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Right then. That actually happened. The Socceroos beat Türkiye 2-0 in Vancouver, and if you told me that six hours ago I would have nodded politely and assumed you were winding me up. Türkiye’s squad is reportedly valued somewhere around six times what Australia’s is worth. Their captain had gone on record before the match saying his more talented team would dominate us. That quote aged, as someone online …

Someone in an online forum recently asked whether you can buy at-home dry-cleaning kits here. Products like Dryel, apparently common in the US, where you chuck a few garments in the dryer with a moist treatment sheet and get something approximating a dry-clean result. Cheaper, more convenient, no dropping things off and picking them up two days later. The answer, roughly, was: no, we don’t really have those, …

There’s a particular kind of shame that comes from owning something for five years and never once dealing with the thing you knew needed dealing with. Not a crisis. Just a slow accumulation of neglect sitting in your kitchen, silently judging you every time you make toast. Someone posted about their Breville crumb tray this week. Before and after photos. Three hours of work. Dawn Powerwash, a plastic scraper, a …

Someone posted a photo online recently of those Victorian terraces near Richmond Station, the ones on Punt Road with the massive billboard plastered across the facade. The question was simple enough: what’s the story, do people actually live there? The answers that came back were not simple at all. Turns out the building was, for a long time, a brothel. Legal, licensed, operating. And the comments section …

There’s a term doing the rounds right now: surveillance pricing. The short version is that a company uses data it has collected about you, your location, your browsing habits, your income bracket, your postcode, to decide what price to show you for a product. Not a universal price. Your price. The one an algorithm has decided you’re likely to pay. The Washington Post is now facing a class action over …

There’s a story doing the rounds about the Flock AI licence plate reader system, and how at least 18 police officers in the US have been arrested for using it to stalk romantic partners. Eighteen that we know of. Arrested. Meaning the actual number of people who used it that way is almost certainly higher, because most of them didn’t get caught, and some who got caught probably didn’t get arrested.

Someone reverse engineered the Bluetooth protocol of a $7 smart ring from Temu, built their own iOS app from scratch, and open sourced the whole thing. The app keeps your health data local, has an optional AI coach, and costs nothing beyond whatever you spend on API keys. I’ve been thinking about this for a couple of days now and I can’t quite let it go. The backstory is worth understanding. The person …

There’s a thing that happens in the AI space, reliably, almost rhythmically: a new model drops, the benchmarks are suspiciously curated, the blog post reads like it was written by a marketing department that just discovered the word “unprecedented,” and within 48 hours someone on Reddit has found the caveats buried in appendix C. Rinse, repeat. So when Moonshot AI put out Kimi K2.7 Code this week, I …

There’s a story doing the rounds online at the moment. A team member gets a redundancy email. Manager fights up the chain, gets nowhere, then goes straight to the Chair of the Board, five layers above their pay grade. The GM’s decision gets overturned. Role is saved. Everyone breathes out. The comments are predictably split between “what a legend” and “that manager is cooked.” Both …

Someone shared an article about Australia’s productivity slump in one of the finance forums I occasionally dip into, and the comments section was exactly what you’d expect: half the people blaming migrants, half blaming “LNP cronies,” and a handful of people actually engaging with the substance. The article itself was worth reading. The response to it was a decent snapshot of why we …