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I’ve been reading about a US congressman trying to defund a company called Flock Safety, and their network of automatic licence plate readers. Thomas Massie, a libertarian Republican from Kentucky, wants to strip federal funding from any local government using them. No bill text yet, just a press release. But the discussion around it is more interesting than the bill itself. We don’t have Flock here, not …

Saw a story out of California this week that made me put my coffee down. One town’s automatic licence plate readers, the Flock system, misread plates in 71% of the alerts sent to police. Not a rounding error. Not a bad week. Seven out of ten times, wrong. I work in tech. I’ve spent twenty-odd years watching systems get shipped before they’re ready, watching “good enough for now” quietly …

Someone posted their homelab setup this week: a repo full of Kubernetes config, KEDA doing the heavy lifting, nine self-hosted apps scaling to zero overnight and waking on the first request. Neat idea. The comments turned it into a small war about whether any of it was worth doing, which is the most homelab thing that could possibly happen. I’ve got a much less impressive setup at home. A Raspberry Pi doing …

I check the LocalLLaMA subreddit the way some people check the footy scores. Rationed, but regular. This week it delivered a proper spectacle: DeepSeek quietly updated their Flash model, benchmarks came out, and half the thread devolved into disbelief. A 162GB model apparently going toe to toe with GLM 5.2, which is nearly ten times its size. Someone posted a chart. Then someone else posted a bigger chart. By the …

Saw a thread this week that’s been rattling around my head longer than it probably deserves to. Someone posted about starting a new job in insurance, noticing a coworker occasionally putting on a pair of Meta Ray-Bans, scrolling through the CRM for a few minutes, then taking them off again. No proof of anything. Just a vague, uneasy feeling. Should they say something? I read the whole thread over batch brew on …

Saw a stat doing the rounds this week that stopped me mid-scroll. Fewer than 15% of full-time Australian workers earn $150,000 or more. The average full-time salary sits around $110k, the median closer to $90k. I had to read it twice, not because I doubted it, but because it doesn’t match the vibe you get from certain corners of the internet. Spend enough time on LinkedIn, or the finance side of Reddit, or even …

Someone sent me the clip of the Musk interview with The Economist on Sunday morning, the way people send you things now, with no context, just a link and a “have you seen this.” I watched it while the coffee was still too hot to drink. Worth doing, if only for the bit at the end where he predicts AI and robots will make money essentially meaningless within twenty years, then in the next breath predicts …

Someone posted a link to their own academic paper this week, analysing two decades of open-source commit data, and it’s been sitting in the back of my head since. The finding: big, mature projects grow at a steady, boring rate no matter what tech hype is happening around them. Smaller projects are chaotic, prone to bursts and stalls. And even with LLMs in the mix through early 2025, the mature projects …

There’s a story doing the rounds again about dental finally getting folded into Medicare, and I’ve noticed the same thing happens every time: a flicker of hope, a lot of “believe it when I see it,” and then quietly, nothing. My father-in-law used to say the same thing about the East Coast fast rail every federal election for about twenty years. Some promises age like wine. This one’s …

Mark 27 July 2026 in the calendar. Actually, don’t just mark it, set a second alarm for 1:55pm, because at 2pm sharp every compatible phone in the country is going to shriek at once. It’s the national test of AusAlert, the new emergency warning system, and I’ll admit my first reaction was mild interest followed almost immediately by “right, so that’s the day I need to remember to put my …