eureka

@eureka@aussie.zone

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Politicians hoping AI can fix Australia’s housing crisis are risking another Robodebt⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  The idea of “AI solving” some social crisis is a farce. The problem isn’t that we don’t know what policies will improve the situation. An AI program or a simulation doesn’t have the political power necessary to solve any of these problems.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Neo-Nazi leader ordered to complete community service for intimidating police officer⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  You make a good point that law shouldn’t be applied based off belief.

  However, and I’m not saying this in regard to your point but as an independent sidenote, we must remember that Sewer isn’t just someone who believes things, they lead a violent cult. They’ve been repeatedly convicted of affray and violent disorder among other things. Neo-Nazism isn’t some abstract harmless idea, and given their context, these threats are not the same as if you or I performed them.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨what is up with u/dwazoup⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  Whether or not you meant it, your post is quite poetic. A tragedy in two lines, or perhaps a koan, the irony of their inactivity screaming out to them in vain.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨what is up with u/dwazoup⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  Do you know if anyone’s tried to contact the person running all those accounts? Their Lemmy accounts would be flooded with post replies so I doubt the owner even looks at them. I don’t have a microblog account so let’s see if this ping works:

  @Dwazoup@mastodon.social, hello! I’d like to hear your point of view on these posts :)

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Welcome to Australia’s Property Nightmare⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  I think the video is a bit mistitled since it’s a single house inspection but it’s a solid glance in to the trends of current properties.

  (The real welcome to our property nightmare IMO would be looking through Site Inspection’s videos and seeing million dollar homes with balcony supports made of styrofoam, mold bait windows, exposed screws and floating supports.)

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Under false flags: why are Australia’s blue and red ensigns and Eureka flag being flown at rightwing rallies?⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  As they mentioned, the Eureka flag has long been associated with the labour movement here. Some of the Rail Tram Bus Union comrades have it printed on their jacket’s arm, CMFEU fly it next to their union flag on sites, and I’ve seen it flown consistently at Gaza rallies by union socialists (including sometimes a red variant similar to my profile image).

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨How neo-Nazis captured the March for Australia - Documenting crowd manipulation tricks at various rallies⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  Props to the few who did stand up to them, who are highlighted in the video.

• How neo-Nazis captured the March for Australia - Documenting crowd manipulation tricks at various ralliesyoutube.com ↗
  Submitted ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩ to ⁨australia@aussie.zone⁩ | ⁨1⁩ ⁨comment⁩
• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨@jack_toohey on why the housing crisis is not caused by migration⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  Thanks for the detailed reply.

  It doesn’t suggest that speculative vacancies are a driver of the housing crisis in Australia.

  I was quoting that to explain that speculative vacancy can be a valid, highly profitable strategy for investors. That quote alone isn’t evidence, yes.

  An investor reluctant to “shell out” for upkeep and maintenance is exactly the type of investor that needs the regular rent income to help cover the other costs of ownership like rates, body corporate, interest, et cetera.

  I don’t understand how this can be assumed. Investors wanting to reduce cost and risk doesn’t imply they need regular income. Rich investment funds would have the same incentive to do that, right?

  They do however demonstrate that vacancy is not the cause of the current housing crisis.

  Yes, it’s not going to be the cause. There isn’t going to be a single cause, like you said it isn’t even the only cause of mass vacancy. In fact, given it’s used as a long-term investment strategy, I suspect that this is a long-term factor that enabled or accelerated the crisis, rather than being an immediate catalyst that suddenly happened a few years ago.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨On Sunday, I walked among those who want me gone from Australia⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  Results were wildly different in different rallies. For example, in Sydney, the crowd was about 50:50 on boos and cheers for the neo-Nazi speaker. This is very different to Adelaide where the organisers rightfully (albeit far too late) tried to deplatform the NSN once they took to the stage and spewed their garbage, leading to a fight and the end of the event.

  I believe it was only the Sydney one that let one of them speak

  They owned the only microphone being used at the Townsville rally and they owned the podium used in the Melbourne rally with widely-used footage of Sewer speaking there. So you have to be pretty out of the loop if you honestly believe that.

  Just because some bad people try to co-opt something it doesn’t mean that they were bad people protests. The overwhelming majority of people there were there for the stated reasons, none of which were racist or “neo nazi”.

  We can’t generalise everyone, you’re right that a majority probably wouldn’t have supported neo-Nazis, many in larger rallies may not have seen them there before they took the stage, and plenty of attendees I wouldn’t consider to be racists, even if they’re expressing or supporting racist rhetoric. But this doesn’t change the fact that most of them attended a racist rally and should understand that and learn for next time this nationalist cover is tried.

