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There’s a story doing the rounds again about dental finally getting folded into Medicare, and I’ve noticed the same thing happens every time: a flicker of hope, a lot of “believe it when I see it,” and then quietly, nothing. My father-in-law used to say the same thing about the East Coast fast rail every federal election for about twenty years. Some promises age like wine. This one’s …

Mark 27 July 2026 in the calendar. Actually, don’t just mark it, set a second alarm for 1:55pm, because at 2pm sharp every compatible phone in the country is going to shriek at once. It’s the national test of AusAlert, the new emergency warning system, and I’ll admit my first reaction was mild interest followed almost immediately by “right, so that’s the day I need to remember to put my …

Someone on Reddit posted a photo this week of baby clothes that had gone through the wash and dryer with a brown crayon still in the pocket. The result looked, depending on who you asked, like toasted marshmallows, prehistoric fossils, shrimp chips, or a litter of newborn puppies. One person on shrooms saw puppies. I believed them. The actual question, “how do I fix this,” got buried fast under a …

Third time now we’ve stayed in Walhalla, and I still can’t quite explain what it is about the place. Officially it’s meant to be the most haunted town in Victoria. Unofficially, it’s the most peaceful few days I get all year. For anyone who hasn’t made the trip, Walhalla is a old gold-mining town tucked into a valley in Gippsland, a couple of hours east of the city. No mobile reception. …

I read about the Bitchat thing on my lunch break and thought about it for the rest of the afternoon, which is more attention than most tech news deserves these days. Quick version: Jack Dorsey built an app called Bitchat that lets nearby phones talk to each other over Bluetooth, no internet, no cell service, just device to device mesh networking. Useful at festivals, useful in national parks, useful anywhere the …

We don’t get many Cybertrucks here. Compliance rules, mostly; the thing barely scrapes past Australian design regs, and even if it didn’t, I can’t picture it navigating a servo forecourt in Cranbourne without clipping a bowser. But the internet has no borders, and I’ve spent an embarrassing amount of time lately reading Americans describe, in real time, the slow-motion collapse of a $100,000 …

Saw a project pop up this week: a zsh plugin that tries to predict your next command, not just autocomplete the one you’re typing. Built by a solo dev, side project, some AI help with the code. Clever idea. History-based, frecency scoring, small Markov chain under the hood. No LLM doing the guessing, which a lot of commenters seemed relieved about. Then someone pointed out the plugin doesn’t respect …

Spent a chunk of the weekend reading a Reddit thread about whether a new Chinese model was “distilled” from a US one, and by the end of it I genuinely couldn’t tell if I’d learned anything about AI or just watched several hundred people argue about vibes wearing lab coats. The setup is familiar by now. A new model drops, benchmarks look good, and within about four hours someone in an American …

Macquarie’s got a new CEO. Greg Ward, in the door since 1996, taking over from Shemara Wikramanayake, who joined in 1987 and is stepping down after eight years running the place. Nobody outside finance Twitter will remember this in six months, and yet I’ve been turning it over for a couple of days now. The thing that actually stuck with me wasn’t the succession, or the pay packet, or the muted …

A mate of mine got asked recently if she could lend ten grand for a holiday. Not “can I borrow the car” money. Ten thousand dollars, for cocktails on a beach somewhere. She said no, obviously, but it stuck with her enough that she brought it up at dinner, and it’s stuck with me enough that I’m writing about it now. I went looking for other people’s versions of this story, expecting a few …