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I didn’t want to write about this. I sat with it for a couple of days first, which is about as long as I can manage before the pressure of having thoughts about something forces me to put them somewhere. Jodi Knott. A woman in mental health crisis, off her medication, trying to get help. What she got instead was an hour of sustained, deliberate cruelty from two NSW police officers who then sent the footage …

Someone posted about eating at David’s Master Pot on Swanston Street for effectively one cent. Not a typo. One cent. The trick: stack an EatClub discount against DoorDash’s “Going Out” credit feature, which reimburses you for dining receipts you upload, then roll that credit into grocery orders. The loop closes neatly. Eat cheap, get reimbursed, buy Aldi staples. Repeat. My first reaction was …

Someone posted photos of their home online recently, asking whether it qualified as a hoarder’s house. They’re 21. They grew up there. Their grandmother had dementia and was on oxygen for years, fighting with their mum through the nights. Caretakers came and went. Depression set in. The house accumulated. And now they’re the one left holding it. Reading through the thread, I noticed a lot of people …

Someone posted a photo to the Melbourne subreddit this week that stopped me mid-scroll. It was taken just as power was being restored to the CBD after an outage, and it looks, genuinely, like concept art for a game that hasn’t been made yet. Wet streets. Neon reflecting off everything. That particular quality of light you only get when half the city is dark and the other half is suddenly, violently bright …

There’s a story doing the rounds that deserves more attention than it’s getting. US senators are formally warning that the advertising data industry represents a national security threat, because location data harvested from ordinary apps is being used to track military personnel in active war zones. The Department of Defense, apparently, has yet to implement basic protections against this. In war zones. …

Ronny Chieng gave the commencement address at Harvard last week and told the graduates their mission was to destroy AI. The crowd cheered. Which is either deeply ironic or completely logical, depending on how much sleep you’ve had. I’ve been turning the speech over in my head for a few days now. Not the “destroy AI” bit, which is a comedian doing what comedians do. The other line: “AI is …

There’s a story doing the rounds this week that I keep coming back to. A developer built an open source project management tool called Kaneo, stood up a cloud-hosted version so people could try it without wiring up their own database, and then one Thursday morning discovered that a botnet had used his signup flow to send 14,520 phishing emails in a three-hour window. From his verified domain. To real people who …

Someone on Reddit built a tool that lets you benchmark yourself against AI language models. Same tests, same scoring. You sit down, answer the questions, and find out what size model you approximate. The post took off, mostly because the original poster was having an absolute blast in the comments, treating themselves like a product listing. Quantization options. Token pricing. VRAM requirements. The bit where …

There’s a particular kind of workplace fatigue that doesn’t come from doing too much work. It comes from watching someone else do none, and then having to explain to yourself why you’re still annoyed about it. Someone posted about this recently online and it hit a nerve, judging by the response. The scenario will be familiar to anyone who has worked in an office for more than about six months. A …

There’s a particular kind of media week where the volume of the coverage is inversely proportional to how much the average person is actually affected. This was one of those weeks. Labor’s proposal to increase tax on the top one per cent. Specifically, about $400,000 more over a lifetime for those earners. The coverage has been wall to wall. The op-eds have been breathless. You’d think they’d …