Someone posted this week about being locked out of their Reddit account entirely until they handed over photo ID to a third-party verification service. Not locked out of adult content. Locked out of everything. Account settings. The ability to delete their own account. The works. Just a popup from a company called Persona, sitting there blocking the door.

That’s a fairly significant thing to happen without much fanfare.

The immediate response from a lot of people in the thread was “just use a VPN,” which is technically correct and also completely misses the point. A VPN is a workaround. It is not a solution to a corporation deciding it can hold your own account hostage until you hand over biometric-adjacent data to a third party you’ve never heard of and didn’t agree to do business with.

Someone posted about eating at David’s Master Pot on Swanston Street for effectively one cent. Not a typo. One cent. The trick: stack an EatClub discount against DoorDash’s “Going Out” credit feature, which reimburses you for dining receipts you upload, then roll that credit into grocery orders. The loop closes neatly. Eat cheap, get reimbursed, buy Aldi staples. Repeat.

My first reaction was genuine admiration. That is a tidy piece of systems thinking. Finding the gap where two separate promotional mechanics overlap and extracting value from the seam. There is something almost elegant about it, the way a well-timed parry in a Souls game feels elegant. You are not cheating. You are just paying close attention to how the rules actually work.

Elon Musk posted something this week about xAI being “only 3 years old,” apparently as a defence of Grok’s current standing in the AI market. The implication being: give it time, it’s just getting started.

This is a strange argument to make in a field where three years is basically a geological epoch. The models people are actually using, Claude, GPT, Gemini, have each had major releases in the last few months. If anything, three years of runway with Musk-level capital expenditure and not being at the frontier is a concerning sign, not a reassuring one.

So Plex has basically killed the Lifetime Pass. The price jumped to $250 USD before they stopped selling it altogether, and the online discourse has predictably split into two camps: people saying “just switch to Jellyfin, it’s easy,” and people who’ve actually tried to switch everyone in their family to Jellyfin.

Those are very different groups.

I’ve been following this closely because I’m in the second group. I run a small Plex setup that my wife and teenage daughter use, plus a couple of extended family members who I foolishly told about it years ago. So “just use Jellyfin” is a fine answer for me, sitting here at my desk with a terminal window open. It is a substantially less fine answer for my mother-in-law, who uses a mid-range Samsung TV and whose entire model of computing is “press the button that makes the thing happen.”

There’s a particular moment in a race where the person who’s been comfortably in front realises they’re not anymore. They don’t necessarily slow down. Someone else just got faster, and they were looking the wrong way when it happened.

That’s roughly where we are with ChatGPT and Claude.

The numbers doing the rounds this week are genuinely striking. Anthropic’s annualised revenue run rate hit $30 billion in early April, ahead of OpenAI’s $24 to $25 billion at the same point. More U.S. businesses paid for Claude than ChatGPT in April, apparently for the first time ever. Eight of the Fortune 10 are now Claude customers. That last one is the one I keep coming back to.

There’s a piece doing the rounds this week claiming Meta is dying. The comments underneath it are, predictably, a mess. Half the people are dunking on the headline without reading past it. The other half are pointing out, correctly, that a company pulling $200 billion in annual ad revenue is not exactly on life support.

Both groups are sort of right, which is the annoying thing.

The article isn’t really claiming Zuckerberg will be selling pencils on Swanston Street by Christmas. The actual argument is quieter and more interesting than that: that Meta is showing the early signs of a slow institutional rot. Turning the screws on advertisers. Cramming more ads into already bloated feeds. Daily active users down for the first time, even if only by a couple of million and even if Meta blames it on Iranian traffic. The argument is that these are the moves of a company that has stopped growing and started harvesting.

So AMD apparently just dropped some news at their AI Dev Day about releasing their own in-house Ryzen AI 395 mini PC box, coming in June. And the tech corners of the internet are… cautiously underwhelmed? Which, honestly, is a pretty reasonable reaction when you dig into what it actually is.

The short version: it’s a 395 with 128GB unified memory. Same as what you can already buy from a dozen different vendors right now. No extra bandwidth, no architectural magic, just AMD putting their own name on the box. One person who was actually at the event confirmed it directly with an engineer on the floor — just a standard 395 system, nothing more.

