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Someone sent me a photo last week of a Telstra payphone booth done up with a Futurama theme, Bender’s face grinning off the side of it. Cute, I thought. Nice bit of nostalgia marketing. Then I read the thread underneath it and realised half of Reddit was having a small existential crisis over the fact that in the actual first episode of Futurama, phone booths aren’t phone booths at all. They’re …

I’ve been reading a thread on r/AussieFrugal about bulk cooking, and it’s done more to cheer me up this week than anything on the actual news. Someone posted a full breakdown of a 27-serve cook up: Mongolian beef, beef stroganoff, creamy lemon garlic chicken, pork with mushroom sauce, meatballs. Costed to the dollar. Frozen in individual bags. Four hours of work, six to eight weeks of dinners sorted. …

Someone posted photos online recently of a jacket pulled from their closet after a few months. Dusty white bloom all over the shoulders. Same on their shoes. They were renting a basement, doing everything right, Swiffering the hardwood weekly, and couldn’t work out why everything kept getting this fine coating on it. Asked the internet what was going on. The internet, in its collective wisdom, arrived at the …

Saw a thread the other day about someone smoking on a train, complete with photo evidence, and the usual pile-on in the comments. What got me wasn’t the smoking itself. It was the number of people who piped up to say they used to do exactly this as teenagers in the 80s and 90s, and how normal it felt at the time. One bloke described being fifteen and having an old European man call him “a pig, a big …

A Florida cop tracked his estranged wife’s car 717 times over about a year and a half using an automated licence plate reader network called Flock Safety. She only found out because a Washington Post reporter rang her up doing a story on officers misusing the system. Not an audit. Not an internal review. A journalist made a phone call. I’ve spent enough years in IT to know that “the system will flag …

Saw a post this week from someone on r/selfhosted who lost the lot. Ten years of a personal diary, gone. Recipes, Home Assistant config, unchecked-out code. The setup was two disks: one live, one “backup”, with a nightly dd copying everything from the first to the second. Sounds sensible until you realise what happens when the source disk is already corrupted. You don’t get a backup. You get two …

I checked my feed on Tuesday morning, coffee in hand, and there it was: GLM-5.3, dropped with the casual confidence of a band announcing a new album nobody asked for but everyone secretly wanted. The changelog line that got quoted everywhere was something like “scaling post-training is all we did.” Which, in this industry, is apparently now a flex. I’ve been half-following the AI release cycle for a …

Saw a thread this week that stopped me mid-scroll. A young grad, a few months into their first full-time job after uni, describing something close to despair. Crying a couple of times a week. Sleeping until 1pm on weekends just to claw back enough energy to do it all again on Monday. Missing the version of life where they had control over their own time. Genuinely asking how they’re supposed to do this for …

A thread popped up online this week that’s been sitting with me since I read it. Someone’s MyGov account got locked for suspicious activity, which turned out to be legitimate, and by the time they worked out what happened, a fraudulent tax return had already been lodged through an agent they’d never heard of, with a $3.5k refund heading to a bank account that wasn’t theirs. It gets worse. The …

Brad Lightcap resigned as COO of OpenAI this week, and within days it turned out he wasn’t alone. Head of Ethics, gone. Head of Safety Systems, gone. Head of Mission Alignment, gone. All in the space of a few weeks, right before a company reportedly worth several hundred billion dollars is meant to march toward an IPO. His farewell post had a line in it that stuck with me: “the real AGI is the friends you …