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There’s a maths problem they used to give kids in primary school. A ship’s ladder hangs 2 metres above the water. The tide rises 3 metres. How far is the ladder from the water now? The answer is still 2 metres, because the ship floats. Saw someone use that exact analogy in a thread about falling house prices this week and it’s been rattling around my head since. Because it’s the whole …

Someone on a forum this week was agonising over a Ninja Luxe coffee machine deal at The Good Guys. Sixty bucks off, some store credit scheme, a gift card discount stacked on top. The question underneath it all was simple: is this a good deal, or is there something better out there. I read the whole thread with more interest than it probably deserved, because I’ve been circling this exact decision myself for …

Someone on the internet posted two photos of bowls in a dishwasher and asked which arrangement was correct. Four thousand comments later, a grown adult had been told they’d be “difficult to marry” over the placement of some Corelle. I’ve been thinking about this for three days, which is embarrassing, but here we are. The original question was reasonable enough. Roommates disagreed on loading …

There’s a specific kind of local excitement that only happens over construction hoarding. Not roadworks, not the endless scaffolding on some apartment tower nobody asked for. I mean the good kind, where someone spots a logo through the plywood and an entire subreddit loses its mind. That’s where we’re at with Books Kinokuniya, Level 2, Melbourne Central. Branding’s up. The council’s own …

Mexico is reportedly looking at social media and AI regulations aimed at protecting kids online. Age verification, possibly biometric, possibly tied to a digital ID. I read through a Reddit thread on it this morning with my second coffee, and the whole time I had this nagging sense of déjà vu. We’ve been here. Australia passed its under-16 social media ban last year. The UK has its Online Safety Act. The EU is …

Someone on a forum this week described trying to remove a former employee’s Adobe licence and getting stuck talking to a chatbot that typed “working on it” and then just… stopped. No confirmation, no human, no end. He sat there wondering if the thing was broken or whether that was the point. I read that and felt something click into place, because I’ve had versions of that exact moment. …

Saw a post the other day about a bloke who moved in with his girlfriend and solved his home server problem with a €35 IKEA coffee table. Gillersberg, apparently. Shelf underneath for the gear, flat top for the plants. Comments section immediately split into two camps: people impressed by the cable management, and people pointing out that water and electronics have never once gotten along in the history of the …

Saw a thread this week about someone running a 744-billion-parameter model on a machine with 25GB of RAM. Not fast. About 0.1 tokens per second, which works out to roughly 8000 tokens a day if you leave it running. That’s a handful of proper questions answered, once every twenty-four hours, on hardware you could buy at JB Hi-Fi. My first reaction was the same as half the comment section: what’s the point. …

I’ve been following the CBA enterprise agreement saga the way some people follow test cricket: not because I expect a dramatic finish, but because I like watching the slow accumulation of small, telling moments. And this one’s telling. Negotiations breaking down, management digging in rather than caving early like they usually do. Something’s different this time, and most people online seem to agree …

I fell down a Facebook hole this week, the algorithm decided I needed to see an Australian tax help page, and what I found there was equal parts fascinating and alarming. People posting their return details, asking why it’s been flagged, why it’s delayed, why the ATO wants “more information.” One bloke earned $130k from his employer and claimed $80k in deductions. Eighty grand. On what, …