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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 …

Spent a bit of time this week down a Reddit rabbit hole about the possibility of the US banning Chinese open source AI models. DeepSeek, Qwen, that sort of thing. Someone in the thread had written an entire Tarantino script parody with Hans Landa hunting for hidden LLMs under the floorboards. Genuinely funny. Also, underneath the joke, there’s a real question worth sitting with. Can you actually ban a file …

Saw a story this week about politicians reportedly trying to influence what chatbots say about them. Not through policy, not through actually doing a better job, but through some combination of astroturfing and complaint letters to AI companies, hoping the model’s answer about them shifts from “under investigation” to “champion of the people.” I read it twice because I wanted to make …

Saw a post the other day from someone who’d taken a photo of their cat exploring the laundry, only to notice, for the first time, that the star rating sticker was still on the washing machine. Years of assuming she was one of the tidy, sticker-removing Australians. Turns out no. The evidence was right there behind the cat. I liked this post more than I probably should have, because it’s such a small, …

I read a story this week about a woman in the US who found a rotisserie chicken in the back of her car. Not that day’s chicken. Not yesterday’s. A week old. Sealed in bags, never leaked, and somehow still managed to turn her entire vehicle into a crime scene. She wasn’t the one who left it there, which is its own small mystery she’s apparently not allowed to solve out loud due to subreddit …