shads

@shads@lemy.lol

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Car sun visor with built-in navigation⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  I like it, however are you concerned about having something made out of hard plastic, glass and metal at roughly head height in the event of a crash?

  Having seen a few improvised claymore mines in cars (rhinestones or diamontes on steering wheels or dashes) it’s always something I consider.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Menthol cigarettes banned and every stick to hold a warning⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  They are already complaining about the hole in the budget illegal tobacco products are leaving, how on earth would our economy stand up to losing the addiction tax?

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨'Won't back down': Inside the anti-wind farm crusade threatening Australian Labor seats⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  I get a really slimy vibe from this RFI group. Kinda reminds me of the NIMBY groups that go around blocking mobile phone sites.

  I remember talking to a planner once about the mobile phone blocking efforts and he was pretty scathing about what he had seen, some of it genuinely people who had an axe to grind based upon Facebook radicalisation, but a lot of it seemed to have deeper financial motivations from some of the organisers.

  He told a vague story about a guy who kicked up a big stink with a proposed tower for highway coverage in a rural area, that is until the site was relocated and he found out afterwards that the secondary site selected was owned by a relative of the guy kicking up the stink who made bag off the bush block that was suddenly worth more than 15 times its previous value.

  I fully endorse research and feasibility studies with an eye towards minimising environmental impacts, but if the alternative to these projects is continued reliance on coal and gas I suspect that the long term impacts are far more likely to be worse by not going ahead with the OSW.

  Of course I would prefer that the development were done by a domestic company rather than foreign investors, but it seems we don’t really do massive infrastructure domestically any more.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨[deleted]⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  Is it too late to set up a bunch of forks on github of AI counter measure software, change the descriptions of each to rambling diatribes about the Musk Rat, explaining how you aim to take him down personally, and then forward it to them as an example of your current work?

  I wonder how negative you have to be about AI and Musk to get the offer withdrawn?

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Cloudflare announces AI Labyrinth, which uses AI-generated content to confuse and waste the resources of AI Crawlers and bots that ignore “no crawl” directives.⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  I find this amusing, had a conversation with an older relative who asked about AI because I am “the computer guy” he knows. Explained basically how I understand LLMs to operate, that they are pattern matching to guess what the next token should be based on a statistical probability. Explained that they sometimes hallucinate, or go of on wild tangents due to this and that they can be really good at aping and regurgitating things but there is no understanding simply respinning fragments to try to generate a response that pleases the asker.

  He observed, “oh we are creating computer religions, just without the practical aspects of having to operate in the mundane world that have to exist before a real religion can get started. That’s good, religions that have become untethered from day to day practical life have never caused problems for anyone.”

  Which I found scarily insightful.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨'Investor' is a dirty word for first-home buyers — but are they the real villains?⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  I don’t know all the ins and outs of her financial situation. But I do know it’s been a point of contention. And she is not the first property owner I have talked to who has been pinged for not charging enough rent as far as a bank was concerned.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨'Investor' is a dirty word for first-home buyers — but are they the real villains?⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Thousands of words of waffle to try to be apologists for those poor unfairly maligned property investors who were just doing their best when they took advantage of circumstances and taxation benefits to snap up the available supply of a limited resource.

  Do they realise that enabling this class of people to do these things without the threat of social consequence is at least in part how this gets normalised.

  Not only that but it skews society. My sister owns two properties thanks to an interstate move for work requiring her to spend more than a decade away from the first home unit she purchased. That first unit was on the rental market for a little under a year while my Mum saw out the lease at her rental she then moved into my sisters and is maintaining the unit as though it was her own. She pays the mortgage, pays for maintenance, rates etc. My sister calls the aggregate of these payments rent (I imagine she derives some tax benefits from this but I don’t imagine it’s super significant and she does pay for things like strata fees herself). Every time she talks to her bank she gets harassed about not deriving enough income from this property asset and that she won’t be eligible for more money until she raises the “rent” my mother pays… By a lot. She is currently looking to sell the 2nd house she bought to put the money towards the next interstate purchase for the new requirements of her job and is being told the bank won’t extend her a loan until the rent on the unit is increased to a “reasonable” amount.