There’s a screenshot doing the rounds on social media lately — someone flexing a $500-a-day Claude API bill as proof that building your own SaaS with AI is smarter than paying $49 a month for an existing product. The original post frames it as some kind of revolutionary insight. “The End of Software,” they declared. I’ll admit, when I first saw it, my reaction was somewhere between genuine curiosity and mild secondhand embarrassment.

So I’ve been down a rabbit hole this week, sparked by a thread I stumbled across where someone had one of those “wait, how much am I actually spending on subscriptions?” moments. You know the feeling — you sit down, add it all up, and suddenly you’re staring at a number that makes you question your life choices. Netflix, Disney+, Prime, Spotify, maybe a Binge or Paramount+ thrown in for good measure… it adds up faster than you’d think.

An Italian court just ruled that Netflix unlawfully increased its prices, and consumers could be looking at refunds of up to 500 euros. Netflix, predictably, said they’ll appeal. And somewhere in a boardroom, I imagine a very expensive suit nodded slowly and said “of course we will.”

The online discussion this sparked has been fascinating — and honestly, a bit cathartic. Because a lot of us have been quietly stewing about this for years.

There’s a particular kind of frustration that builds up slowly when you’re dealing with the modern web. You need to do something simple — resize a photo, strip some metadata, blur a face — and suddenly you’re being asked to sign up for a free trial, verify your email, and “unlock premium features” just to do what should take thirty seconds. It’s exhausting. And it’s gotten worse, not better.

So when I stumbled across a project this week — essentially Stirling-PDF but built for images — I found myself genuinely interested. The pitch is clean: one Docker container, browser-based, everything runs locally, your files never leave your machine. Thirty-plus tools covering the usual suspects like resize, crop, rotate, compress, and convert, but also some more interesting stuff like background removal, face and licence plate blurring, OCR, and object erasing. The developer is building it openly, asking for feedback, and has explicitly said they’re not interested in making it another “AI-wrapped gimmick or subscription trap.”

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.

I’ve been following a fascinating discussion about Minecraft server performance lately, and it’s got me thinking about something that frustrates me to no end: the way we’ve been conditioned to believe that cloud services are always the answer, even when they’re not.

Someone ran some tests comparing Minecraft chunk generation speeds across different setups - from expensive Hetzner cloud instances to a decade-old CPU that’s barely worth anything. The results? That old hardware was holding its own remarkably well against modern cloud offerings that cost significantly more per month.

The latest episode in our ongoing political soap opera features former President Trump dramatically announcing he’s getting rid of his Tesla. While this might seem like just another celebrity breakup story, it perfectly encapsulates everything wrong with our current political and tech landscape.

Remember when Trump was promoting Tesla at the White House like it was the greatest thing since sliced bread? “Everything’s computer!” he exclaimed, in what became an instant meme. Now, merely months later, we’re witnessing what happens when two massive egos inevitably collide.

The other day, while setting up a new development environment for work, I stumbled across an interesting discussion about self-hosting email servers. It brought back memories of my own attempts at email independence over the years, and the subsequent frustrations that followed.

Running your own email server used to be a badge of honor in the tech community. Back in the late 90s and early 2000s, it was almost a rite of passage for system administrators and tech enthusiasts. The technical challenges were significant but manageable - configuring Sendmail or Postfix, setting up spam filters, and maintaining proper DNS records.

The tech world is buzzing with discussions about Plex’s recent changes to their remote streaming policies, and it’s sparked quite the debate in various online communities. This latest move has finally pushed me to do something I’ve been contemplating for a while - making the switch to Jellyfin for my home media server needs.

Going through the online discussions, it’s fascinating to see how this situation mirrors so many other cases where proprietary software gradually tightens its grip on users. The story always seems to follow the same pattern: start with a great product, build a loyal user base, then slowly introduce more restrictions and monetization.

Looking at the latest browser drama unfolding, I’m getting flashbacks to the Internet Explorer days. Microsoft’s recent move to disable uBlock Origin and other extensions in Edge feels like history repeating itself, but with a fresh coat of corporate paint.

