rainynight65
@rainynight65@feddit.org
Migrated from rainynight65@feddit.de, which now appears to be dead. Sadly lost my comment history in the process. Let’s start fresh.
- Comment on Who was our worst Prime Minister and why? Any notable state leaders we need to add? 1 week ago:
He was educated. Didn’t make him smart.
- Comment on Who was our worst Prime Minister and why? Any notable state leaders we need to add? 1 week ago:
I’d say the entire Abbott/Turnbull/Morrison trifecta was terrible.
Abbott was definitely out of his depth as PM, he never stopped being the leader of the opposition and was always pugilistic, impulsive and didn’t think things through. He promised stable leadership but didn’t have his party under enough control to ensure it - probably because he sort of skated into the role because those who the party actually wanted didn’t make it. He got into power on the back of a campaign focused on debt and deficit, but had no policies to address it and I don’t think he ever intended to. He played his pet issues but was aggressively ineffective at everything else.
Turnbull was a devastating disappointment. Hated by his own party, only used as a more popular and sensible replacement for the ousted Abbott, but never having any party backing for his agenda. I’d say he flamed out, but he was never even on fire. Reneged on his promises and ambitions for fear of reprisals from his party - a spineless creature whose years in power were an absolute waste and a net loss for the country.
And then of course Morrison. A sociopath who bradbury’d into the role because enough people in the party room had the self-awareness to realise Dutton as party leader would be a disaster. Obviously Morrison schemed his way through that entire leadership crisis and lied whenever he opened his mouth, not least when professing his support for the embattled Turnbull. He was probably the most useless PM, out of the country in times of crisis and actively refusing to show leadership. Not to mention the shameful mishandling of the pandemic.
Collectively these three set back social, economic and political development in this country back by at least a decade. We’re all worse off thanks to the nine years of having these three clowns in power.
- Comment on Who was our worst Prime Minister and why? Any notable state leaders we need to add? 1 week ago:
Howard was to Australia what Thatcher was to the UK and Reagan to the US. He ushered in neoliberalism and set the Liberal Party on an accelerated course towards right wing christian fundamentalism.
- Comment on NBN Co to accelerate higher speed tiers and launch multi-gigabit speeds in September 2025 2 weeks ago:
That’s nice, but how does that help people who, to this day, can’t get any ‘NBN’ other than satellite?
- Comment on David Crisafulli backtracks on promise to resign if crime victim numbers do not fall under an LNP government 3 weeks ago:
Because he has no plan to address the causes of crime, only a plan for harsher punishments. So he has no realistic way of reducing victim numbers.
No surprises here.
- Comment on Australia's youth crime rates have plummeted despite what politicians would have you believe 4 weeks ago:
It still means that fewer young people commit crimes than what used to be the case. It’s not like people stopped having children. And if the youths who used to commit crimes are now adults who commit crimes, they no longer class as youth crimes.
- Comment on South Australia’s upper house narrowly rejects ‘Trumpian’ bill to wind back abortion care 4 weeks ago:
If the Libs win, I hope they go full Newman again and get kicked out after one term. I’m not exactly enamoured with QLD Labor but bloody hell anything is better than the toxic Libs in this state.
- Comment on South Australia’s upper house narrowly rejects ‘Trumpian’ bill to wind back abortion care 4 weeks ago:
If only you could see the ‘newspapers’ in Queensland, every other front page has ‘young crims’ scaremongering and they make it sound like Townsville and such are hellholes where people are terrorised by young criminals day and night without reprieve.
Weird how the LNP’s only answer to this is ‘adult crime, adult time’. Like, literally, zero policies on how to prevent youth crime, how to help children with better education and more perspectives for their future. Nothing. Just harsher punishments.
- Comment on South Australia’s upper house narrowly rejects ‘Trumpian’ bill to wind back abortion care 4 weeks ago:
If a woman seeks abortion at that stage, it is almost guaranteed to be due to a condition that would seriously endanger her, the baby, or both, if the pregnancy was carried to term. Nobody just decides after 27 weeks that they simply don’t want the baby. In these cases, inducing to deliver the baby will likely not help the baby and it could still seriously harm the mother.
What this guy proposes would be, in most cases, indistinguishable from an abortion, but way more harmful for everyone involved. It’s telling that it is usually men who try to push these kinds of law.
- Comment on 'It's going to scar them': NT to become first jurisdiction to lower criminal age of responsibility 1 month ago:
The fact that this is the new (liberal) governments first priority speaks volumes. Their approach to crime is all about punishment and retaliation, not about prevention and mitigation.
Treating ten year old children like adults when they mess up is going to do them a world of harm.
