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My daughter came home a while back and mentioned, almost as an aside, that a boy in her year got pulled up for something he said to a teacher. She didn’t elaborate much, and I didn’t push. But it stuck with me, the way she said it. Not shocked. Just tired. I’ve been reading the discussion this week about female teachers dealing with Nazi salutes and Epstein jokes in classrooms, and the thread …

Saw a thread this week from someone in Perth with the flu, needing a medical certificate, and running into the particular indignity of modern Australian healthcare: you’re too contagious to sit in a GP waiting room, but somehow not too contagious to be denied a bulk billed appointment. The pharmacist charged them fifty bucks for a certificate. Fifty dollars, to confirm what a rapid test already told them, so …

Someone posted a photo of an enamel oven dish on Reddit this week. Decades of baked-on fat, black and cracked like old lava. Turns out it belongs to the poster’s husband’s grandparents, both in their eighties, who’ve owned it forever and don’t clean much anymore because, well, they’re in their eighties. She was asking for advice on how to clean it. What followed was a few hundred …

Saw the story on Tuesday, another car chase ending badly, this time outside the MCG. A stolen Mustang, a crash, a dead carjacker, an injured bystander. The kind of story that used to shock me and now just makes me tired in a specific, familiar way. What got me wasn’t the crash itself. It was the comments underneath it. Hundreds of them, and about eighty percent landed somewhere between “good …

Saw a story out of Ohio this week that made me put my coffee down for a second. A grand jury declined to indict a bloke charged with destroying a Flock camera, one of those automated licence plate readers that have been popping up on street corners across the US like bindis in a Melbourne backyard in February. No conviction. No real explanation, because grand juries don’t have to give one. Just twelve people …

There’s a saying in American legal circles that a grand jury will indict a ham sandwich. The bar is that low. So when a grand jury in Ohio looked at footage of a bloke smashing up a Flock surveillance camera, and declined to charge him, that’s not a small thing. That’s someone throwing the sandwich back. I’d never heard of Flock cameras until this story crossed my feed, but the shape of it is …

There’s a thread doing the rounds about whether you should put your self-hosted setup on your CV. A senior engineer at a big tech company said if they saw a serious homelab listed, they’d rate it highly. Reasonable take. But the replies are the interesting bit, because everyone has a different idea of what “serious” means, and a few people admitted to running their whole setup off gear they …

I spent an unreasonable amount of my Sunday reading a Reddit thread about someone running a 1-bit quantised version of a large language model on 8GB of VRAM, and I have no regrets. None. The thread is a monument to a very specific kind of joy: watching something extremely sophisticated fail in an extremely stupid way. For anyone who hasn’t fallen down this particular hole: quantisation is how you shrink a …

Saw a post doing the rounds this week: a guy explaining that if you’re permanent and frustrated with a toxic boss, don’t resign, negotiate a payout instead. Send a nicely worded email, mention Fair Work, mention the hassle you could cause, and watch the company hand you three to six months’ pay to walk away quietly. The comments section did what comments sections do best, which is tear the whole …

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 …