There’s a photo doing the rounds comparing the West Gate Freeway approach in 2004 versus today, and honestly, it’s sparked some interesting reflections about what we’ve actually achieved in two decades of infrastructure development. The punchline? Still just four lanes heading onto the Bridge itself, even with all the fancy new tunnel work.

Now, before anyone jumps down my throat, I’m not saying the West Gate Tunnel project was a complete waste. Far from it, actually. But there’s something deeply frustrating about spending billions on infrastructure that, at its core, still has the same fundamental bottleneck it had twenty years ago.

I’ve been following the age verification debate for a while now, and honestly, every time I think it can’t get more dystopian, something new comes along to prove me wrong. This week’s revelation about Persona – the age verification vendor that’s been exposed for running what essentially amounts to a comprehensive surveillance operation – is both shocking and entirely predictable.

For those who haven’t heard, researchers discovered that Persona’s system doesn’t just verify your age. Oh no, that would be far too reasonable. Instead, it performs 269 distinct verification checks, runs facial recognition against watchlists and politically exposed persons, screens “adverse media” across 14 categories including terrorism and espionage, and assigns risk and similarity scores. They collect and can retain for up to three years your IP addresses, browser fingerprints, device fingerprints, government ID numbers, phone numbers, names, faces, and a whole battery of “selfie” analytics.

There’s something deeply absurd about watching billionaire CEOs throw tantrums over YouTube reviews. Yet here we are in 2026, and apparently Elon Musk has decided to give tech YouTuber Marques Brownlee (MKBHD) the silent treatment because he sold his Cybertruck and preferred a Rivian instead.

Let me get this straight: a company worth over a trillion dollars is ghosting one of the most influential tech reviewers on the planet because he exercised consumer choice. The pettiness is almost impressive in its scale.

I stumbled across someone’s GitHub project the other day that got me thinking about the peculiar challenges of raising kids in 2025. A developer built an entire approval system for YouTube because they wanted their child to access educational content without getting sucked into the algorithm’s vortex of brain rot. It’s called BrainRotGuard, and it’s exactly what it sounds like – a parental gateway where every video request goes through Telegram for approval before the kid can watch it.

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.”