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Someone on r/AusFinance posted their home insurance renewal yesterday and it set off a stampede of people comparing notes like survivors swapping stories after a natural disaster, which, in a roundabout way, is exactly what this is about. The numbers are the kind of thing you read twice. One person’s premium jumped 35 percent. Not once, they went back and checked, it’s jumped roughly 35 percent every year …

Spent a chunk of my Sunday morning down a rabbit hole that started with r/singularity and ended with me reading a Millennium Prize problem statement I barely understood, which is roughly how most of my weekends go these days. The short version: OpenAI apparently threw a swarm of AI agents, something like ten thousand of them, at the Navier-Stokes existence and smoothness problem. That’s one of the seven Clay …

Saw a headline yesterday that stopped me mid-scroll: an AI-developed drug appeared to make patients biologically younger in a clinical trial. Mid-stage, small sample, plenty of caveats buried in paragraph four, but still. That’s a hell of a sentence to read on a Tuesday. My first reaction was the same one I get whenever a longevity story pops up: genuine fascination, followed almost immediately by a low hum of …

Spent a chunk of my Sunday morning down a Reddit rabbit hole on r/artificial instead of doing the thing I actually promised my daughter I’d help her with (a maths assignment, since you ask, and no, ChatGPT wasn’t allowed to touch it). Someone had posted about burning through $200 of API credits on a new “agentic” tool, expecting the AGI moment, and getting three broken outputs out of four for …

Canberra’s floated another one this week: opt-out laws for social media algorithms, letting people switch off the recommendation engine and go back to a plain chronological feed. Platforms would also be on the hook for “minimising and preventing harm.” It’s the kind of headline that makes you nod along at first, then start picking at the threads once you actually think about how these things …

Someone on r/AussieFrugal did something I wish more people would do before they open their mouths about grocery prices: they actually priced three dinners, ingredient by ingredient, at both Coles and Woolworths, and showed their working. Butter chicken, beef lasagna, chana masala. Full spreadsheet, per-serve cost, the lot. It’s the kind of post that makes you sit up a bit, because it’s rare to see someone …

I went looking for something light on r/CleaningTips this morning. Stain removal, maybe a satisfying before-and-after with a stainless steel sink. Instead I found a post that’s been sitting with me all day, and it wasn’t about stains at all. A woman wrote in about her husband, who’s been fighting severe depression for most of the year. She wasn’t asking how to fix him. She was asking how to …

Saw a story this morning that’s been chewing on me all day. Yarra council was set to install a naloxone dispensing machine in North Richmond, one of those vending-machine-style units that hands out the overdose reversal drug for free, no questions asked. Then the mayor, Stephen Jolly, stepped in and got the location scrapped. He’d rather it went somewhere else, apparently near the safe injecting room …

There’s a post doing the rounds on r/privacy this morning with a headline that made me laugh out loud: “Turns out Brits would quite like their private messages to stay private.” Nearly a thousand upvotes, which tells you something about the appetite for stating the obvious. Apparently the UK government ran an ad campaign trying to soften people up for chat control style legislation, and the public …

I’ve been half-following this story about the White House launching a little arcade of parody games to promote deportation policy, and my first reaction wasn’t outrage. It was something closer to secondhand embarrassment. Someone in a government office, presumably paid a public salary, sat down and made a knock-off Tetris. Not a clever one. A bad one, by the sound of it, where the lines don’t even …