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- Comment on Zuckerberg's Huge AI Push Is Already Crumbling Into Chaos 1 week ago:
The Metaverse was being spruiked as the next big thing that everyone will need a VR headset for by Facebook as recently as 2023, which went so far as to change their name to Meta Platforms in 2021. Then they posted dozens of billions in losses in their Meta department each year for the succeeding couple years before casually dropping a post saying Meta would ‘pivot away from the Metaverse to focus on AI’ in early 2023. Wonder what the final losses will be for LLM AIs.
In a rational world, investors would watch Zuck to see what he goes all-in on next and avoid it. Buy the stock market is built on feelings and hype, irrational by nature.
- Comment on Sam Altman admits OpenAI ‘totally screwed up’ its GPT-5 launch and says the company will spend trillions of dollars on data centers 1 week ago:
*Few more billion.
I sometimes wonder if silicon valley tech businesses in general will take a reputation hit with investors when this bubble bursts, it’s gonna be a doozy.
But then I remember how many greedy idiots there are out there pumping money into grifts in the hope of The Big Win, and my expectations of consequences are tempered.
- Comment on Google has agreed to pay $36 million fine for signing anticompetitive deals with Australia’s two largest telcos that banned the installation of competing search engines 1 week ago:
Sorry, corporations are only legally ‘people’ when it suits them - like when
paying bribescontributing to SuperPACs and lobbying. If it doesn’t suit them, like with crimes, then suddenly… nobody is responsible. - Comment on Study: Social media probably can’t be fixed 2 weeks ago:
As long as the devs have an instance-agnostic ‘live and let live’ attitude and just ignore any instances they don’t politically like and advise others to do the same, it’s not really a problem.
If they ever try to enforce their ideology via their code: actual issue.
- Comment on Labor asks Deloitte to design universal childcare system as PM eyes political legacy 2 weeks ago:
Don’t forget the $10 billion they handed to the financial sector in the form of a loan for the HAFF joke, and they borrowed at the highest interest point in the last 5 years.
I’m sure they have cushy jobs waiting for them at whichever bank(s) accepted those loans.
- Comment on Still throwing shrimp on the barbie: why is Tourism Australia’s advertising stuck in 1984? 2 weeks ago:
BTW I’m a middle age Australian and I’ve been to hundreds of barbeques - have seen prawns barbequed maybe twice in my life. So I don’t even know what the original ads were taking about, a cultural staple that almost never happens?
- Comment on High Quality Offline Music - マリウス 3 weeks ago:
(I know, we try to keep it quiet)
- Comment on Should big tech be allowed to mine Australians’ text and data to train AI? The Productivity Commission is considering it 3 weeks ago:
Signal is objectively a far better choice than SMS or WhatsApp and all the options I’m aware of. I dunno what OP is angling at either.
The only easy to use E2E encrypted chats are centrally managed, eg: Signal - and even getting friends and family members to move to that is hard.
While a decentralized fully open source self-hosted solution would be great - that shits just not possible for 90% of people. Apps succeed or fail due to barrier of entry and ease of use, and the decentralized options typically have far less user-friendly apps, far fewer users, and often require tech know-how like choosing a federated server or even configuring your own online storage or server (egs: Matrix, Briar, StoneAge). Some bring up Session as another alternative while failing to realize it is also centralized if you want push notifications (which most users do).
- Comment on High Quality Offline Music - マリウス 3 weeks ago:
Slsk, search for it. Best kept secret. Note that some bigger artists have their libraries blocked from search via dcma, so you will need to search by partial artist name or album name instead, but it’s voluminous. Musical library of Alexandria.
- Comment on Australian retailer Kmart faces court action as two of its suppliers have been linked to forced labour in China's Xinjiang region 3 weeks ago:
ANKO. We were sad when we saw Anko infiltrate the local Target after Kmart went through a merger with them in 2023.
We regularly avoid Kmart because the Anko crap filled the store, with very little in the way of brand options for any product type - just several different models of Anko - and then all the various brands disappeared from Target after the merger and were replaced with Anko… a massive loss of consumer choices, all for the benefits of owner, Wesfarmers. Bleh. I don’t think most consumers notice or care?
- Comment on Going to waste: two years after REDcycle’s collapse, Australia’s soft plastics are hitting the environment hard 3 weeks ago:
Plastic recycling is a joke. If you look at the recycling they actually did, it was only a few smallish projects like plastic planks for walkways and benches, and plastic carts and shelved for some Woolworths branches to put at front of store with a label to greenwash the problem. Hooray, now those plastic walkways and benches will slowly deteriorate microplastics into the environment around them under full force of the sun and rain.
The only real solution is banning single use plastics and moving back to glass and cans - focus on things that actually are recyclable and get rid of all the plastic.
