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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 …

Someone posted a photo yesterday morning of the sky over Melbourne looking like the whole city was ablaze. Deep orange, streaked with cloud, the kind of colour that makes you check the CFA Vic app before you check the time. Turned out to be a fairly spectacular sunrise, nothing more sinister than that. But the comments were the best bit: half the thread trying to work out where the photo was taken, someone guessing …

Saw this one and had to put my coffee down for a second. The CEO of Flock Safety, the company that’s papered half of America (and increasingly here) with automated license plate readers, called activists protesting his product “terroristic.” Then, when the backlash rolled in, he apologised. Sure he did. I’ve watched enough corporate apologies over the years to know the shape of them. This one …

Spent a good chunk of the weekend reading about SpaceX’s stock losing a trillion dollars in valuation in a month, and I kept coming back to the same question: how do you lose something you never actually had? That’s not a rhetorical trick, someone in the comments asked it plainly, and it’s a fair one. A trillion dollars of “value” evaporating doesn’t mean a trillion dollars existed …

Someone on a forum posted a photo of an old home server rig this week. A little VIA Pico-ITX board, cobbled together, running Apache and an email server and XMPP and, for reasons the owner admitted were “just for funsies,” pygopherd. All of it pushed out to the world through 384k upstream DSL, later upgraded to a blistering 768k. Ran from 2008 to about 2013. The comments were half admiration, half people …