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The Meeting Room Power Play Nobody Wants to Admit Exists

There’s a particular kind of workplace theatre that never quite makes it into the onboarding materials. You learn it the hard way, usually while standing in a corridor holding a laptop, watching people who absolutely know what time it is pretend they don’t. Someone posted about this recently and it landed with me. They had a room booked, a presentation to give, twenty people waiting. The room was occupied …

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Strata Fees: The Mystery Box You're Paying For Every Quarter

There’s a particular kind of frustration that comes from paying for something you don’t understand. Not outrage, just a slow, grinding sense that someone somewhere is relying on your inertia. That’s the feeling a lot of apartment owners seem to be having right now, judging by the conversations doing the rounds online. Someone put up a post about their strata levies climbing 30% since COVID, with …

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The Clumsybot and the Vending Machine We Already Have

There’s a video doing the rounds of a humanoid robot in what looks like a retail store, fumbling a shelf retrieval and making a bit of a mess. The kid nearby looks delighted. The internet, predictably, lost its mind. The comments split pretty cleanly into two camps. One camp found it charming, almost endearing, the robot equivalent of a new employee knocking over a display on their first day. The other camp …

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Cursor's CVE-2026-26268, Claude Code's Dynamic Workflows, and Why Google Antigravity's Launch Was a Mess

May was a big month. Too big, arguably. Let me just talk about the things I actually care about. Update Cursor. Do It Now. I’ll lead with this because it’s the most urgent thing in the notes: CVE-2026-26268, rated 9.9 critical by NVD, affected Cursor versions prior to 2.5. The attack surface is uncomfortable to think about. Clone a malicious repository, let the AI agent start doing its autonomous Git …

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Cognitive Debt: The Bill We're Running Up Without Noticing

There’s a concept doing the rounds at the moment called cognitive debt, and it’s been sitting in the back of my head for a few days now. The idea is straightforward. Tech debt is what happens when you cut corners on code quality to ship faster, and then spend the next year paying for it in maintenance hell. Cognitive debt is what happens when you outsource the thinking itself. You ship the thing, it …

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What Jodi Knott's Family Wants Us to See

I didn’t want to write about this. I sat with it for a couple of days first, which is about as long as I can manage before the pressure of having thoughts about something forces me to put them somewhere. Jodi Knott. A woman in mental health crisis, off her medication, trying to get help. What she got instead was an hour of sustained, deliberate cruelty from two NSW police officers who then sent the footage …

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The One Cent Meal and the Question Nobody Wants to Answer

Someone posted about eating at David’s Master Pot on Swanston Street for effectively one cent. Not a typo. One cent. The trick: stack an EatClub discount against DoorDash’s “Going Out” credit feature, which reimburses you for dining receipts you upload, then roll that credit into grocery orders. The loop closes neatly. Eat cheap, get reimbursed, buy Aldi staples. Repeat. My first reaction was …

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The Weight of Other People's Things

Someone posted photos of their home online recently, asking whether it qualified as a hoarder’s house. They’re 21. They grew up there. Their grandmother had dementia and was on oxygen for years, fighting with their mum through the nights. Caretakers came and went. Depression set in. The house accumulated. And now they’re the one left holding it. Reading through the thread, I noticed a lot of people …

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When Melbourne Looks Like a Video Game

Someone posted a photo to the Melbourne subreddit this week that stopped me mid-scroll. It was taken just as power was being restored to the CBD after an outage, and it looks, genuinely, like concept art for a game that hasn’t been made yet. Wet streets. Neon reflecting off everything. That particular quality of light you only get when half the city is dark and the other half is suddenly, violently bright …

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Your Phone Is Talking. Someone Is Listening and Selling the Transcript.

There’s a story doing the rounds that deserves more attention than it’s getting. US senators are formally warning that the advertising data industry represents a national security threat, because location data harvested from ordinary apps is being used to track military personnel in active war zones. The Department of Defense, apparently, has yet to implement basic protections against this. In war zones. …

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