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A Florida cop tracked his estranged wife’s car 717 times over about a year and a half using an automated licence plate reader network called Flock Safety. She only found out because a Washington Post reporter rang her up doing a story on officers misusing the system. Not an audit. Not an internal review. A journalist made a phone call. I’ve spent enough years in IT to know that “the system will flag …

Saw a post this week from someone on r/selfhosted who lost the lot. Ten years of a personal diary, gone. Recipes, Home Assistant config, unchecked-out code. The setup was two disks: one live, one “backup”, with a nightly dd copying everything from the first to the second. Sounds sensible until you realise what happens when the source disk is already corrupted. You don’t get a backup. You get two …

I checked my feed on Tuesday morning, coffee in hand, and there it was: GLM-5.3, dropped with the casual confidence of a band announcing a new album nobody asked for but everyone secretly wanted. The changelog line that got quoted everywhere was something like “scaling post-training is all we did.” Which, in this industry, is apparently now a flex. I’ve been half-following the AI release cycle for a …

Saw a thread this week that stopped me mid-scroll. A young grad, a few months into their first full-time job after uni, describing something close to despair. Crying a couple of times a week. Sleeping until 1pm on weekends just to claw back enough energy to do it all again on Monday. Missing the version of life where they had control over their own time. Genuinely asking how they’re supposed to do this for …

A thread popped up online this week that’s been sitting with me since I read it. Someone’s MyGov account got locked for suspicious activity, which turned out to be legitimate, and by the time they worked out what happened, a fraudulent tax return had already been lodged through an agent they’d never heard of, with a $3.5k refund heading to a bank account that wasn’t theirs. It gets worse. The …

Brad Lightcap resigned as COO of OpenAI this week, and within days it turned out he wasn’t alone. Head of Ethics, gone. Head of Safety Systems, gone. Head of Mission Alignment, gone. All in the space of a few weeks, right before a company reportedly worth several hundred billion dollars is meant to march toward an IPO. His farewell post had a line in it that stuck with me: “the real AGI is the friends you …

Saw the headline this week: scientists reckon we might be able to grow new teeth within four years. Not dentures, not implants, actual teeth, grown fresh, courtesy of some clever work with stem cells and tooth buds happening in Japan. My first reaction was genuine interest. My second reaction, about four seconds later, was a very specific kind of tiredness. Because I’ve heard this before. Not this exact claim, …

Four Claude models in two months. That’s the number that stopped me mid-coffee this week. Anthropic shipped Mythos 5, Fable 5, Sonnet 5, and now Opus 5, all since early June. I don’t know how their eval team is sleeping, but Opus 5 is the one actually worth talking about. The pitch is cost, not raw grunt. Same pricing as Opus 4.8, 1M context on by default now, and a new effort dial (low/medium/high) that …

I’ve been reading about a US congressman trying to defund a company called Flock Safety, and their network of automatic licence plate readers. Thomas Massie, a libertarian Republican from Kentucky, wants to strip federal funding from any local government using them. No bill text yet, just a press release. But the discussion around it is more interesting than the bill itself. We don’t have Flock here, not …

Saw a story out of California this week that made me put my coffee down. One town’s automatic licence plate readers, the Flock system, misread plates in 71% of the alerts sent to police. Not a rounding error. Not a bad week. Seven out of ten times, wrong. I work in tech. I’ve spent twenty-odd years watching systems get shipped before they’re ready, watching “good enough for now” quietly …