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Saw a post the other day from someone who’d taken a photo of their cat exploring the laundry, only to notice, for the first time, that the star rating sticker was still on the washing machine. Years of assuming she was one of the tidy, sticker-removing Australians. Turns out no. The evidence was right there behind the cat. I liked this post more than I probably should have, because it’s such a small, …

I read a story this week about a woman in the US who found a rotisserie chicken in the back of her car. Not that day’s chicken. Not yesterday’s. A week old. Sealed in bags, never leaked, and somehow still managed to turn her entire vehicle into a crime scene. She wasn’t the one who left it there, which is its own small mystery she’s apparently not allowed to solve out loud due to subreddit …

Someone posted a photo yesterday morning of the sky over Melbourne looking like the whole city was ablaze. Deep orange, streaked with cloud, the kind of colour that makes you check the CFA Vic app before you check the time. Turned out to be a fairly spectacular sunrise, nothing more sinister than that. But the comments were the best bit: half the thread trying to work out where the photo was taken, someone guessing …

Saw this one and had to put my coffee down for a second. The CEO of Flock Safety, the company that’s papered half of America (and increasingly here) with automated license plate readers, called activists protesting his product “terroristic.” Then, when the backlash rolled in, he apologised. Sure he did. I’ve watched enough corporate apologies over the years to know the shape of them. This one …

Spent a good chunk of the weekend reading about SpaceX’s stock losing a trillion dollars in valuation in a month, and I kept coming back to the same question: how do you lose something you never actually had? That’s not a rhetorical trick, someone in the comments asked it plainly, and it’s a fair one. A trillion dollars of “value” evaporating doesn’t mean a trillion dollars existed …

Someone on a forum posted a photo of an old home server rig this week. A little VIA Pico-ITX board, cobbled together, running Apache and an email server and XMPP and, for reasons the owner admitted were “just for funsies,” pygopherd. All of it pushed out to the world through 384k upstream DSL, later upgraded to a blistering 768k. Ran from 2008 to about 2013. The comments were half admiration, half people …

There’s a graph doing the rounds again, this time with a Chinese model called Kimi K3 sitting near the top of an arena leaderboard, allegedly outscoring models that American labs spent months telling us were too dangerous to release without careful safety review. Someone in the comments put it well: the existential danger was never really the AI. It was the competition. I’ve watched this cycle a few times …

I got my eyes tested a couple of years back at one of the big chains, the kind with a name you’d recognise from a shopping strip anywhere in the country. Decent enough experience, except the bit at the end where the optometrist pivoted, almost mid-sentence, into asking if I’d considered a second pair for “screen use.” I hadn’t. I still don’t own one. But I remember thinking, at the …

Saw a post the other day: bloke messages his telco to cancel, walks away with a $45 a month discount for six months. Comments section immediately splits into two camps. One camp says nice work, keep doing that every six months forever. The other camp says why are you still with Optus, and lists, in forensic detail, every way that company has ruined their week, their credit rating, or their faith in humanity.

Saw a video this week of a soft robot from Keio University, basically a helium blimp shaped like a friendly whale, that follows you around, nudges you awake, reminds you about things. People online are calling them “air whales” and honestly, that’s the correct name and I won’t hear another. My first reaction was pure delight. My second reaction, about four seconds later, was: where does the …