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Spent a chunk of my Sunday morning reading a thread on r/LocalLLaMA titled, more or less, “why do Americans lag so far behind in open LLMs”. The poster’s logic ran like this: DeepSeek, Kimi, GLM, MiniMax, the Chinese labs are shipping open weight models constantly, and the big American labs mostly aren’t. Shouldn’t that bother people more than it seems to? I don’t know the full …

Quiet month for model releases, loud month for everything around them. Opus 5.5 and Sonnet 5.5 turned up, both solid, neither surprising. Same context window, same pricing tier, a benchmark bump that Anthropic measured on its own scaffold so I’ll believe it once someone outside the building confirms it. Fine. Switch the defaults, move on. The thing that actually kept me up reading changelogs was Claude Code …

Saw a thread on r/auscorp this morning that stopped me mid-scroll. Someone posted that their colleague is quietly working two full-time remote jobs, software engineering gigs, no overlap in required hours, both employers apparently fine with it (or at least not actively looking). The original poster wasn’t outraged. If anything they sounded a bit envious, which, fair enough. What got me wasn’t the …

There’s a thread doing the rounds on r/AusFinance about the ban on card surcharges, and it’s one of those topics that looks simple from a distance and gets more interesting the longer you sit with it. The original post was blunt: why is everyone losing their minds over a 1% fee disappearing from the bottom of a coffee receipt? A $5 coffee already bakes in the beans, the milk, the rent, the wages. Why does …

I’ve been rationing my AI news intake lately, the way you ration anything that’s genuinely bad for you but also genuinely interesting. Most days it’s the same churn: a new model benchmark, a funding round, someone on X declaring the singularity is either three weeks away or a scam cooked up by venture capitalists. I scroll past most of it with the same flat interest I give cricket scores from a …

I’ve been chewing on something I read on r/artificial instead of doing anything productive with my evening, which is roughly how most of my AI curiosity ends up. Someone had gone through the actual system card for a new model release, not the press summary, the 30-page document nobody but the truly committed reads. Buried in it was a section on “sandbagging”: can the model deliberately underperform …

There’s a post doing the rounds on r/australia this morning, a young woman sharing a photo of her leg from a few years back, the scar left after they cut a melanoma in situ out of what had looked like an innocent freckle. She posts this every year, apparently, as a PSA. Get your skin checked. Don’t assume you’re too young. Don’t assume the mole is fine because it looks fine.

I’ve been dipping into r/AussieFrugal again, partly for the bargain tips, partly because it’s a good barometer of what’s actually annoying people at a household level. This week it wasn’t grocery prices or electricity bills that had people worked up. It was a bloke, forty years old, who has never needed a credit card in his life and now has to get one just so Steam and Apple will believe …

Fell down a Reddit hole yesterday, r/CleaningTips, of all places. Not my usual haunt, but a post caught my eye and I ended up reading the comments for longer than I’d like to admit. A cleaner, fairly new to the trade, had quoted $500 for a post-construction clean on a three-storey condo, plus $100 for the garage. Written quote, clear scope, homeowner signed off. Standard stuff. Then she got in there and found …

There’s a story doing the rounds this week that hasn’t got the attention it deserves, probably because “strata enforcement” is not a phrase that makes anyone’s pulse quicken. But stick with me, because it’s a genuinely infuriating bit of journalism, and it says a lot about how we do regulation in this state. The Age did a deep dive into Consumer Affairs Victoria’s handling of …