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There’s a thread doing the rounds on r/auscorp about graduate law jobs, and it’s stuck with me for a couple of days now. MinterEllison cut its grad intake by almost a third this year, and they’re not hiding why: AI. Other big firms are cutting too but keeping quiet about the reason, which is its own kind of tell. Meanwhile the UK is seeing paralegal vacancies down more than 60 per cent since 2023.

Someone on r/AusFinance posted a leaked bit of market research from a bank testing the waters on subscription tiers for personal banking. Not a fee here or there, an actual Netflix-style ladder: basic, plus, premium, max. Pay more, get more of your own money’s basic functions unlocked. The post ended with a line I want stitched onto a cushion: “I DON’T WANT TO FUCKING SUBSCRIBE TO A BANK.” …

Amazon is closing down Mechanical Turk at the end of September. If you’ve never heard of it, Turk was the internet’s odd-job board: tiny, tedious tasks (tagging images, transcribing audio, answering surveys) farmed out to a global pool of humans for a few cents a pop. It’s been running since 2005, longer than the iPhone, and it quietly became one of the engines behind the AI boom. Somebody had to …

A Stanford study did the rounds this week confirming something a lot of people already suspected: AI is hitting entry-level jobs hardest. Not middle managers, not senior architects with twenty years of scar tissue, but the graduates and juniors who used to get their start doing the unglamorous, repetitive stuff that taught them the job. I’ve been in IT long enough to remember being that person, and long enough …

Saw a thread this week about AI agents now burning through five times more tokens than humans do for the same tasks. Someone asked, quite reasonably, what a “human token” even is. Someone else answered: it’s the moment on a Monday morning when your boss makes the dumbest request of the week, and you decide to swallow it and get on with your day instead of telling him where to shove it. That’s …

My daughter came home a while back and mentioned, almost as an aside, that a boy in her year got pulled up for something he said to a teacher. She didn’t elaborate much, and I didn’t push. But it stuck with me, the way she said it. Not shocked. Just tired. I’ve been reading the discussion this week about female teachers dealing with Nazi salutes and Epstein jokes in classrooms, and the thread …

Saw a thread this week from someone in Perth with the flu, needing a medical certificate, and running into the particular indignity of modern Australian healthcare: you’re too contagious to sit in a GP waiting room, but somehow not too contagious to be denied a bulk billed appointment. The pharmacist charged them fifty bucks for a certificate. Fifty dollars, to confirm what a rapid test already told them, so …

Someone posted a photo of an enamel oven dish on Reddit this week. Decades of baked-on fat, black and cracked like old lava. Turns out it belongs to the poster’s husband’s grandparents, both in their eighties, who’ve owned it forever and don’t clean much anymore because, well, they’re in their eighties. She was asking for advice on how to clean it. What followed was a few hundred …

Saw the story on Tuesday, another car chase ending badly, this time outside the MCG. A stolen Mustang, a crash, a dead carjacker, an injured bystander. The kind of story that used to shock me and now just makes me tired in a specific, familiar way. What got me wasn’t the crash itself. It was the comments underneath it. Hundreds of them, and about eighty percent landed somewhere between “good …

Saw a story out of Ohio this week that made me put my coffee down for a second. A grand jury declined to indict a bloke charged with destroying a Flock camera, one of those automated licence plate readers that have been popping up on street corners across the US like bindis in a Melbourne backyard in February. No conviction. No real explanation, because grand juries don’t have to give one. Just twelve people …