Left 4
More.

There’s a thread doing the rounds that I’ve been mulling over for a few days now, and it touches on something that genuinely gets under my skin — the intersection of bad management, AI-generated nonsense, and the quiet erosion of worker trust. Someone posted about receiving a fairly formal email from their manager flagging “patterns” in their sick leave. On the surface, sounds reasonable …

There’s a phrase that gets thrown around a lot in Australian political discourse — “the lucky country.” Donald Horne coined it back in 1964, and here’s the thing most people miss: he meant it as a criticism. His full quote was that Australia is “a lucky country run mainly by second rate people who share its luck.” Over sixty years later, it feels like we’ve leaned so hard …

There’s a post doing the rounds that I’ve been sitting with for a few days now, written by a mechanic who makes a genuinely unsettling argument. The trades aren’t as safe from automation as everyone keeps saying — not because robots are about to master the complexity of crawling under a seized engine, but because the work itself will be redesigned to meet the robots where they already are. And …

So Richard Dawkins spent three days chatting with Claude, named his instance “Claudia,” and has now declared her conscious. I’ll be honest — when I first read this, I nearly choked on my latte. The irony here is so thick you could cut it with a knife. This is the same man who spent decades skewering creationists for their “argument from personal incredulity” — the logical fallacy where …

There’s something deeply exhausting about Pauline Hanson still being a thing. I was in high school when she first crawled out of her Ipswich fish and chip shop and onto the national political stage, and here we are, decades later, still talking about her. People I went to uni with have had entire careers, raised kids, and retired, and Pauline Hanson is still out there, microphone in hand, telling us she …

There’s been a good discussion floating around online lately about chicken drumsticks, and honestly, it hit home. With grocery prices still being what they are — and anyone who’s done a Coles or Woolies run recently knows exactly what I’m talking about — drumsticks have quietly become one of the best value proteins you can throw in your trolley. A 2kg bag for under ten bucks? In this economy, …

There’s a thread going around that caught my eye this week, and it’s one of those situations where the practical problem on the surface gives way to something much bigger underneath. Someone came home to find two unhoused men had sheltered in the small vestibule of their apartment overnight. The men left without incident, but the smell they left behind has been absolutely brutal — weeks of trying various …

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 …

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 …

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 …