The tech landscape has shifted dramatically since those early browser wars. Edge, built on Chromium, was actually becoming a decent browser. But Microsoft seems determined to follow Google down the path of prioritizing advertising revenue over user experience and privacy.

The tech world is buzzing with DeepSeek’s latest open-source contributions, and this time they’ve unveiled something that’s particularly close to my developer heart - a new distributed file system called 3FS and a data processing framework named smallpond. Having spent countless hours wrestling with various storage solutions throughout my career, this announcement genuinely excites me.

Remember the early days of big data when Hadoop’s HDFS was revolutionary? Those were simpler times when spinning disks were still the norm. Now, DeepSeek has introduced a file system specifically designed for modern hardware - leveraging SSDs and RDMA networks to handle the intense demands of AI workloads.

The digital world never ceases to amaze me with its peculiar approach to seemingly simple problems. Discord’s latest feature rollout - the ability to “ignore” users - has got me thinking about how we handle uncomfortable social situations in our increasingly online world.

Remember the good old days when ignoring someone meant literally pretending they weren’t there at the pub? Now we need software features to achieve the same effect, and somehow, they still don’t quite get it right. Discord’s new ignore feature joins their existing block feature in what feels like a masterclass in unnecessarily complicated solutions.

Remember when hosting your own services was considered a bit nerdy and perhaps unnecessary? Well, times have certainly changed. The self-hosting movement has gained serious momentum lately, and it’s not just tech enthusiasts jumping on board anymore.

Scrolling through this week’s self-hosting newsletter, I noticed an interesting trend emerging. More folks are moving away from corporate-controlled platforms and embracing self-hosted alternatives. The fascinating part isn’t just the technology itself, but the growing awareness of digital sovereignty among everyday users.

The recent buzz around self-hosted alternatives to Google services has got me thinking about my own digital autonomy journey. Don’t get me wrong - this isn’t about bashing Google. Their services are polished and convenient, but there’s something deeply satisfying about taking control of your digital life.

My home server, humming away in the study, has become quite the Swiss Army knife of services. The star of the show lately has been Immich, a remarkably capable alternative to Google Photos. What started as a curious experiment has turned into my primary photo management solution. The face recognition feature works surprisingly well, even on my modest hardware, and the ability to share libraries between family members is brilliant.

The tech world never ceases to amaze me with its creative innovations. Recently, I stumbled upon an fascinating open-source project - a self-hosted ebook-to-audiobook converter that supports voice cloning across more than 1,100 languages. What caught my attention wasn’t just the impressive technical specs, but the delightfully chaotic community response, particularly the idea of having Kermit the Frog narrating bedtime stories!

Working in DevOps, I’m particularly impressed by the Docker implementation. Docker containers have become the go-to solution for deploying complex applications, and for good reason. They provide that perfect isolation we all need when testing new software. Though I must say, the image size (nearly 6GB) made me raise an eyebrow - that’s quite a hefty download for my NBN connection!

The recent surge in porch pirates and the general desire to keep our homes secure has many of us looking into security cameras. But the market has become a minefield of subscription-based services, turning what should be a one-time purchase into yet another monthly drain on our bank accounts.

Yesterday, while browsing through various online discussions about security cameras, I noticed a clear trend emerging. The community seems to be gravitating towards two main contenders in the subscription-free space: Eufy and Reolink. What caught my attention wasn’t just the number of recommendations, but the consistent praise for their reliability and feature sets.

Looking through my desk drawer the other day, I found my old iPhone 11 gathering dust alongside various charging cables and forgotten adapters. This discovery coincided perfectly with an interesting post I spotted about someone transforming their old OnePlus phone into a home server - complete with what looked like an entire tube of silicone adhesive holding it together.

The specs were impressive: 8GB RAM, 256GB storage, and an 8-core CPU. That’s more powerful than many entry-level servers, and it was just sitting there, destined for landfill. While the setup looked a bit, shall we say, “enthusiastic” with its liberal use of adhesive (prompting some rather colorful comments online), the concept is brilliant.