shads

@shads@lemy.lol

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨More police busts in Italy⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  Well yes, but also no. I went to school with a bunch of dumb asses who used metalwork classes to make “throwing stars”, and half of them haven’t been to prison yet.

  I had an electronics teacher help me make “tripwires” to play a prank on a friend at school camp that would set off an airhorn once tripped, it was only after I finished he thought to mention “Don’t use these to trigger anything else, and don’t put the airhorn inside the tent with him.”

  Teenagers and sometimes the engineers who fall in to teaching them can be astoundingly dumb and work the challenge rather than think of the consequences.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Lesbian group seeks legal exemption to exclude trans women from events⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  Literally my first thought: s it going to be based on honesty policy or is one of them going to act as the official genital inspector? I mean I am a heterosexual cisgender man, but even I can see that they are going to struggle to attract new young members when the newbies have to demonstrate their fully functional reproductive system to a senior member before being invited to events.

  I have heard some pretty rough stories of women transvestigating people and making it worse by pushing past the limits of verbal and psychological harassment into physical assault. Do they really feel that this will make their community safer?

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Exclusive: Albanese government expresses interest in setting up privileged faith advisory body | Rationalist Society of Australia⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  No but you don’t understand… the Indigineous people would have used a special voice to parliament to gain unfair benefits over everyone else and push their own agendas. Religious leaders are completely apolitical and no agenda.

  Do I really need to add the /s?

  Just in case: /S

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Council scraps four-day work week plan after backlash from business sector⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  The amount of vitriol coming from the usual sources towards this proposal was pretty high. The comment section on Pulse (local online publication with some backroom links to the state Liberal party) was full of people upset with even the idea of council workers getting pay rises a little over CPI, not to mention all the racist, bigoted, misogynistic stuff that’s usually on there.

  Honestly Tasmania is this melting pot of conservatives (with all the negative connotations that word can carry) right through to the most impractical of hippies, but the fringe elements of both sides are the most visible.

  The big difference is that the hippies have a political party that occasionally sees some success at a state level and some activist level zines. Whereas the conservatives have a political party that keeps getting voted into power and effectively the entire media landscape jamming a party line directly into their heads.

  My tin foil hat theory is that the HIA is worried that showing too much humanity to council workers will get some in the construction industry peering over the fence and wondering why the grass is so much greener. They of course couch it around delays to getting projects completed, but I have known plenty of builders who work around supplier and sub-contractor availability without it destroying their businesses, the industry, or society its self. I’m fairly certain they would do the same with council work being a 4 day a week thing.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Australia’s Social Media Ban Is Isolating Kids With Disabilities—Just Like Critics Warned⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  I only apply that judgement where it fits. If you are an anti-vaxxer I don’t need you as a friend. If you tell everyone who will listen that Daniel Andrews is a paedophile based on rumours that apparently started on cairnsnews.org, I don’t need you as a friend. If you think Port Arthur was a false flag to take away your guns I don’t need you as a friend. If you think the lazy botched mess that is this legislation has more to do with protecting kids than getting us used to handing over our ID or biometrics to whichever large company asks for it I don’t need you as a friend.

  I called my member and asked who will pay for the damage that this could cause in the event of massive data breaches and was told that the eSafety Commissioner was empowered to hand out fines of hundreds of thousands of dollars per person affected by breaches… Why is Discord not trying to figure out how to pay tens or hundreds of millions of dollars in fines? Because the government doesn’t care and Comissioner Grant is too busy flying around the world doing a victory lap to bother with trivial details like protecting the people she is selling out for her pet project.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨What's a good audiobooks server/client combo?⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Audiobookshelf is fantastic, however if you aren’t ready to self host I would have a long think about if you want to start pulling that thread.

  We are not IOS users so can’t comment on client software but the experience on Android is pretty good.

