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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 …

Elon Musk posted something this week about xAI being “only 3 years old,” apparently as a defence of Grok’s current standing in the AI market. The implication being: give it time, it’s just getting started. This is a strange argument to make in a field where three years is basically a geological epoch. The models people are actually using, Claude, GPT, Gemini, have each had major releases in …

Someone posted a genuinely interesting question online recently. The gist: if minimum wage in parts of the US is still $7.25 an hour, how is any of this robot and AI infrastructure supposed to be cost-effective? How do you justify a billion-dollar data centre to replace people you’re already paying almost nothing? The thread that followed was one of those rare internet discussions where the argument actually …

Fifteen thousand tickets. That’s the number being thrown around in connection with the cancelled Candace Owens tour, and I’ll be honest, it took me a moment to process that. I don’t know if it’s accurate. The figure apparently comes from a Turning Point Australia spokesperson who has every incentive to inflate it, and the Guardian doesn’t seem to have verified it independently. Could be …

Someone posted online recently asking where people do their grocery shopping. Simple enough question. The thread ran long and the range of answers was genuinely interesting, not because anyone said anything revolutionary, but because it illustrated just how much cognitive load the average household is quietly carrying around something as mundane as buying butter beans. The short answer from most people: Aldi for the …