- Many cheered when banks eliminated ATM fees in 2017 – but now it’s a struggle to find onewww.theguardian.com ↗Submitted 1 month ago to australia@aussie.zone | 7 comments
- Comment on Labor threatens to cancel visas for ‘inciting discord’ after protests against Israeli attacks on Lebanon 1 month ago:
They’re scared of being labelled as ‘weak on National security’, ‘weak on terrorism’ and ‘antisemitic’ by the coalition.
- Comment on Woolworths, Coles sued by ACCC for ‘misleading’ price drop claims 1 month ago:
It’s a pity the small chains do exactly the same shit.
My local supermarket (formerly an IGA, now Drake’s) recently did that with an item I buy regularly. Bumped the price up from $26 to $45, only to have it ‘on sale’ a week later for $28. Wouldn’t be surprised if that’s the only instance.
The funny thing is that I could have probably lived with the direct price increase, but that doesn’t sell as well to the people who aren’t paying attention. All they see is the ‘price drop’ sticker.
- Comment on Microsoft inks deal to restart Three Mile Island nuclear reactor to fuel its voracious AI ambitions 1 month ago:
Equally then, the nuclear disasters shouldn’t count, right?
Deaths from an accident at an active nuclear power plant are not the same as deaths caused by a burst dam that was originally intended to produce electricity one day, but has never produced any. Especially if you call the statistic ‘Deaths per unit of electricity production’. At the time of the accident, it was just a dam, construction of any hydroelectric facilities was nowhere near beginning, so calling it a ‘hydropower accident’ is highly debatable (probably as at least as debatable as calling nuclear ‘conventional’). Without the inclusion of those deaths, hydro would be shown to be even safer than nuclear, given that it has produced nearly twice as much electricity in the time span covered by those statistics, while having caused a similar number of deaths (if you continue to ignore the increased miner mortality, otherwise nuclear will look way worse). The article also does not cite how they determined the number of 171000 deaths, given that estimates for the Banqian dam failure range between 26000 and 240000. The author mentions (but does not cite) a paper by Benjamin Sovacool from 2016, which analyzes the deaths caused by different forms of energy but, crucially, omits the Banqian dam death toll. I will try to get hold of that paper to see the reasoning, but I suspect it may align with mine.
How do you assume it’s ignoring their increased mortality?
The article makes zero mention of any such thing, and the section about how the deaths are calculated (footnote 3 in this section) only calls out the deaths from Chernobyl and Fukushima. Direct quote from the footnote:
Nuclear = I have calculated these figures based on the assumption of 433 deaths from Chernobyl and 2,314 from Fukushima. These figures are based on the most recent estimates from UNSCEAR and the Government of Japan. In a related article, I detail where these figures come from. If you include deaths from a burst dam that has never produced electricity (but was planned to do so eventually), then you must include deaths among people who mine the material destined to produce electricity in a nuclear plant.
No mention at all of any other deaths or causes of death, nothing whatsoever. It’s the deaths from two nuclear accidents, that’s all. The figures from the cited study alone would multiply the number of nuclear deaths in this statistic. What’s worse, the author has published another article on nuclear energy which essentially comes to the exact same conclusions.
To me it simply looks like the author of this article is highly biased towards nuclear, and has done very selective homework.
- Comment on Microsoft inks deal to restart Three Mile Island nuclear reactor to fuel its voracious AI ambitions 1 month ago:
Edit: It’s also the cleanest and nearly the safest source of energy, including the disasters. ourworldindata.org/safest-sources-of-energy
I love how the ‘Death rates per unit of electricity production’ graphic includes deaths from a 1975 dam break in China, when the dam in question up to that point hadn’t produced a single megawatt of electricity (and by the looks of it, still hasn’t to this day). At the same time it appears to conveniently ignore the increased mortality among uranium miners.
- Comment on Microsoft inks deal to restart Three Mile Island nuclear reactor to fuel its voracious AI ambitions 1 month ago:
Nuclear falls under ‘conventional’ - the PWR design of TMI is one of the oldest and most common types of nuclear reactor. It’s just another way of creating steam to drive a turbine which then generates electricity.
Nuclear is also anything but clean. People love to call nuclear ‘clean’ because its low in emissions, but that’s ignoring the requirement for either safe storage of radioactive material or reprocessing thereof, as well as the emission of radioactivity in the water cycled through the reactor.
- Comment on Microsoft inks deal to restart Three Mile Island nuclear reactor to fuel its voracious AI ambitions 1 month ago:
Three Mile Island is the epitome of
conventional dirty energy
- Comment on Microsoft inks deal to restart Three Mile Island nuclear reactor to fuel its voracious AI ambitions 1 month ago:
It doesn’t make financial sense to build new nuclear power plants. They’re hugely expensive and such projects routinely run well over time as well as budget. If it did make sense, Microsoft would be building them, instead of reviving the site of one of the worst nuclear disasters in the US. Thing is, they want lots of power, and they want it yesterday. By the time you can build a new nuclear plant to satisfy these needs, AI will have run its course and big tech will be on to the next scam.