  Got my wife set up and a few titles from Librivox for her to stream while driving across my home state for work and she essentially jumped from Google Play Books to Audiobookshelf without missing a beat, saved us a lot of money on a voice she largely ignores to help her focus.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Australia’s Social Media Ban Is Isolating Kids With Disabilities—Just Like Critics Warned⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Agreed, completely. I used Facebook for all of 9 months before I did the self reflection and realised that it was like voluntarily poisoning myself and got out in, I think, 2012 or so. I was unemployed at the time and it became clear to me that it was doing bad things to me mentally and I was developing an addiction to the scroll.

  Imagine if you would that instead of this garbage social media ban on kids we had some serious investigation into the corrosive nature of these social media orgs and they were held accountable for every bit of “experimentation” they conducted without informed consent. While we were at it we could have maybe whipped up some regulstion to curb the gambling industry.

  The only people I have personally talked with who say the teen social media ban is unambiguously good just so happen to be the same people whose brains have been completely cooked by a combination of Facebook and Sky News. I kid you not when I say that the last person to loudly assert social media ban good also told me about the time he threatened bodily harm to a man who was wearing a mask immediately after Covid lockdowns were lifted and got upset when he unmasked got within 20cm of his face.

  Oh and the absolute bullshit conspiracy theories he spouted about Daniel Andrews while telling me he wishes we had an Australian Trump to “get rid of all the corrupt pedos in Australian Politics”.

  Oh how I wish we had some IT savvy legislators who would make good law, since this won’t happen I would settle for them doing nothing. This sort of ineffectual crap serves the sole purpose of creating opportunities for these corporations to further entrench their hold over the internet. I am watching on with dread to find out how much data is going directly to Palantir from this mess.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Australia’s Social Media Ban Is Isolating Kids With Disabilities—Just Like Critics Warned⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  With all due respect that’s the justification, not the “why”. The why is politicians wanting to be seen as proactive and advertising company’s wanting to protect the goose that lays the golden eggs by heading of regulation on advertising of the gambling industry. If addictive and algorithmic harms was the actual concerns we would be in the process of legislating the gambling industry out of existence. Add to the above a light sprinkling of oh so grudging compliance from social media companies who will be seeing a boost in the value of their data now they can tie it with even greater certainty to a real world ID.

  I am ideologically opposed to the Liberal party, it’s shit like this that makes me reconsider my support of the Labor party. I already vote independent most of the time, looks like Labor doesn’t want to win me back.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Australia’s Social Media Ban Is Isolating Kids With Disabilities—Just Like Critics Warned⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  So you are criticising this story for being to broad and generalised by using a broad and generalised example. You are right the thirty minutes my kids were blocked on social media was absolutely worth the upheaval and angst of this government imposed erosion of EVERYONES privacy. Oh and before you start waffling about how I should be policing their social media usage, I was doing that before this farce was implemented through the astounding application of a skill called parenting. Only thing is now the major control I had over my kids most prevalent online usage… Youtube… Is now gone as I no longer have the ability to view what they are using.

  This law doesn’t actually make anything better, it doesn’t help and it just causes division and more angst. When the vast majority of the kids that go to school with mine have had uninterrupted usage of social media and its only 1 in 10 or 1 in 20 that get targeted it is just another means of ostracization, only this is government mandated.

  But hey if you think this is a good and effective law I have a bridge you might be interested in, solidly made only one previous owner.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨‘Manfluencers’ are filming themselves trying to pick up women using smart glasses⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  I bet you the Venn diagram of doing this crap and being incapable of comprehending why women picked the bear is a perfect circle.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨When you know your boss is an insane moron⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  I had a manager tell me that my unproductive time was right on the borderline once, like 1 more minute of unproductive time and I would be getting coached. Then casually mentioned that the timer resolution is down to 6 seconds, so I was actually 24 seconds off coaching. The same manager wanted to have a company representative (aka a company Doctor) present for my Doctors appointment when I got diagnosed with Shingles, since people in their 30s can’t get Shingles according to her Telco middle manager training. My Doctor offered to have his lawyer present at the same appointment and they backed off, I miss that guy.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨When you know your boss is an insane moron⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Oh, oh no. I’m having severe flashbacks to working in a call center. Quick someone tell me the company pays me to turn around the customer within a reasonable time, and that I should be balancing my call metrics, having a near perfect FCR, NPS and hold time doesn’t excuse me having an AHT 40% higher than my colleague who is getting coached around dropping every call that seems more than middling complex.

