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Someone on r/artificial posted something this week that stuck with me. The title was basically a cry for help: “I don’t know where to go anymore. No AI community will accept me.” Turns out they’re pro-AI in general but worried about surveillance, corporate power, environmental cost, the usual list. For that, apparently, they got run out of the pro-AI subreddits as a closet doomer. Meanwhile …

Saw a story doing the rounds yesterday about a boss who handed out cupcakes for R U OK? Day and then told staff they’d need to stay back to make up the twenty minutes it took to eat them. I read it twice because I assumed it was satire. It wasn’t. And judging by the pile-on in the comments, it hit a nerve that a lot of people have been nursing quietly for years.

There’s a thread doing the rounds on r/AussieFrugal about ALDI Mobile axing its cheap plans, and it’s got that familiar energy of people trading spreadsheets in the comments like it’s a competitive sport. The $23 plan is going, the family plans are going up, and everyone’s suddenly become an expert on the difference between Telstra’s wholesale network and its retail one. I read the whole …

I fell down a Reddit hole this week that started with a stovetop and ended with me standing in my own kitchen at 9pm on a Tuesday, staring at the cooktop like it owed me money. The post that did it was on r/CleaningTips: someone made a baking soda paste, let it sit, then went at their stove with a razor blade for an hour and a half. Before photo looked like a crime scene. After photo looked like a showroom floor. …

A motorcyclist died on the Western Highway this week after hitting a pothole. I read that headline on Tuesday morning with my coffee and just sat with it for a minute before I could go back to my emails. Not because it’s shocking in the sense of being unprecedented, sadly it isn’t, but because it’s the kind of death that feels entirely preventable and entirely predictable at the same time. Someone …

I came across a discussion on r/privacy this morning about a US citizen rights group suing to force police to get a warrant before searching Flock Safety’s automatic number plate reader database. If you haven’t heard of Flock, they’re the company that’s quietly wired up thousands of intersections across America with cameras that read every plate that goes past, log the time and location, and …

There’s a story doing the rounds about a small Michigan township where the University of Michigan and Los Alamos National Labs want to build a “massive data centre.” Locals turned up to a town hall to say they’d never been consulted, and the meeting turned into something close to a rebellion. Turns out the whole thing is technically a supercomputer for fusion research, not a bog-standard AI …

Spent a chunk of Sunday reading a thread on r/selfhosted instead of doing anything useful, which is more or less how I spend most Sundays. The post was from someone who’s tried, for months, to fully replace Spotify with a self-hosted stack. Navidrome for serving, Lidarr for grabbing albums, slskd and qBittorrent doing the heavy lifting underneath, a rolling playlist tool on top. A proper setup. And still, at …

I’ve been lurking in r/LocalLLaMA for a few years now, the way you’d keep half an eye on a hobby forum for something you’ll probably never fully understand but find endlessly interesting anyway. Yesterday someone posted a one-liner that made me laugh out loud at my desk: a “flash” model, the supposedly lightweight, fast, cheap option, now clocks in at 512GB. A few years ago, a 100GB …

There’s a thread doing the rounds on r/auscorp today that’s basically a support group in disguise. Someone asks how to deal with colleagues who fire off an email, then ping you on Teams twice before lunch asking for an update, on a task with no actual deadline. Forty comments in, and the group has more or less converged on a philosophy. Don’t respond straight away. When you do respond, don’t …