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• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Ubisoft's Saudi-funded Assassin's Creed DLC provokes staff unrest, but the publisher insists partnering with the controversial regime is A-OK⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago⁩:

  Is everything critical of Saudi Arabia Hasbara propaganda?

  I hate Saudi Arabia’s leadership and brutal oppression of their people. Obviously, Kashoggi. Obviously, funding terrorism worldwide. Personally, a friend of mine witnessed a state beheading simply by being in the wrong place at the wrong time while he was working in SA (he was an Indian immigrant worker) - scarred him for life.

  Hasbara are in the walls so I presume they saw me type that out and I’ll just patiently await my cheque.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨The Stop Trump coalition published this video⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  You miss their point. The original inhabitants of the British isles are long forgotten and have largely been replaced by invaders, colonists, and immigrants (some listed in OP’s comment) for millennia.

  There are no ‘real Brits’. Britain is a multilingual melting pot of different peoples and cultures, and it always has been for as far back as we’ve been able to look in history, the first major immigrations from mainland Europe happening around 4000bc or so.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨My reaction when there's a new Star Trek show for pre-schoolers⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  I think you need to rewatch to refresh your memory. They comment on how he’s an accomplished cook that’s why they’re keen to try the eggs he’s making. However, on that occasion they are alien eggs from an 'Owon, that he’s never cooked before, and those are notoriously not to everyone’s taste. While none of the human staff could handle them, Worf loved them.

  memory-alpha.fandom.com/wiki/'Owon

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨My reaction when there's a new Star Trek show for pre-schoolers⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  You guys are all imaging good shows that stick with the established characters and don’t retcon the universe, your imaginations are far better than what would actually be created.

  The most exotic and amusing chef on the show - Neelix, would be absent. Data is back and well (no explanation offered) and cooks up a plate of synthetic oil, writers not knowing he can taste and wants to study and be part of human culture and make things his friends can also enjoy. Tilly has a meltdown because she’s done the recipe wrong and everything’s burnt - everyone who tries to help her also cries, but then they come together, “actually it’s even better burnt”.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨My reaction when there's a new Star Trek show for pre-schoolers⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  I mean I would. But I think Riker is the kind of guy that makes breakfast the morning after, sans replicator - for that personal touch. So I think he’d have no trouble scrambling some eggs.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨My reaction when there's a new Star Trek show for pre-schoolers⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  More evidence that the current showrunners have no idea what to do with the franchise.

  Next: a Trek-themed cooking show.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨In Australia, racist violence is nothing new. But emboldened neo-Nazis form a frightening new spectre⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  Import record numbers of people to make the problem worse! That’s the opposite of what we should do.

  And that’s exactly why everyone with a brain is downvoting you. You’re told (by racists) that it’s immigrants taking your homes, and you believe it, without looking at the wider picture or even checking the facts.

  Immigration was 10% lower in 2024 than 2023, which would definitely make it not a record, and still recovering from the massive decreases through covid. We have still not made up for those losses though covid - had it not happened, we would have seen a lot more immigrants over the last six years.

  There are ~11 million dwellings in Australia - more than enough for everyone once you factor in families. The main problem is that housing has - for a long time - been an investment vehicle. This is an issue throughout the world.

  Actual problems worth protesting:

  • Negative gearing continues to make housing a very effective and attractive investment. Labor promised to remove it in 2019, while grandfathering-in existing homes. As a result they were crushed at the polls and lost “the unloseable election”.
  • Multiple home ownership is common. I know several boomers that own multiple houses that they do not rent out, you probably do too. Why the fuck do people own multiple homes and ‘holiday homes’ during a housing crisis. Tax it out of existence.
  • Liberal and Labor governments consistently hand big incentives and payouts to the building and home loan sectors to prop up those industries, because they lobby and donate hard. Every time they do add a rebate or an incentive, housing prices increase by the same value because developers simply pocket it.
  • Public housing has not kept up with our increasing population, and the HAFF is a monumental joke that the bankers managed to pull on the Australia people. If the government wants to solve the housing issue the simple solution is to build goddamn public housing, not take out a $10 billion dollar loan and then pay incentives with the interest (hopefully, if there is any after paying back the loan interest fees). $10bil of public housing would increase in value faster than sitting it in an investment portfolio too, with less risk.
  • