle complex physics simulations. But what really got me thinking wasn’t the specs. It was the fact that this is fully open source.

I’ve been mulling over a theory about inflation that’s been doing the rounds online, and it’s kept me awake at night more than the humidity we’ve been having lately. The core idea is simple but deeply unsettling: our main tool for fighting inflation – interest rate hikes – might be fundamentally broken because of how wealth has concentrated in our economy.

Picture this scenario: A 25-year-old takes out a $950k mortgage with a 5% deposit. That’s nearly a million dollars of new credit, created essentially from thin air, transferred to a 55-year-old investor who’s just cashed out $700k in property profit. That older investor? They’re not sitting on that money. They’re buying a new car, doing renovations, booking overseas trips. They’re spending like there’s no tomorrow, because for them, there basically isn’t – they’ve already won the game.

There’s been a lot of chatter online lately about Kimi-K2.5, an open-source AI model that’s supposedly beating Claude Opus 4.5 in various benchmarks, particularly in coding tasks. The reactions have been… well, let’s just say they’ve been interesting.

The conversation reminded me of watching my daughter study for her VCE exams. She’d ace practice tests but then stress about whether that actually meant she’d perform on the day. Turns out, AI models face a similar problem – performing well on benchmarks doesn’t always translate to real-world capability.

There’s something quietly significant happening in France right now that probably won’t make much noise outside tech circles, but it’s worth paying attention to. The French government is rolling out their own video conferencing platform, essentially ditching Zoom and Microsoft Teams in favour of a homegrown solution they’re calling “Visio” (yes, the same name as Microsoft’s diagramming tool, which is either brilliantly cheeky or a massive oversight depending on your perspective).

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about how I approach weeknight cooking, and honestly, it’s a bit of a mess. There’s this post I came across from someone in WA who’s managed to prepare 26 meals for about $55 – roughly $2.10 per serve – through bulk meal prepping and strategic shopping. And look, I’ll be upfront: my initial reaction was a mix of genuine admiration and mild defensiveness about my own kitchen habits.

Someone on Reddit sparked an interesting discussion the other day about their manager’s Jekyll-and-Hyde routine during Teams meetings. Camera on? All smiles, warmth, and “how’s your day been, guys?” Camera off? Stone cold silence, even when sitting right next to them in the office. The original poster seemed genuinely baffled by this behaviour, wondering if they were dealing with some kind of corporate narcissist.

Reading through the thread, I found myself nodding along with most of the responses. This isn’t narcissism – it’s just the exhausting reality of modern professional life, particularly for introverts who’ve climbed into management roles.

The October unemployment figures dropped this week, and predictably, the finance forums went into meltdown mode. The headline number came in at 4.4%, with the seasonally adjusted figure at 4.3%. Markets wobbled, someone joked it was barely “a light after dinner fart” (which, honestly, is the most Australian market commentary I’ve seen in ages), and within minutes, the usual chorus began: “RIP rate cuts.”

Here’s the thing that’s been getting under my skin lately – we’ve collectively become obsessed with interest rate cuts. Not just interested, not just hopeful, but genuinely dependent on them happening. It’s like we’ve built our entire economic psychology around the Reserve Bank coming to our rescue, and frankly, it’s a bit concerning.

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about a peculiar project someone shared online—a script that uses a local AI model to generate fake Twitch chat comments while you work on your computer. At first glance, it sounds utterly absurd. Why would anyone want a bunch of simulated internet strangers commenting on their screen? But the more I sat with this idea, the more fascinating it became.

The concept is brilliantly simple: you run a vision-language model (like Gemma) locally on your machine, it watches your screen, and it generates chat messages that mimic the chaotic energy of a live Twitch stream. Someone suggested having it roast your code while you program, which is both hilarious and slightly masochistic. Imagine fixing a bug at 2 AM while an AI tells you your variable names look like they were chosen by a random number generator. It’s the digital equivalent of pair programming with a sarcastic mate who never sleeps.