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Real wages fell 0.6% again. I read that number the way I read most economic news these days: with the detached curiosity of someone watching a slow-motion car crash they’re also a passenger in. I ran my own numbers through one of those inflation calculators over the weekend, the way you’d poke a bruise to see if it still hurts. It still hurts. I’m doing fine relative to a lot of people, hybrid IT …

Saw the Anthropic protein design news this week and sat with it longer than I expected to. Claude apparently designed disease-targeting proteins autonomously, with actual wet-lab validation, and hit something like a 35% success rate against a human average of 10-15%. Not a benchmark. Not a demo. Real proteins, in a real lab, doing real things. That’s a different category of claim. My first reaction was the one …

Saw a story this week about a Chinese biotech team aiming to get a “smart” probiotic for type 2 diabetes onto US shelves within two years. Uses gut bacteria and GLP-1 pathways to help regulate blood sugar. Cheaper than Ozempic, apparently, and without the injections. My first thought wasn’t about the science. It was about what happens next, and whether “next” ever actually arrives. …

There’s a chart doing the rounds, built off Ramp’s spend data, showing AI expenditure per employee across companies. The top 1% are burning something like $660 a month per head. The median company is sitting somewhere near lunch money, a few hundred dollars, if that. I’ve seen this chart three times this week in different threads, which either means it’s genuinely interesting or I need to …

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 …