  I feel like Ryan isn’t getting the full experience unless Sharon has 2 levels of middle management over her in that office alone, all 3 levels trying desperately to justify their existence.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Science teachers from Queensland Open Brethren schools told to teach students about vegetarian dinosaurs on Noah’s Ark⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  But the kids might ask questions:

  • How big was the one window on the ark?
  • Why put only a single door in the side?
  • Why would an all knowing god specify dimensions for an ark to take all the animals that in no way could facilitate even a fraction of the animals on Earth?
  • Why is the church so cool with children being raped?
  • Jesus seems pretty clear that being rich makes getting into heaven a tough pull, does Ken Ham want to go to hell?
  • In a universe ruled over by an all knowing, all good, and all powerful deity… Ken Ham, WTF???
• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Aurora australis set to light up Australian sky as agencies monitor ‘severe’ solar storm⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  Well it was certainly visible, not as good as the night we had a couple of years ago, but I was successfully getting colour from the sky just shooting handheld on my phone.

  Image

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Melbourne goes from among the most to least expensive capital cities⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  If we weren’t competing with Landlords driving the cost of houses up to astronomical levels by buying up stock and living on the speculative investment value who would be buying houses… Hmm that’s a toughy we might need to get back to you.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Melbourne goes from among the most to least expensive capital cities⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  I’ll touch base with him next time he is back in town from sailing on his yacht and ask if he is better off.

  He is my go to example, not the only business owner I know who has outright stated working for a living is dumb. It’s almost always people working in trades who evangelise the benefits of being a landlord to me, and who can blame them?

  Work 20-30 years and be physically broken for whatever time you have left, or work for long enough to get the first 2 or 3 properties bought and then use that as a platform to become a full time landlord.

  One of those options is definitely the less physically impactful. This is also the route to personal wealth for a whole lot of politicians, so they are far less likely to close the loopholes they themselves are using for personal enrichment.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Melbourne goes from among the most to least expensive capital cities⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  My previous landlord shutdown his Electrical business because it makes less sense to funnel money into keeping a business operational than to just use it to buy more property. When we have small businesses shutting down so people can join the landlord class is it at least worth considering that something is askew in our economy?

  If the political will existed then we could tackle monopolistic property ownership through regulation anyway. In the event we get politicians to legislate against their own cashcow then having them legislate against lobbyists shouldn’t be that hard.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Melbourne goes from among the most to least expensive capital cities⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  You’re kidding right? I know at least 3 people personally who would riot if that happened and one of them is a politician. Line must go up, if line doesn’t go up it’s time for a new government, if line doesn’t go up enough time for a new government, hell if line goes up in the wrong way time for a new government.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Snow forecast for [Tasmania] on Christmas Day⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Only for certain parts of the state, not on Liverpool Street in Hobart. But yeah it’s been moderately cold and rainy all day Christmas Eve.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨I didn't want to use AI, so I made something that detects it!⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  I was trying to solidify a joke about beating up people who are pro-AI, but just can’t get the timing right.

  But I do have a question for someone who can apparently see things from both sides. Do you think that people’s perceptions and engagement would be different if “AI” was marketed as natural language processing coding / programming expert system.

  I feel like some of the visceral pushback against “AI” would be reduced if we didn’t all have to pretend there was actual intelligence in operation. Plus it would seem more like the successor to context aware code completion, rather than the successor to the individual sat at the keyboard.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Australia’s Social Media Ban Was Pushed By Ad Agency Focused On Gambling Ads It Didn’t Want Banned⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  I started writing out a detailed reply going into all the nuance, but I feel that it’s a waste of time. I’m not sure if you are trolling as such, but you are being deliberately obtuse. I actually feel like you understand the points that people are making to you quite clearly. This is terrible legislation, it’s a knee jerk reaction to a complex problem, with very few exceptions this is almost always a bad way of enacting policy.

