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The Art of the Funny Number Plate: Melbourne's Rolling Comedy Show

There’s something uniquely Melbourne about spotting a funny number plate while crawling through traffic. Someone posted a photo to the Melbourne subreddit recently that had people absolutely losing it — a personalised plate spotted crossing the West Gate Bridge that was, let’s just say, anatomically suggestive. The comments section quickly turned into its own comedy show, and honestly, it made my …

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When the Watchers Won't Stop Watching: Police, Surveillance, and the Stalking Problem

There’s a story doing the rounds at the moment that has been sitting uncomfortably in my head all week. Researchers reviewing media reports in the US have identified at least 14 cases where police officers used automated licence plate reader (ALPR) systems to stalk romantic interests — current partners, exes, even strangers who happened to catch their eye. And the kicker? That number is almost certainly a …

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Meta's Ray-Ban Glasses and the People We Never Think About

There’s a story doing the rounds this week that I can’t stop thinking about, and it’s not really about the glasses. Well, it starts with the glasses — Meta’s Ray-Ban smart glasses recording people in bathrooms, in intimate moments, capturing banking details — all of it being piped through to AI trainers who were then fired when they had the audacity to speak up about it. Over a thousand …

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CopyFail: Why This Linux Kernel Vuln Should Actually Make You Stop and Think

So there’s a fresh Linux kernel vulnerability doing the rounds this week — dubbed CopyFail — and if you’re running any Linux-based systems at home or at work, it’s worth taking a few minutes to understand what’s actually going on before you either panic-patch everything or, worse, shrug and do nothing. I’ve been following the discussion online and it’s been… instructive, in …

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Cursor's Security Mess, Claude's New Effort Levels, and Why Managed Agents Actually Excites Me

April was a big month. Possibly too big. Between a critical RCE in Cursor, Anthropic shipping Opus 4.7 with three silent breaking changes, and the “ultra prefix” commercial model crystallising into something real, there’s a lot to unpack. I’m going to focus on the three things I can’t stop thinking about. The Cursor CVE Should Have Been Front-Page News Let’s start here, because …

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AMD's In-House Ryzen AI 395 Box: Exciting News or Just Another Mini PC?

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 …

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What Are We Actually Worth? The Great Australian Salary Transparency Debate

There’s a thread doing the rounds on Reddit at the moment where a digital marketer — four and a half years out of uni, working at a decent-sized company — asked a pretty simple question: how much are other marketers earning? They mentioned they’d previously been “roasted” for their $85k salary and wanted some honest benchmarks. What followed was exactly the kind of chaotic, occasionally …

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Renewables Are Actually Working — So Why Does My Power Bill Still Hurt?

There’s been some genuinely good news floating around this week, and given how relentlessly grim the news cycle has been, I want to actually sit with it for a moment before the cynicism kicks in. AEMO — the Australian Energy Market Operator — has released data showing that power prices dropped 12 per cent in the first quarter of 2026, driven by record levels of wind, solar, and the rapid expansion of grid-scale …

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Who's Actually Responsible? A 1979 IBM Manual and the Question We Keep Dodging

Someone shared a page from an IBM training manual from 1979 recently, and it’s been rattling around in my head ever since. The gist of it was simple: computers can process information, but a human being must always be accountable for the decisions made from that information. Seems reasonable, right? Almost obvious, even. And yet here we are, 46 years later, and that principle feels more like a quaint relic than …

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AI as a Mirror: When the Chatbot Says What Four Years of Therapy Couldn't

There’s a post doing the rounds that stopped me mid-scroll this week. Someone shared how a ten-minute conversation with an AI chatbot gave them more closure on their divorce than four years of therapy. And the responses ranged from genuinely moving to deeply cynical, with a lot of interesting territory in between. My first instinct was the sceptical one — it just told you what you wanted to hear. That’s a …

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