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May was a big month. Too big, arguably. Let me just talk about the things I actually care about. Update Cursor. Do It Now. I’ll lead with this because it’s the most urgent thing in the notes: CVE-2026-26268, rated 9.9 critical by NVD, affected Cursor versions prior to 2.5. The attack surface is uncomfortable to think about. Clone a malicious repository, let the AI agent start doing its autonomous Git …

There’s a concept doing the rounds at the moment called cognitive debt, and it’s been sitting in the back of my head for a few days now. The idea is straightforward. Tech debt is what happens when you cut corners on code quality to ship faster, and then spend the next year paying for it in maintenance hell. Cognitive debt is what happens when you outsource the thinking itself. You ship the thing, it …

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 …