  It was co-opted before 99% of the people going there even heard of it. It was well-publicised in advance that many organisers were known neo-Nazis and white supremacists. The official promotions kept posting racist rhetoric about Indians, framing European immigration as acceptable. At the end of the day, it was largely a neo-Nazi attempt to appeal to broader nationalists, with some, limited, success. There were plenty of cheers among the boos during their speeches. “The overwhelming majority” didn’t fuck off or fight back once literal Nazis took the stage, and in most cases, kept the stage for the whole speech.

  The anti-immigration rhetoric, that the housing crisis is caused or heavily impacted by immigration, is a racist deflection of real economic issues. I’m not suggesting that people repeating the argument are racists, or even that they realise it’s a racist argument. It’s a very normalised argument and once even promoted by Labor politicians and mass media. But that doesn’t change the fact that it’s racism being used to deflect the housing crisis, the education crisis, the hospital crisis and more away from the government and the owning class. Stopping migration won’t even begin to solve those issues.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨On Sunday, I walked among those who want me gone from Australia⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  The Melbourne rally literally used Thomas Sewell’s own podium that you can see in their own NSN videos.

  The Townsville rally used the NSN’s branded megaphone, Katter says there was no other one there.

  The Sydney organiser, Bec Freedom, is a white nationalist with strong links to the NSN. Before the rally, it was well-publicised that they were a white nationalist in conversations with neo-Nazis. 1+1.

  “There’s a lot of people trying to claim the rally as their own and turn it into a unity march,” Freedom said. “I understand why some people are saying it’s not about race. Though people like that … they’re scared. But if we break it down, this is how I tried to explain it to somebody. I said, OK, so protect Australian heritage, culture, way of life. Next step, protect European culture, heritage, way of life. The next step is protect white heritage."

  ‘Auspill’, one of the earliest and central promoters has strong known links to the NSN and creates memes supporting esoteric Nazism concepts like Hyperborea. In a word, Auspill is a Nazi.

  The main March for Australia website originally had and then redacted a call for the neo-Nazi wolf-whistle of ‘remigration’, you can see this in archived copies of the website and it was widely reported. The rally Facebook page consistently and repeatedly advocated for including the NSN at the march and downplayed them.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨It turns out there is a Lemmy alternative with categories - anyone got stories about it?⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  I haven’t tried any Piefeds or mbins. My impression is similar to yours: interpreted language and “no fancy design patterns” gives me the idea it’s probably great for quickly prototyping new features like categories and moderation tools, possibly at the cost of performance. If you’re looking at hosting, maybe reach out to a few piefed admins, ask what they think about it and if/when they tried Lemmy for a comparison.

  The great thing about the Fediverse is afaik you can test other instances and even other softwares while still getting access to the same communities and posts.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Who is telling the truth?⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  None of them except the first paragraph are false, and even that one could be true if it were qualified instead of generalised.

  They have biases, they might suggest and emphasise parts inappropriately, but the fact is this event, or rather these events were more complex than most articles or comment sections said.

  Even some of my earlier comments were affected by missing information, generalisation and a bit of shock. For example, after having talked to a few different (socialist) people who were present visiting the racist rallies in Sydney, they pointed out that:

  • The NSN were being sneaky in how they represented themselves, such as not leading the march out of Belmore Park, but then having a dozen of them jump to the front once the march was underway for the photo ops. Most of the people in the march would not have seen this at all.
  • There were only about 30 of them, many out of uniform
  • When they went up to speak, there was the same generic applause that other speakers got, and about half the reactions were boos instead of cheers once they started saying things, with many leaving
  • Their attempted march on Newtown just got redirected down a side street where they changed clothes and went to the train station

  Now, this does not change that it was well-known and well-publicised in advance that neo-Nazi organisations would be present, that they were involved in the organisation of many of the events and the main website.

  It does not change that the protests themselves were based upon racist deflectionary arguments, including ones made by Labor members. This doesn’t mean all marchers are inherently racist, or that they were aware of the racism, but they’re repeating and supporting racist claims that immigration is to blame for various crises, or that some cultures (read: non-white cultures) are a major problem while others aren’t.

  It does not change that a large amount of attendees were openly white nationalists, and that a large amount of attendees were knowingly tolerant of neo-Nazis. It does not change that the attendees who didn’t contest the Nazis accepted and emboldened them.

