dgriffith
@dgriffith@aussie.zone
- Comment on Geologists doubt Earth has the amount of copper needed to develop the entire world 1 week 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 week 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 2 weeks 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 3 weeks 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 4 weeks 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 4 weeks 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? 4 weeks 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 5 weeks 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 5 weeks 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] 1 month 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 1 month 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 1 month 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 1 month ago:
Warmest winter on record, so far.
- Comment on Record enrolment [98.2%] ahead of 2025 federal election | AEC 1 month 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 1 month 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 2 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 2 months ago:
- Comment on trying to test washing machine motor; saw a white flash, voltage dropped, what happened? 3 months ago:
Hm that certainly won’t help!
- Comment on trying to test washing machine motor; saw a white flash, voltage dropped, what happened? 3 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? 4 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 4 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.
- Comment on If me and a bunch of my lemmy friends got on a yacht. Went into international waters what could we get away with legally and what would still be illegal? 4 months ago:
Not carrying the flag I think is a big crime basically everywhere
Hence why flying the pirate flag is a big deal. You’re indicating “no laws here”.
- Comment on If me and a bunch of my lemmy friends got on a yacht. Went into international waters what could we get away with legally and what would still be illegal? 4 months ago:
- Comment on Facebook and Instagram to Unleash AI-Generated ‘Users’ No One Asked For 5 months ago:
And holy shit does their algorithm latch onto any minor interest in their content.
Accidentally tapped on a floor tiling video the other day, three days of tiling and handyman videos jammed into my feed and me pressing the “not interested” button on every single one.
Facebook, I am there for the rare post from my 150 or so friends and family. That’s it. Nothing else.
The reason we don’t use it anymore is because actual posts from real humans we know are buried under a torrent of shit. Sometimes their posts take days to surface leading to all sorts of chain-mail posts on how to “get your feed back”. None of which work because the whole business model is about jamming sponsored shit down your throat.
- Comment on Embodied Is Actually Trying To Release ‘Moxie’ Robots To The Open Source Community 5 months ago:
Trying to, because there is no more money to continue development.
Hopefully they can pull it off and do the same as Pebble did when they released a last firmware update for their watches that allowed third party servers to be used.
- Comment on Australian bosses on notice as 'deliberate' wage theft becomes a crime 5 months ago:
The ATO would know, and while they are slow, once it is raised with them they get there in the end. About 5 years after I left a job I got a letter out of the blue from the ATO saying that they’d chased down a quarter’s worth of super payments that the business didn’t pay when I left.
Perhaps not 15 years later though, but it’s worth a shot.
- Comment on The loyalty tax shoppers willingly pay despite push for supermarket competition 5 months ago:
The range just isn’t there.
Apart from a few name brand food items, they generally only stock one type of item. So you don’t have 5 different types of alfoil you can buy, but you can still buy alfoil.
- Comment on So what are we going to do with all this social media age-gate stuff? 5 months ago:
I certainly wouldn’t stake my money on just being deemed “too small to care about”
Something to consider on that point is that there might be a spike in the userbase once the major players put in whatever irritating form of age verification the govt dreams up.
- Comment on An unwritten 'country code' is putting Rob's life at risk on the road, and all he's doing is turning right 5 months ago:
Get on uhf40 at the top of the gateway bridge in Brisbane, you can hear every whinging/gossiping truckie in the city all at once haha.
- Comment on An unwritten 'country code' is putting Rob's life at risk on the road, and all he's doing is turning right 5 months ago:
I’ve seen plenty of trucks do the single right hand indicator blink, usually b-doubles and larger.
I interpret that as a few things:
- Old mate has noticed me behind them and has judged the road ahead to be suitably clear, so I can nose out and have a look and go for it if I think it’s ok, and
- That they in turn have a good bit of road ahead of them so they can attempt to nudge all the trailers to the left for me as I come past.