But hey, why pay attention to such nuances?
- Comment on The Irony of 'You Wouldn't Download a Car' Making a Comeback in AI Debates 2 months ago:
Sure, training data selection impacts the output. If you feed an AI nothing but anime, the images it produces will look like anime. If all it knows is K-pop, then the music it puts out will sound like K-pop. Tweaking a computational process through selective input is not the same as a human being actively absorbing stimuli and forming their own, unique response.
AI doesn’t have an innate taste or feeling for what it likes. It won’t walk into a second hand CD store, browse the boxes, find something that’s intriguing and check it out. It won’t go for a walk and think “I want to take a photo of that tree there in the open field”. It won’t see or hear a piece of art and think “I’d like to be learn how to paint/write/play an instrument like that”. And it will never make art for the sake of making art, for the pure enjoyment that is the process of creating something, irrespective of who wants to see or hear the result. All it is designed to do is regurgitate an intersection of what it knows that best suits the parameters of a given request (aka prompt). Actively learning, experimenting, practicing techniques, trying to emulate specific techniques of someone else - making art for the sake of making art - is a key component to humans learning from others and being influenced by others.
So the comparison between human learning and influencing, and the selective feeding of data to an AI to ‘tune’ its output are entirely different things that cannot and should not be compared.
- Comment on The Irony of 'You Wouldn't Download a Car' Making a Comeback in AI Debates 2 months ago:
Generative AI is not ‘influenced’ by other people’s work the way humans are. A human musician might spend years covering songs the like and copying or emulating the style, until they find their own style, which may or may not be a blend of their influences, but crucially, they will usually add something. AI does not do that. The idea that AI functions the same as human artists, by absorbing influences and producing their own result, is not only fundamentally false, it is dangerously misleading. To portray it as ‘not unethical’ is even more misleading.
- Australia is failing its children. A ‘tough on crime’ approach to youth justice puts politics before preventionwww.theguardian.com ↗Submitted 2 months ago to australia@aussie.zone | 0 comments
- Comment on Linda Reynolds failed to offer a ‘basic human response’ after Brittany Higgins’ rape allegations, court told 2 months ago:
Someone among Linda Reynolds’ advisors should have had the courage to tell her that persisting with this defamation trial, especially in the wake of the Bruce Lehrmann trial, is really shitty optics.
And the fact that they tried to make it all about alleging that Higgins wanted to bring down the government, while putting Reynolds into the role of the victim, makes it even worse.
I really hope Reynolds fails in this trial.
- Comment on Research shows more than 80% of AI projects fail, wasting billions of dollars in capital and resources: Report 2 months ago:
Re 1, 3 and 5, maybe it is upon the AI projects to stop providing shiny solutions looking for a problem they could solve, and properly engaging with potential customers and stakeholders to get a clear understanding of the problems that need solving.
This was precisely the context of a conversation I had at work yesterday. Some of our product managers attended a conference that was rife with AI stuff, and a customer rep actually took to the stage and said ‘I have no need for any of that because none of it helps me solve the problems I need to solve.’
- Comment on Gina Rinehart urges government to ‘drill, baby drill’ and build Israeli-style ‘iron dome’ in northern Australia 2 months ago:
She obviously means for the government to just subside on the existing mining royalties, while also abolishing certain taxes, the act of which will surely help pay for all her lofty fantasies.
- Gina Rinehart urges government to ‘drill, baby drill’ and build Israeli-style ‘iron dome’ in northern Australiawww.theguardian.com ↗Submitted 2 months ago to australia@aussie.zone | 17 comments
- Comment on Starbucks' new CEO will supercommute 1,000 miles from California to Seattle office instead of relocating 2 months ago:
What you’re describing are use cases for charter flights - renting an aircraft for a specific, temporary purpose, usually from a company specialising in such flights - they own or lease the aircraft and employ the flight crew and maintenance staff.
- Comment on Streamyfin, a simple and user-friendly Jellyfin client for iOS and Android 3 months ago:
Last time I checked, on iOS it didn’t have either.
- Comment on Streamyfin, a simple and user-friendly Jellyfin client for iOS and Android 3 months ago:
Support for downloading and Chromecast? Sign me up.
- Comment on Aluminum 3 months ago:
Then we also need to talk about Sodum, Potassum, Magnesum, Plutonum, Uranum, Cadmum, Chromum, Titanum and a bunch more. Why should Aluminum be the outlier?
- Submitted 3 months ago to australia@aussie.zone | 7 comments