  But we should try to avoid being careless and suggesting that everyone there is irredeemable and was there to be racist. It was foolish, ignorant and harmful for them to attend. But in my opinion, this was a way for many people to voice legitimate grievances which they believed were unvoiced, like housing. And so long as Liberals and Labor deflect that crisis onto immigrants, and as long as those to the left can’t get their voices heard in the mainstream, fascists will be there to collect their rage. If you want to stop neo-Nazis from being validated, we have to let citizens know we’re fighting for them.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨@jack_toohey on why the housing crisis is not caused by migration⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  I had a quick search, this isn’t something I’ve properly looked into, but empty homes are valuable:

  Speculative real estate investment can lead to homes being left vacant for quite long periods of time, as in some cases this helps to preserve their condition for resale and saves the investor from having to shell out for upkeep and maintenance. In cities with high-value real-estate like Melbourne, Sydney, New York and London, housing prices have risen much faster than wages, and many investors know that simply buying and holding property can be a more effective investment strategy than buying to rent. As Karl Fitzgerald of the Australian non-profit Grounded Community Land Trusts and member of GEHN notes:

  ‘If you consider that there’s been an 18% increase in Australian property values this year, that’s triple the rent you could make, so why bother renting it out?’ (GEHN 2022)

  Jack Portman - “What is the value in an empty home? A perspective from Action on Empty Homes and the Global Empty Homes Network” www.tandfonline.com/doi/…/13604813.2024.2390754#d…

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Lawyer caught using AI-generated false citations in court case penalised in Australian first⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  It’s kind of surprising how often it just confidently spews out sentences which seem plausible but are completely incorrect.

  To me, it’s not surprising at all. It’s trained to talk like its training data talks, how people talk. Very loosely speaking, it’s a “common sense” generator, and if there are topics that you’re experienced with and you look at a site like reddit talking about it, you soon realise how normal it is for people to be confidently incorrect.

  And on that note, it’s been seriously worrying to me how people seem to trust and anthropomorphise computers. It’s been a problem since at least the '60s but the advent of Artificial so-called Intelligence has revealed how dangerous it is.

  Unless a bot is trained with curated data (like some medical imaging ones, for example), it shouldn’t be believed. And even then it shouldn’t be fully trusted.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Thousands of Australians call for neo-Nazi leader to be deported to New Zealand⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  I’m personally not taking the petition seriously, I assumed it’s more of a statement of their hypocrisy. Like you said, it’s not appropriate and not a substitute for justice. Lock them up in isolation for a serious stretch of time along with the other violent domestic terrorism participants.

  And one thing you touched on, I’ll note that there is an unfortunate tendency (at least online) of people proclaiming conditional rights, like the US Democrat voters saying they hope Republican-voting immigrants get deported, or nominally progressive people misgendering others over political disagreements because ‘they deserve it’ or because it’s an easy attack. Really shows their hand when their convictions are conditional. Either you believe in a right or you don’t, be honest about it.

  As for NZ… they’ve already had too many of our nazi scum over there.

  Additionally, is there really anything to be gained by getting rid of this one guy? Some other asshole will emerge to take up his role.

  On one hand, you’re correct that removing a leader doesn’t solve the rest of the problem. “If you could go back in time and kill Hitler”, the Nazi Party still would have certainly gained major ground.

  On the other hand, I recall one of the times Sewer went to prison, there was a power struggle and drama. So it probably won’t hurt.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Anti-immigration rallies held across Australia as clashes break out in Adelaide and Melbourne⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  And, let’s not forget, certainly nowhere near 300,000

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨How neo-Nazis used the shield of ‘ordinary mums and dads’ at Australia’s anti-immigration rallies to sell white supremacy⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Victoria police said it was too early to confirm whether the alleged attack on Camp Sovereignty or any of the other activity complained about at the rally would be investigated as “prejudice-motivated”, the force’s term for offences that could also be described as hate crimes.

  Wow, it’s too early do confirm whether neo-Nazi in uniform separating from a protest and going out of their way to marching towards and then charge a peaceful Aboriginal protest camp is “prejudice-motivated”?

  What other possible motive is even on the table?

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Anti-immigration rallies held across Australia as clashes break out in Adelaide and Melbourne⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  15k was the largest,

  Adelaide? This number included counterprotesters IIRC.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Do I have permission to create a very unsavoury community?⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  I don’t understand why you would want an Australia-focused instance for this. A general-purpose instance like .world or shitjustworks seems more appropriate, and far more likely to find an audience who will engage in the community, rather than hosting on a tiny laidback instance where I’d wager either zero or one person would participate and the rest would be annoyed at all the distressing posts regularly appearing high on our feeds, because we have less local posts than those general-purpose instances.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Australian university(University of Melbourne) used Wi-Fi location data to identify student protestors⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  ffs I thought having my WiFi off in public was being overly cautious. Now even the public transport is monitoring it.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨This day of protests has given me optimism for the upcoming counter-protests against the cryptofascist "March for Australia" this weekend⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  9 out of the 10 would be interested in this post.

  And also it’s simply not 10 in the first place.

