There is a particular rhythm to Australian internet pricing. The real price sits at some quietly outrageous number, a promotional price appears for six months, and then you either forget to switch or you switch, and the whole cycle begins again with a different provider. It is, in its own mundane way, a kind of performance art.

The current one worth knowing about: Origin Energy is offering their 500Mbps NBN plan for $54 a month for the first six months. New activations need to be in before 30 June, which is very soon. After the discount period, it jumps back to the standard rate, which is where the story gets less interesting.

Someone posted a graph this week. Model version number on the Y-axis, release date on the X-axis. The line goes up and to the right. The title called it “not quite exponential, but progress is progress.” It was a shitpost. A pretty good one.

The comments, predictably, split into three camps.

First, the people who got it immediately and just typed “lol.” Second, the people who genuinely started analysing the graph before realising the Y-axis was just sequential model numbers. Honest mistake, to be fair. I probably would have done the same. Third, and most entertainingly, the people who did not get it and then got very annoyed at the first group for saying they didn’t get it.

Been down a rabbit hole this week reading through a thread about self-hosting and CGNAT, and honestly, it’s one of those topics that sits right at the intersection of “deeply nerdy” and “genuinely important infrastructure that affects real people.” Bear with me if you’re not in the IT world — I’ll try to make this relatable.

For the uninitiated, CGNAT (Carrier-Grade NAT) is basically your ISP hiding your connection behind a shared IP address. Think of it like living in an apartment block where everyone shares the same street address — great for the landlord who doesn’t have to manage individual addresses, not so great if you want people to actually find your specific door. For those of us who like to self-host services at home — a personal media server, a game server, a home automation dashboard — CGNAT is an absolute pain in the neck.

So researchers have just announced a new fibre optic record that could theoretically allow 50 million movies to be streamed simultaneously through a single cable. Fifty million. My brain genuinely struggles to wrap itself around that number. The comment sections online were predictably full of jokes — “finally, I can watch all the Saw movies at once” — and honestly, fair enough. Sometimes the absurdity of a headline just demands a bit of silliness.