I’ve been watching the AI arms race unfold with a mixture of fascination and dread for a while now. Every week brings another announcement about some massive AI model that’s supposedly going to change everything, backed by billions in funding and wild promises about achieving artificial general intelligence. It’s exhausting, frankly. So when I came across India’s latest budget announcement committing $90 billion to AI infrastructure, I expected more of the same – another country trying to build their own GPT-killer and join the race to the bottom.

There’s a special circle of hell reserved for drivers who cruise along at 80km/h in a 100 zone, only to suddenly discover their accelerator the moment an overtaking lane appears. And judging by the avalanche of comments I’ve been reading online, I’m far from alone in this frustration.

Look, I get it. We all have different comfort levels when driving. Some people are naturally more cautious, and that’s fine. But what baffles me – genuinely baffles me – is the complete lack of awareness these drivers seem to have about their impact on everyone else around them.

There’s something deeply satisfying about getting money back on purchases you were going to make anyway. It’s like finding a twenty-dollar note in an old jacket pocket, except you can orchestrate it to happen regularly. I’ve been thinking about this lately, particularly as I’ve watched the cashback scene evolve over the past few years.

The basic concept is brilliantly simple: shop through a cashback platform, and you get a percentage of your purchase returned to your account. It’s not revolutionary – it’s essentially commission-sharing – but it works. The retailer pays the platform for sending customers their way, and the platform shares part of that commission with you. Everyone wins, which is rare enough in modern commerce to be worth celebrating.

There’s something deeply moving about watching people rally around a stranger’s yellowed, five-decade-old stuffed Snoopy. I came across this discussion thread the other day, and it’s been rattling around in my head ever since. Someone posted asking for advice on how to clean and brighten their ancient plush toy – cotton fabric, strong seams, but showing its age with that telltale yellowing that comes from half a century of existence.

There’s been a video doing the rounds this week that perfectly encapsulates everything that’s simultaneously funny and deeply concerning about Australia’s drinking culture. Two blokes get kicked out of a strip club on King Street, and one of them—in a moment of alcohol-fueled genius—decides the best course of action is to walk into a nearby restaurant, wrestle a chair from the dining area, and hurl it at the security guard. Except he misses. Spectacularly. And knocks his own mate unconscious instead.

The news about the Washington Post journalist having her phone seized got me thinking about something we’ve all probably taken for granted: how we unlock our phones dozens of times a day. It’s such a mundane thing, isn’t it? Just glance at your iPhone, touch your fingerprint sensor, and you’re in. But what happens when that convenience becomes a vulnerability?

The case involves a journalist who hasn’t been charged with anything, yet had investigators at her door with a warrant that specifically mentioned they couldn’t ask her which finger she uses for biometrics. Think about how absurd that is for a moment. They can’t ask which finger, but apparently they could compel her to use it. It’s one of those legal technicalities that makes you wonder if the people making these decisions have ever actually considered the real-world implications.

There’s something deeply unsettling about watching evidence vanish in real-time. Yesterday, the US Department of Justice accidentally published documents from the Epstein files that were… let’s just say, significantly more revealing than they intended. Within hours, the document was gone from the government website. But here’s the thing about the internet in 2025 – nothing ever truly disappears, does it?

I’ve been working in IT for over two decades now, and one of the first things you learn is that data deletion is rarely absolute. There are backups, archives, and in this case, thousands of people who downloaded those PDFs the moment they appeared. The DOJ’s fumble – whether intentional or through sheer incompetence – has created a situation where the evidence is simultaneously everywhere and nowhere. It’s on hard drives around the world, but officially, according to the US government, it was never meant to exist in the public sphere.

I’ve been running Immich for a while now as my self-hosted photo management solution, and it’s been brilliant. For those who haven’t heard of it, Immich is essentially an open-source alternative to Google Photos that you can run on your own hardware. No subscription fees, no cloud storage limits, and most importantly, complete control over your data. It’s exactly the kind of project that makes the open-source ecosystem so valuable.

I’ve been watching the AI space with that peculiar mix of fascination and dread that’s become my default setting these days. This week, something genuinely interesting caught my attention: LingBot-World, an open-source world model that’s apparently giving Google’s Genie 3 a run for its money. And before you roll your eyes at yet another “AGI is just around the corner!” proclamation, stick with me here.

The technical details are impressive enough – 16 frames per second, emergent spatial memory that can track objects for up to 60 seconds after they’ve left the frame, and the ability to handle complex physics simulations. But what really got me thinking wasn’t the specs. It was the fact that this is fully open source.

I’ve been mulling over a theory about inflation that’s been doing the rounds online, and it’s kept me awake at night more than the humidity we’ve been having lately. The core idea is simple but deeply unsettling: our main tool for fighting inflation – interest rate hikes – might be fundamentally broken because of how wealth has concentrated in our economy.

Picture this scenario: A 25-year-old takes out a $950k mortgage with a 5% deposit. That’s nearly a million dollars of new credit, created essentially from thin air, transferred to a 55-year-old investor who’s just cashed out $700k in property profit. That older investor? They’re not sitting on that money. They’re buying a new car, doing renovations, booking overseas trips. They’re spending like there’s no tomorrow, because for them, there basically isn’t – they’ve already won the game.