  There are plenty of posts on the local front page with scores in the dozens and hundreds, the stat count claims 300 users a day in this community alone.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨This day of protests has given me optimism for the upcoming counter-protests against the cryptofascist "March for Australia" this weekend⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  PAG in Sydney have had regular rallies basically every weekend since the conflict reignited on Oct 7. Some critics in allied groups were concerned that this would lead to a sense of fatigue, having constant, smaller, easily-missable rallies as opposed to having a big notable one each fortnight or month. And in my limited experience, crowds did get smaller over time until a big event spiked interest, like the invasion of Rafah, bombing of Lebanon, bigger Australian foreign policy actions, etc., so I can understand that perspective, especially when I assume Adelaide has a smaller and less mobilised population to draw from.

  Definitely keep an ear out for any counter-rally there on the 31st, I can’t see any announcement of one yet.

• This day of protests has given me optimism for the upcoming counter-protests against the cryptofascist "March for Australia" this weekend
  Submitted ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩ to ⁨australia@aussie.zone⁩ | ⁨8⁩ ⁨comments⁩
• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Thousands st Adelaide March for Palestine right now⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  [not Ade] Great to see and absolute sea of people out this week.

• An exposé of Australian neo-Nazis systematically exploiting vulnerable underaged children (*Tom Tanuki - "NSN, child-grooming cult."*)www.youtube.com ↗
  Submitted ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩ to ⁨australia@aussie.zone⁩ | ⁨0⁩ ⁨comments⁩
• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Antoinette Lattouf's unlawful sacking exposed the power of lobbying on the Australian media⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  I don’t disagree at all. That said, I also want to say I’m glad the ABC exists as a state-funded channel, and it’s no secret that I’m very critical of the governments who have held the levers. The main reason I’m glad is because without state-funded channels, we see a more-or-less dominance of the owning class controlling the vast majority of mass media in the hands of the mega-rich and using it to pursue their financial interests and fill the remaining airtime with for-profit drivel. The ABC enables creators to create art and educational shows far far more than commercial media does, it reminds me of George Lucas talking about the filmmaking industry and artistic freedom. When the channel isn’t desperate to make money, the employees have more real freedom. And like you said, the ABC is still dependent on the government allowing them to get funding, and they often kow-tow to receive it, but it’s miles better than having to please a major shareholder board and major advertisers who don’t want to be criticised.

  As you’ve described, the ABC certainly has pressures which bias it against neutrality, and you’ve proposed some good alternatives which reduce these biases.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Should big tech be allowed to mine Australians’ text and data to train AI? The Productivity Commission is considering it⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  I’m not convinced that the ABS graph shows that productivity and earnings were closely coupled before or during the 90s. As it says in the graph title, they’ve set 1991 as a starting origin (setting Productivity equal to Earnings), so it doesn’t imply the two were already as closely coupled as they look. They only appear so close because the graph sets 1991 as the common point to compare both axes.

  To demonstrate, I’ve edited the graph to show what would happen if they made that same graph start from 2009. I’ve done this by copying the orange line up (and colouring it red) so that both lines begin at the same spot in 2009 instead of 1991. And just like the 1991 line, they appear to match each other or a few years - apart from one major dip around 2016, they align very closely for the first 10 years just like in the full 1991 graph.

  Image

  But we know from your original ABS graph that the wages were already significantly diverging from productivity by 2009. So, I suspect that if we had a longer graph, then we’d learn that wages were already decoupled from productivity in the decades before 1991, but at the very least this graph doesn’t imply close coupling existed in the past and shows evidence of regular uncoupling.

  Maybe we should use AI to train them :D

  Sure. Although like all tools, AI can only help if used properly. It’s not a panacea, and it can’t replace most training techniques by itself. Similarly, we can’t just “use the internet” to train them or “use books” to train them.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Should big tech be allowed to mine Australians’ text and data to train AI? The Productivity Commission is considering it⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  Whenever a technology has increased productivity, the extra profit made hasn’t been passed on to increase the workers’ real wages. Why would it?

  We’ve already seen AI preemptively treated as a way to make workers redundant and not pay their wage at all, with some idiot bosses having to rehire entire teams they had fired because they bought into AI hype and thought it was capable of replacing them all. They’ve shown what their financial incentive is - increasing shareholder value by outsourcing to cheap markets or removing jobs. And in fact, removing jobs through automation could be a great thing if we had a market capable of retraining those workers to perform the jobs that society needs most. We don’t. Our political-economy is run for profit, not productivity, and it’s important we recognise how contradictory those goals truly are in the real world.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Antoinette Lattouf's unlawful sacking exposed the power of lobbying on the Australian media⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  ABC making the news and then reporting on it. Infinite news hack.