  The jab at my parenting because I already do the things you claim parents are too feeble to do without the government holding their hand is admittedly irritating, but I am going to choose to move past it.

  This is the brainfart of a conservative grifter, it’s satanic panic, it’s the war on drugs, it’s another populist policy being pitched at the unintelligent to draw their attention while the business and political interests behind it are picking their pocket. You choose not to see it that way then fine, but we both know it’s true.

  I am going to stop engaging with you now, feel free to have as many last says and derisive put downs as you want. I will not be reading them.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Australia’s Social Media Ban Was Pushed By Ad Agency Focused On Gambling Ads It Didn’t Want Banned⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  The parental controls I had? That worked just fine? That no longer work as the kids are force logged out of YouTube until they have turned 16. Or do you mean I should engage with Microsoft’s virtual spyware? Sorry but we are an opt out family and I do all I can to block telemetry and surveillance as I think my kids deserve better than to be reduced to a profile on a server. What do you use to monitor your kids activity online?

  Do you not see the betrayal of our elected officials bowing to minority interests and pursuing policies that are, at very best, counterproductive, and at worst a distraction, that experts are telling them will not have the intended outcomes, to give them an excuse to avoid legislating the harder things? A deciding factor for my preferences at the last election was to minimise the creeping advance of the surveillance state that Dutton so obviously desperately wanted to push through… We are getting it anyway.

  We keep moving further and further away from privacy and security in the face of the spooky spectres of “terrorism” and “protecting the children” but once we have handed those things over they are almost impossibly hard to regain. When we look back in 10 years and realise we voluntarily handed the government and big business all the info they need to monitor our every movement online at all times and got nothing in return how do we stuff that Genie back in the bottle?

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Australia’s Social Media Ban Was Pushed By Ad Agency Focused On Gambling Ads It Didn’t Want Banned⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  No, what it does is removes agency from parents and tells us that we aren’t capable of raising our kids, the government will have to do it. My kids have been asking, for several years, to get Facebook accounts so they can use marketplace. I used that desire to have a frank discussion with them about how predatory Facebook is and how sinister it is that they have subsumed so many things that used to be independent and didn’t require an account with them specifically so they can lock users in and Hoover up more data. I have told the kids that if they want Facebook accounts after they turn 18 they are welcome to open them then, but until that day I am not allowing them to give up their privacy. Do I seem disengaged as a parent?

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Australia’s Social Media Ban Was Pushed By Ad Agency Focused On Gambling Ads It Didn’t Want Banned⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Not to mention it is counter productive in a number of ways. I have lost the ability to monitor my kids YouTube usage, the kids are just going to move to alternate platforms, and I am amongst the cohort of sensible Australians who will refuse to use social media before I provide some dodgy AI company my ID, it’s going to be a lot harder to convince my kids to do the same once all their friends and peers start ratcheting up the conformity pressure after they turn 16. This whole thing isn’t misguided, it’s a betrayal of the majority of Australians who are too dumb to realise what they are giving away to access these services.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Reddit files legal challenge against social media ban for under-16s⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Perhaps if some thought and care had been put into this ridiculous land grab by our government this kind of outcome could have been avoided.

  I’m not giving Reddit a single bit of benefit of the doubt here, but by pushing back against this they may be helping us instead of pissing on us for a change.

  Instead of using political capital to shove age verification down our throats, imagine if they used that same capital to restrict gambling advertising? Or implement strong data protection and privacy legislation? Or strong laws against IP theft by AI companies? The government could have pursued all sorts of positive policies to materially improve life for us, what we got instead was the conjunction of the masturbatory fantasies of the intelligence community (who have never enjoyed us having any privacy) and knee jerk reactionary conservatives who know best how to raise kids because of “muh feels”.