Will it be hard and more expensive? Yes. Is it worth it and will reduce long term cost of pollution cleanup? Also yes.
- Comment on Proton releases a new app for two-factor authentication 4 weeks ago:
Peoples credentials are increasingly captured by information stealer malware, including attacks on Keepass. It’s not just services mishandling their data that people should consider as likely vectors.
I do agree about evaluation - it doesn’t matter much with stuff like a forum account that has 2FA, but I certainly wouldn’t put any of my banking or key account 2FA backup codes or credentials in a password manager or central account/password storage service. It weakens your protection if something does go wrong.
- Comment on Proton releases a new app for two-factor authentication 4 weeks ago:
That’s just scratching the surface. Peoples credentials are increasingly captured by information stealer malware, including attacks on Keepass. So that ‘almost always’ ain’t right regardless.
I agree of course, how the breech has occurred is important as to actions - if it’s just the website being breached and losing their passwords that has no impact on your 2FA codes. So ‘in most cases’ you might be fine, but peoples comp
The goal of 2FA is to be ‘something you have’ like an authenticator device or auth app on your phone, working as a secondary verifier that you are who you say you are to the ‘something you know’ being your password. So if you store 2FA codes with your password then you just have two sets of ‘something you know’ which is far less secure - and leaves you more vulnerable.
It doesn’t matter much with stuff like a forum account that has 2FA, but I certainly wouldn’t put any of my banking or key account 2FA backup codes or credentials in a password manager or central account/password storage service. It defeats the purpose.
- Comment on Proton releases a new app for two-factor authentication 4 weeks ago:
Feels like everyone has forgotten when LastPass was breached, and that was barely three years ago.
Any affected LastPass users storing their 2FA backup codes in with the rest of their login data got a rude awakening.
Anyone who had them separate was at least able to rescue those accounts. But hey do what you like people, I know convenience usually trumps security.
- Comment on I need to tell you something unsatisfying: your personal consumption choices will not make a meaningful difference to the amount of enshittification you experience in your life 4 weeks ago:
Yep. The title and the intro are both clickbait designed to drag in people incensed by the suggestion that their positive individual actions won’t have impact - which are absolutely the same people that don’t need to be fucking converted into the belief that regulations and enforcing laws already on the books would be good things.
The people that do need to read the article will read the title and intro paragraph (as is often auto-copied into posts on social media pages) and they’ll chuckle to themselves that they know that already and move on with their day.
Tl;dr. This article annoys the converted, and misses the ideal demographic.
- Comment on Proton releases a new app for two-factor authentication 4 weeks ago:
Absolutely. 2FA codes (and 2FA ‘single use codes’ / recovery codes) should not be stored in the same system that manages your usernames and passwords - it defeats the purpose of 2FA.
But most people will just breeze past advice and do whatever is most convenient.
- Comment on Proton releases a new app for two-factor authentication 4 weeks ago:
It is very wise to store your 2FA codes separately from your general login credentials. If one is breached, the other protects it (hence, two factor). If both are breeched, your account is hosed.
Same deal when setting up 2FA on an account and they provide some ‘one time use’ 2FA codes, they generally say ‘do not store these with your standard password credentials - keep them secure and separate’.
- Comment on YSK: Deezer, the music streaming service, is owned by a company whose Founder and CEO is a Russian Oligarch with connections to the Kremlin and donates to the American Republican party. 4 weeks ago:
Oh yes, true. I do forget. Their catalogue in Australia is quite pricey which doesn’t make them a very good value proposition here.
For example Random Access Memories by Daft Punk is $27.09 for HiRes or $23.49 for CD resolution. I bought that album on physical CD from a brick and mortar store (JB HiFi) for $14.99. It was not on sale, that’s just a fairly standard price for a major release CD at the time - reissues of very popular releases are cheaper than that now.
A more recent example, Igor by Tyler the Creator is $23.99 at physical stores, or on Qobuz is $27.59 for CD res or $31.79 for HiRes.
(All these prices are in AUD).
It does get cheaper with their ‘Sublime’ subscription but not to make it worth it (33%) - unless you were buying heaps of music off them, or already using their streaming.
- Comment on Signal boss warns app will exit Australia if forced to hand over users’ encrypted messages 4 weeks ago:
To the ASIO chief claiming that they need this to monitor terrorism I would answer that legislation has already made it illegal to not unlock your phone if you are presented with a ‘data access order’ - which police can obtain from a judge. Their claim of ‘but terrorists’ falls apart when they are free to surveil suspected terrorists in 1000 other ways and can then arrest them with very loose suspicions, hold their phone while they obtain a data access order, and then force them to unlock it and see all the Signal chat data and groups they’re in. If you don’t unlock your phone it’s fines or 2 years in jail.
