I stumbled across an interesting thread yesterday that got me thinking about our relationship with stuff. Someone was asking for help cleaning their discolored flip-flops - they’d tried soap, scrubbing, dish soap, vinegar, the whole nine yards. The responses were fascinating and really divided into two camps: those saying “just bin them and buy new ones” and others offering actual cleaning solutions.

What struck me most wasn’t the cleaning advice itself, but the underlying tension between our throwaway culture and environmental consciousness. The original poster mentioned their flip-flops cost $40 USD (which is about $60 AUD these days), and they’d been wearing them for three years. When they finally found success with a magic eraser, they added an update that really resonated with me: “I refuse to throw away what is still perfectly good but not as pretty anymore. Our landfills are full and we are drowning in fast fashion.”

There’s something beautifully ordinary about watching kids have meltdowns at birthday parties. This weekend, someone shared their experience observing three different families - Asian, Caucasian, and Indian - all navigating the chaos of children’s birthday celebrations at a play centre in Heidelberg. What struck them most wasn’t the differences between these families, but the remarkable similarities: tantruming birthday kids, complaints about overpriced venues, parking struggles, allergy concerns, and yes, even AFL discussions (with two families unfortunately backing the Bombers).

There’s something almost comically ironic about my current predicament. Here I am, a DevOps engineer who spends his days wrestling with code, infrastructure, and the endless march of technological progress, and I’ve stumbled across a question that’s been gnawing at me for weeks now.

It started with a post on Reddit that made me pause mid-scroll. Someone was asking whether the Go programming language itself could be a privacy concern, simply because Google created it. At first glance, it sounds almost absurd – worrying about the privacy implications of a programming language is like being suspicious of the pencil because you don’t trust the company that made the graphite. But the more I thought about it, the more I realised this question touches on something much deeper about our relationship with technology in 2024.

Sitting at my desk this morning, scrolling through the news about Charlie Kirk’s assassination, I found myself staring at my screen in a kind of bewildered horror. The 22-year-old shooter had engraved bullets with internet memes. Not political manifestos. Not ideological screeds. Memes. One of them literally read “Notices bulges OWO what’s this?” - a furry roleplay joke that’s been floating around the darker corners of the internet for over a decade.

I stumbled across something interesting the other day that got me thinking about the state of academic research tools. Someone has built an open-source academic search engine called Paperion that indexes 80 million papers, and honestly, it highlights just how broken the current system is for anyone trying to access and organize research.

The creator mentioned being shocked by the “lack of tools in the academia world” for paper search and annotation, and that really resonated with me. Even though I’m not in academia, I find myself diving into research papers constantly, especially anything related to AI and machine learning. The rapid pace of development in these fields means staying current requires consuming a lot of academic content, but the tools we have for doing this are frankly terrible.

Sometimes the tech industry throws you a curveball that makes you stop and think. This week, it came in the form of a small Korean startup called Trillion Labs announcing they’d just released the world’s first 70B parameter model with complete intermediate checkpoints - and they’re doing it all under an Apache 2.0 license while being, in their own words, “still broke.”

The audacity of it all is honestly refreshing. Here’s a one-year-old company going up against tech giants with essentially unlimited resources, and instead of trying to compete on pure performance, they’re doubling down on transparency. They’re not just giving us the final model - they’re showing us the entire training journey, from 0.5B all the way up to 70B parameters. It’s like getting the director’s cut, behind-the-scenes footage, and blooper reel all in one package.

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about what really makes a job worth having. Sure, the pay packet matters – we all have bills to pay and teenagers to feed – but there’s something else that’s been nagging at me: freedom. Not the existential kind, but the day-to-day autonomy we have (or don’t have) in our working lives.

It started with a discussion I stumbled across recently where someone posed a simple question: how “free” are you at work? The responses were fascinating and, frankly, a bit depressing. It got me reflecting on my own journey through the IT world, from junior developer frantically trying to look busy whenever a manager walked by, to now where I can theoretically take a two-hour lunch break without anyone batting an eyelid.

Stumbled across something yesterday that had me laughing out loud at my desk – and trust me, that’s not easy to do when you’re knee-deep in deployment scripts. Turns out the world of Self-Managed Super Fund names is an absolute goldmine of Australian humour and creativity.

Someone pointed out that all SMSF names are publicly searchable through the superfundlookup website, and naturally, people have been having a field day with their fund names. We’re talking about serious retirement savings here, but apparently that doesn’t stop Aussies from injecting a bit of personality into what’s traditionally one of the most boring aspects of financial planning.

Scrolling through Reddit this morning, I stumbled across a discussion about Seedream 4 that’s left me genuinely unsettled. Not in a doom-and-gloom way, but in that peculiar manner when you realize we’ve just crossed a technological threshold that we can’t uncross.

The images being shared looked like ordinary photographs - a determined-looking puppy, candid portraits, autumn scenes. Nothing particularly remarkable until you realize they’re all AI-generated. And here’s the kicker: even people actively looking for tells couldn’t reliably spot them as fakes.

There’s something deeply moving about Voyager 1 still beeping away out there in the cosmic darkness, nearly fifty years after it left Earth. Every signal it sends back is like getting a postcard from your mate who’s been backpacking for decades and somehow keeps finding wifi in the most remote corners of the universe.

The engineering marvel of it all really gets to me. Here we have a spacecraft built with 1970s technology – we’re talking about the era when a pocket calculator was cutting-edge – and it’s still functioning beyond anything its creators dared to imagine. It’s like finding your old Nokia 3310 in a drawer and discovering it still has three bars of battery life and can somehow receive text messages from Alpha Centauri.