  This half baked, vague, wishy washy law has made my kids materially less safe online, all so the government can soft sell the idea that you should have to provide ID for every interaction online.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨MegaThread: Under 16 lockout/verification/ID required⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Wow I wish the media would remember that a strong independent media that is willing to hold the government to account actually makes for a stronger democracy.

  Somehow Jonathon Haidt is being discussed as the ultimate authority on this topic because he wrote a book that some pollies read. Not seeing Candice Odgers being brought up, just to grab a name at random. Her take seems a bit more nuanced but we can’t do nuance these days.

  And meanwhile the truly catastrophic damage is already being done, how many young people handed over their biometric data today? Yes there is a lot of noise in that data, but the politicians are categorically stating that the systems will improve over time, if the scope of data collection is solely for the purpose of performing verification and no data is being retained… How exactly are these systems expecting to improve over time… And the mask is off, “Won’t somebody think of the kids!!!” Is actually, “Won’t somebody provide categorised biometric data to the scumbag AI companies?”.

  Citizens need to start demanding that the eSafety Commissioner investigate these AI companies for misappropriation of data starting today, if the demands are concerted and consistent enough maybe we can keep the government tied up investigating these companies and help them avoid shooting any more toes off in the process.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨The lesson of the Cronulla riots was that the beach was not for people like me. But it’s a myth I am increasingly resisting | Sarah Malik⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  I genuinely don’t think I have anything to add to that. It’s all just so petty and tawdry.

  On a related note I think it’s worth mentioning that this is all accelerated by a 24 hour news cycle and the amount of right-wingers who insist on dragging American culture wars and politics over to Australia, I’m guessing because our own politics aren’t dramatic enough for them, which then platforms the worst sort of people.

  Maybe that’s reaping what we sewed considering we exported Rupert. Now we are importing hate & radicalism on-top of our own domestic stock.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨The lesson of the Cronulla riots was that the beach was not for people like me. But it’s a myth I am increasingly resisting | Sarah Malik⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  I want to preface this by saying that I don’t believe anything could serve as recompense for what those women and girls went through.

  But it’s a bit telling that they had been caught, tried, found guilty and were actively serving their sentences, yet the mob (or at least elements of it) still clung to that pretence as a way of being able to attack and traumatize an entire community.

  I sincerely doubt that this was the first flirtation with racism for many of these people. Violent race based attacks maybe, but not racism on the extreme end of the spectrum.

  Slightly off topic anecdote:

  I talked with a refugee from sub Saharan Africa once, he was pretty cooked and not super lucid. Talking to a friend later she revealed that she had dealt with him before doing community outreach.

  She explained that his parents had got him out of Africa ahead of a little ethnic cleansing and brought him to Australia as a young child. He had then spent the next decade plus dealing with racism, ranging from casual to overt and targeted. Started on drugs at 13 and looked like he was in his late 30s before he turned 20.

  I’m certain he was no angel, but I feel like he was forced down a pathway in life by the environment he lived in through no choice of his own. How different could his life have turned out if he had landed in the right community?

  I despair that we are really terrible at just living with people from different places and cultures, especially when they make up a minority in our communities.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨MegaThread: Under 16 lockout/verification/ID required⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  My MP started off giving this topic a simple once over and agreed with it. Then listened to a bunch of constituents, experts and just the rhetoric from other politicians. He has since changed his stance on it. Also he happens to be an Independent.

  Strange how much of the inequity in our current system is related to people who are motivated to vote along party lines instead of listening to the people who put them in their position isn’t it?

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨The lesson of the Cronulla riots was that the beach was not for people like me. But it’s a myth I am increasingly resisting | Sarah Malik⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Not a Sydney-sider or from NSW, was the racial tension that was stoked up to the riots really caused or significantly contributed to by that horrible series of rapes?

  For the outside I get the feeling it’s a brick in the wall kind of thing. Along with lots of racism, culture clash, opportunistic politicians and grifter shock jocks.

  But I understand it’s hard to gauge the vibe of a culture from a half a continent away. Even more so doing it 20 years later.