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There’s a story doing the rounds this week about One Nation’s Facebook presence being propped up, at least in part, by overseas accounts running what amount to engagement farms. Foreign-operated pages, monetising outrage, targeting Australian political discourse. And the reaction online has been roughly split between “obviously” and “finally someone said it.” Both reactions are …

There is a particular rhythm to Australian internet pricing. The real price sits at some quietly outrageous number, a promotional price appears for six months, and then you either forget to switch or you switch, and the whole cycle begins again with a different provider. It is, in its own mundane way, a kind of performance art. The current one worth knowing about: Origin Energy is offering their 500Mbps NBN plan for …

Someone posted online recently about inheriting their father’s house. The house is mostly fine. There’s one room that isn’t. The father had enclosed the carport years ago and turned it into his smoking room. Two to three packs a day for over forty years. The photos looked exactly like what you’d expect, which is to say, like the inside of an old pub that was never cleaned and then sealed shut …

Someone posted a photo to the Melbourne subreddit this week. Black and white, a train platform at night, fog sitting low, a wash of light at the far end with a handful of commuters walking towards it. The kind of image that makes you stop scrolling. The comment thread immediately turned into a collaborative detective exercise. Was it Pascoe Vale? Seaford? Jewell? Croxton? People were citing platform geometry, fence …

Someone posted this week about being locked out of their Reddit account entirely until they handed over photo ID to a third-party verification service. Not locked out of adult content. Locked out of everything. Account settings. The ability to delete their own account. The works. Just a popup from a company called Persona, sitting there blocking the door. That’s a fairly significant thing to happen without much …

Someone posted recently about their company running a leaderboard tracking AI token usage. Top 25 users got called “Champions.” People who barely used it were labelled “Sleepers.” The champions had collectively burned through $850,000 since January first. It took me a minute to fully absorb that. The kicker is that the Sleeper who posted about it seemed genuinely worried about being at the …

A while back I came across someone’s write-up of a 1U firewall appliance they’d picked up from AliExpress for $290. Intel N100, four 2.5G Intel i226-V ports, a PCIe slot for SFP+ modules. Runs pfSense. One year on, they reported zero freezes, zero reboots, quiet as you like, cool enough in a home office with no air conditioning. That last detail stuck with me. No AC and it just keeps going. That’s …

There’s a thread doing the rounds about the US government moving to individually approve access to frontier AI models. GPT 5.6, apparently, is now something you need permission to use. I’ve been sitting with this for a few days, turning it over, and I still don’t know whether to be more disturbed by the policy itself or by how unsurprised I am. Let’s be honest about what’s actually …

There’s a thread doing the rounds that started as a shitpost about RM Williams boots and somehow became a genuinely interesting argument about class, value, and what men do to signal competence in an office. The original post was about feeling like a “weapon of an operator” after dropping close to a grand on boots. People were complimenting him at the urinal. Under the stall. That sort of thing. The …

Someone posted on r/AusFinance recently feeling genuinely bad about themselves. Sub-six-figure salary, low five figures in investments, super that wouldn’t cover a long weekend. In their forties. Their words: fat and bald. They wanted to know how to stop feeling jealous every time they opened the app. It’s an honest post. More honest than most of what surrounds it. Here’s the thing about a finance …