So they don’t need to have a backdoor into Signal or any other E2E encrypted chat to ‘stop terrorism’. It’s just a wishlist item because they’re jealous that they can’t hoover up everyone’s chats to datamine any more.
- Comment on Signal boss warns app will exit Australia if forced to hand over users’ encrypted messages 4 weeks ago:
Its just pressure from the ASIO chief (our NSA equivalent) at this stage. No legislation.
The Signal CEO is rightly firing back saying it’ll never happen, and if push comes to shove they’ll leave.
- Comment on YSK: Deezer, the music streaming service, is owned by a company whose Founder and CEO is a Russian Oligarch with connections to the Kremlin and donates to the American Republican party. 4 weeks ago:
7digital is owned by the same people as Bandcamp BTW. Not that it changes your point, just interesting.
- Comment on YSK: Deezer, the music streaming service, is owned by a company whose Founder and CEO is a Russian Oligarch with connections to the Kremlin and donates to the American Republican party. 4 weeks ago:
Its an Australian company founded by this guy en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Wiltshire and this guy www.songtradr.com/helge
Songtradr is a fairly boring ecommerce platform for music from what I can read. Boring is good though, I don’t see any dramas / issues in my brief web traipsing.
- Comment on YSK: Deezer, the music streaming service, is owned by a company whose Founder and CEO is a Russian Oligarch with connections to the Kremlin and donates to the American Republican party. 4 weeks ago:
It was just a pirate server that charged for mp3s you realize, none of that money ever went to the artists.
- Comment on YSK: Deezer, the music streaming service, is owned by a company whose Founder and CEO is a Russian Oligarch with connections to the Kremlin and donates to the American Republican party. 4 weeks ago:
Tidal might pay the most of streaming services (others in here are claiming it’s Qobuz) but Bandcamp pays the most to artists in general as the purchases pay much higher than streams. Bandcamp charge 15%, everything else goes to the band/label until they hit $5k in sales, and then Bandcamp’s fee drops to 10% and stays there for additional sales. If you wait to buy in bulk on ‘Bandcamp Fridays’, which happen about 10 times a year, the artists take 100% on those days.
Imo Bandcamp is by far the best service for supporting artists.
- Comment on "We approached payment processors because Steam did not respond" - Australian pressure group Collective Shout claims responsibility for Steam and Itch.io NSFW game removal 4 weeks ago:
Deal if you send just half of him back.
Which half is dealers choice, and no need for a contiguous half. It can be half by volume.
- Comment on "We approached payment processors because Steam did not respond" - Australian pressure group Collective Shout claims responsibility for Steam and Itch.io NSFW game removal 4 weeks ago:
The trade imbalance? With the US?
Take back your war on drugs, the war on terror, the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, your insane tech broligarchy, rhe 2008 global financial crisis, your Evangelical hate brigades (actually you know what take back Mormons and Scientologists and 7th day adventists while youre at it), the GLOBAL trade disasters & inflation caused by Trump and his pissy tarrif wars, the global derailing of climate agreements again by Trump and his idiot Republican allies.
I’ll stop now because I could literally type all day the shit coming out of the US that has been causing immense damage to the rest of us.
What’s Australia’s shit?
Murdoch? He gave up Aussie citizenship and moved to the US in 1985, he’s spent the majority of his working career as an American living in America - we can at best take half ownership of him.
This handful of censorship wowsers taking down some rapey video games?
Mel Gibson?Enlighten me because I think the numbers of your “trade imbalance” don’t even come close to adding up.
- Comment on "We approached payment processors because Steam did not respond" - Australian pressure group Collective Shout claims responsibility for Steam and Itch.io NSFW game removal 4 weeks ago:
He is from Australia originally, but he’s been a US naturalised citizen and lived there full-time since 1985, he gave up Australian citizenship 40 years ago.
No backsies.
- Comment on How to Setup a Secure Ubuntu Home Server 4 weeks ago:
That guide looks like it has all steps explained with terminal commands, so it should be fine to go for Server version to follow the guide.
I’m also pretty sure you can install the desktop GUI for Server later if you decide you need it for whatever reason, just in case.
- Comment on How to Setup a Secure Ubuntu Home Server 4 weeks ago:
Unless you wanna run headless and do everything via SSH then desktop is better, its essentially identical to server, but with a GUI and some apps bundled by default - both of which new users and infrequent server admins generally need.
- Comment on Humans can be tracked with unique 'fingerprint' based on how their bodies block Wi-Fi signals 4 weeks ago:
First - someone comes up with this. Next, privacy researchers and black/white/grey hat techies come up with methods to defeat it.
Better for surveillance tech research like this to be published out in the open than developed in some secret lab. I figure these researchers are doing more positive than negative by publishing their findings. It’s not like if they didn’t publish, someone else wouldn’t come up with this and possibly use it clandestinely.