  Our system is broken, badly, and the only corrections I can see that would reintroduce equity will destroy the people who have invested into the property ponzi scheme. Find me a government who would bankrupt a large portion of the population, including themselves, for a better future. I’ll arrange an airborne porcine squadron to replace the Roulettes for the next ANZAC day to celebrate.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Microsoft has pulled back on over a gigawatt of planned data center capacity, suggesting that they do not think there is a growth future in generative AI⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Had a big thing written out, didn’t like it when I read it back. So keeping it simple, I equivocated to try to deflect some of the potential rough replies from the cultists who have already drunk the Koolaid.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Microsoft has pulled back on over a gigawatt of planned data center capacity, suggesting that they do not think there is a growth future in generative AI⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Hmm, not meaning to get my conspiracy hat on here but do we think this could relate to the fact that Microsoft now has a quantum computing chip that they can hype to their investors to show they have the next big thing in the bag?

  AI has served its purpose and is no longer strategically necessary?

  Since they are only spending investors money it doesn’t matter if they burn billions on leading the industry down the wrong path and now they can let it rot on the vine and rake in the next round of funding while the competition scrambles to catch up.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Could Musk's unpopularity in Australia impact the election?⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  You know I was thinking that rents have been climbing throughout the whole country. Maybe the government needs to take into account that Trump and his cronies are out there ratcheting up tensions internationally and posturing as bullies on a global stage, then apply a small rent increase on US bases on our soil. A lazy hundred billion or so for Pine Gap should cover a lot of trade shortfall and somewhat compensate for the extra risk we are shouldering. When Trump calls to posture about it tell him we will increase troops on the border to prevent fentanyl and crack down on the cartels, then offer him the same price and watch him Art of the Deal™ that into a negotiating victory for himself.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Australia bans DeepSeek on government devices over security risk⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Our government banning wealthy off-shore interests just because they happen to be highly toxic and detrimental with negligible benefits to the citizens they are exploiting…

  Sounds like a slippery slope there.

  I imagine there are more than a few companies/industries that would see that as a dangerous precedent.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Australia bans DeepSeek on government devices over security risk⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  And just look at what is happening in the US right now, this statement being arguably true today means nothing about how things will be tomorrow. You can’t put the genie back in the bottle here.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Australia bans DeepSeek on government devices over security risk⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  How many of these Chinese government supported companies are being provided a veneer of legitimacy by being officially sanctioned to use on state and federal supplied and supported IT resources? Because Microsoft 100% is. Hell they are even getting to supply training materials to government workers on how best to integrate Copilot into their day to day workflows. I am no fan of the Chinese government but I don’t reserve a greater store of trust for US backed Ad-tech companies either and thanks to Five Eyes once one of the aligned governments has your info it’s the same as all of them having it. I have only once interacted with an online LLM, run a few self hosted on my own hardware for probably 3-4 hours and realised that they aren’t worth the power consumption, and really aren’t worth opening a gaping hole into my own privacy. The fact that there are government workers and government organisations who are happily surrendering our data to these companies with no explicit consent sets of more alarm bells than I can express, regardless of the country of origin. And yes I declined the eHealth record and will be doing everything I can to resist digital drivers license because our government is fundamentally untrustworthy and borderline tech illiterate and the IT consultancies they deal with for any IT related infrastructure or services make them look like paragons of virtue and competency.

  But that’s just my opinion.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Australia bans DeepSeek on government devices over security risk⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  And yet Copilot is busy burrowing into the flesh of the government like a growing hookworm, a large swathe of big business is simply trusting to Microsoft’s: “Oh no we keep your data entirely seperate and safe. We don’t use it to train the LLM, pinky promise.” Whilst ChatGPT keeps showing up in the hands of the most clueless people, “Oh I gave it all my personal info so it could rewrite my resume. How great is AI!”

  I feel like this could be solved immediately and easily, make every privacy breach by any company subject to a fine totalling a single digit percentage of global turnover of the company. So for each privacy breach where Copilot is involved that will be… say… 3 billion dollars. They would yank their “AI Solution” from the local market so quickly you would hear a cracking sound.