dgriffith
@dgriffith@aussie.zone
- Comment on Detection of fire ants in Queensland 800km from closest infestation sparks fury over gaps in eradication funding 3 days ago:
“How did this happen?”
Well let’s see, they were found at a 100 percent FIFO coal mine that ships ridiculous quantities of equipment, materials, and food from all across Australia and the world on a daily basis, and 600 people are shuffled to and from Brisbane every week via the local airport.
I wonder how those ants ended up there, it’s a complete mystery.
- Comment on Why Americans Can’t Buy the World’s Best Electric Car 4 days ago:
They also iterate very quickly.
First car design - “functional” is being polite about it.
Fifteen years later when they are on their tenth revision - pretty damn good.
- Comment on Why Americans Can’t Buy the World’s Best Electric Car 4 days ago:
I’ve test driven a few BYD models here in Australia. 50 thousand dollarydoos for an electric car that goes 400+km, can power your house in a blackout, has all the normal electric car performance (6 seconds to 100kmhr) and is chock full of user comforts and safety features.
There are a LOT of these getting around in Brisbane, and for good reason. I didn’t get one this time round, but by the time the lease expires on my Volvo EX30 in 4 years, I’ll be looking pretty hard at BYD. Especially if they get their new solid state batteries going by then.
- Comment on Fear of 'being cringe' blamed for lack of dancing on nightclub dance floors 5 days ago:
Exactly. Every person worries that they are one shaky phone video away from internet mockery.
It worked out ok for this guy but only by a stroke of internet luck.
- Comment on South Australia Government considers requiring developers to build bigger garages. The cost will be paid by home buyers. Whether they have a car or not. 6 days ago:
“Buuuuut I need my RANGER ULTRAMAX PRO LAND BARGE TITANIUM EDITION to carry all my toooools!” - every young tradie ever.
Meanwhile old painters are still getting around in falcon utes just fine.
- Comment on Simple Wikiclaudia: Chrome extension that finds a simple.wikipedia.org version of any wiki article. If one exists, click to open it; otherwise, it uses Claude or ChatGPT to simplify it. 6 days ago:
Why?
Because people should be looking to expand their knowledge by getting into the details. By handwaving those details away with an AI summary that may or may not actually summarise the article correctly, people lose the opportunity to learn.
If your attention span or cognitive capacity can’t get you through a basic Wikipedia article you need to work on that, for your own betterment.
If you’re reading an article and you’re lost in the weeds you should be taking a step back to simpler concepts in Wikipedia (or elsewhere) first. Don’t trust a LLM to make a coherent summary about a topic you can’t understand, because you won’t be able to tell if it’s feeding you bullshit.
- Comment on Powerful US lobby groups urge tariff retaliation against Australia’s ‘socialised medicine’ 6 days ago:
That’s right - the Australian government has bulk purchasing power and that’s a big motivator for pharmaceutical companies. When companies get their medications on the PBS sales in Australia skyrocket.
There are some very expensive drugs on the PBS simply because it makes financial sense from a cost of care perspective for the government to do so.
- Comment on Australian influencers warned after several accounts inadvertently promote illegal offshore bookmakers 2 weeks ago:
“Inadvertently”
Riiiiiiiight.
- Comment on Zero-day: Bluetooth gap turns millions of headphones into listening stations 2 weeks ago:
It’s BLE - Bluetooth Low Energy.
Basically devices with BLE can listen for a wake-up command and turn on, similar to the “magic packet” of wake on Ethernet.
It also means that most devices with BLE end up flat within a month. I had a speaker with BLE and had to deliberately download a much older version of the Android partner app to turn it off, as they dropped the option to do so in later versions for “convenience”.
- Comment on Geologists doubt Earth has the amount of copper needed to develop the entire world 1 month ago:
Perhaps it’s time to start researching alternative materials.
Plenty of metals floating around in space. Just need to go and get them.
Only need to capture one decent sized metalliferous asteroid from a near earth orbit and we’d be set for a century or two.
- Comment on YSK how to unclog a toilet 1 month ago:
Australian here.
Step 1: design your damn toilets so they do not clog.
Step 2: there is no step 2.
Seriously, half a century of toilet use here in Aus and I’ve never caused - or discovered even - a blocked toilet at home.
Clearly the fact that I can buy a toilet plunger from the local hardware store indicates that this can happen here. But it seems that every American household has a toilet plunger and poop knife on standby and many articles are devoted to what clogs, and how to unclog, American toilets.
There are better designs out there guys, maybe you should look into using them.
- Comment on Top Ways Inkjet-Printed Sensors are Changing Tech 1 month ago:
This kind of reliability is huge for prosthetic limbs, fitness trackers, and robotic arms, where precision and durability are non-negotiable.
Thanks, AI slop! Sensors that have been durability tested for a few hundred cycles will be perfect for prosthetic devices that can do that in half a day of office work, or fitness trackers that can do that in five minutes, or in robotic arms that can perform that kind of movement in 60 seconds! I’m going to use them in my next safety critical robotics project for sure!
- Comment on GOP sneaks decade-long AI regulation ban into spending bill - Ars Technica 1 month ago:
"automated decision systems "
“IF X THEN Y” satisfies this description.
Soooo basically just take the handbrake off practically every chunk of software ever written then?
- Comment on Windows Is Adding AI Agents That Can Change Your Settings 2 months ago:
It’s much more fun to just half-ass a new control panel with only a few features, and then hide the old, fully-functional control panel.
Bonus points if you can then begrudgingly finally show the old, useful, control panel when a user clicks 6 layers deep in the new panel.
- Comment on 2 months ago:
“Wuh-wuh-wuh”, using pronunciation similar to the start of “wow” or “woman”
- Comment on Can local LLMs be as useful and insightful as those widely available? 2 months ago:
“Why do people do X, when in my opinion if you disregard the two top reasons for doing X, it’s pointless? Prove to me that it would be better!?”
- Comment on Sydney woman who sold a cartoon cat T-shirt told to pay US$100,000 in Grumpy Cat copyright case | Australia news | The Guardian 2 months ago:
“Default judgement”, meaning nobody turned up to plead their case in whatever court and jurisdiction this was in.
So this woman sold 1 shirt, someone else sold 275,000, someone else sold 1200 coffee mugs, and so on and so forth until Grumpy Cat Enterprises™ gets the shits and goes to court with a case against multiple plaintiffs. Then in the absence of any defense all the alleged guilty parties get slapped with a default USD100K.
Which means very fucking little if the judgement is in East Texas and you’re in South East Asia as it’s going to be pretty tough to collect, but it might mean something if you live in Australia.
Being a civil matter, it’s pretty unlikely to go any further than being a note in a file somewhere, I’m not even sure if this could get on to Australian credit reports.
But the single sale of a shirt just before all this happened sounds extremely suspicious, like a fishing expedition to get enough people to make it worthwhile to go to court.
- Comment on Slate, a no-nonsense EV pickup for $20k 2 months ago:
But I need my land barge to potentially carry 9000 pounds and 6 people for at least 400 miles without a break, even if I can barely manage to satisfy one of those criteria once a year. Otherwise it’s a miserable failure that must be mocked.
- Comment on [deleted] 2 months ago:
Australia here, I have a 100GB plan with unlimited calls Australia-wide for AUD40 a month. With the current miserable exchange rate with the US, that’s about USD25/mo.
And any unused data rolls over each month so now I have (checks)… 4.22TB of data available, because I have a dual-sim phone and my work sim does all the heavy data usage.
- Comment on A weird phrase is plaguing scientific papers – and we traced it back to a glitch in AI training data 2 months ago:
Thankfully, science will inevitably sus those papers out eventually, as it always does,
In the future, all search engines will have an option to ignore any results from 2022-20xx, the era of AI slop.
- Comment on Dear Big Tech, Stop Shoving AI Into Operating Systems 2 months ago:
“Ohhhh, that tired old OS was using AI 1.6. We’ve been offering the new OS -now with AI 1.8 - for 7 solid weeks now! We recommend you upgrade now, as we’re shutting down AI 1.6 on Tuesday.”
- Comment on BOM predicts one of the warmest winters on record 2 months ago:
Warmest winter on record, so far.
- Comment on Record enrolment [98.2%] ahead of 2025 federal election | AEC 2 months ago:
AEC does a good job of nudging people into getting their enrolment details organised. I changed addresses a little while ago, and it was 30 seconds online to update, with confirmation a few days later via SMS and email.
- Comment on Don't send that Plutonium guy to jail 3 months ago:
My son ordered me a cube with a bit of silver from the US, it’s part of a periodic table set.
It was delayed a little, and when it arrived at his door there was a little note from Australian customs basically saying, “This is cool and everything, but don’t go ordering the radioactive elements from this place unless you have all the right paperwork, ok?”
- Comment on Unexpected use of FR2 of the week: Phenolic gears 4 months ago:
Older engines had them in their timing gears - they were in 6 cylinder Holdens, for example.
They give an amount of cushioning/vibration dampening that you can’t get with steel gear sets.
- Comment on “I Want Every Young Mum Back In The Office Permanently” Says Multimillionaire Childcare Profiteer 4 months ago:
- Comment on trying to test washing machine motor; saw a white flash, voltage dropped, what happened? 5 months ago:
Hm that certainly won’t help!
- Comment on trying to test washing machine motor; saw a white flash, voltage dropped, what happened? 5 months ago:
You can use a set of probes in series with a 100 watt incandescent bulb as a “poor man’s megger” to roughly check insulation. Of course everything needs to be appropriately insulated for this!
Remove the motor from the washing machine and place it on an insulating surface.
Put one probe from your light bulb on a motor terminal.
Put the other probe on the frame of the motor.
The bulb should not light up.
Repeat for various motor terminals in case there are different windings/etc.
- Comment on trying to test washing machine motor; saw a white flash, voltage dropped, what happened? 5 months ago:
Possibly your motor is having an insulation breakdown when 220v is applied. Looks fine when testing with an ordinary multimeter and it’s low supply voltage.
So everything looks fine until it powers up. This flashover would likely fry whatever control components are in your main board, and it’s possible that your safety capacitor has a set of polyfuses in it that temporarily go high resistance when excess load is applied.
To check for an insulation breakdown you’d really need a megger which can apply 250/500v to the motor windings to check the leakage to ground/between windings.
- Comment on Private parking rules review prompted by £2,000 five-minute fine 5 months ago:
In Australia with similar parking companies they have to prove that the losses incurred would amount to what they are trying to invoice.
That is, the invoiced amount can’t be a penalty, it can only be up to the amount required to recoup the financial loss they would incur from being unable to rent out that spot for the duration under their usual rates. This is the basic “making them whole again” principle of compensation that applies in the legal system when parties are injured.
The “penalty” amount that they attempt to invoice is thus pretty difficult for them to justify, seeing that all day parking can usually be had for $20 or so.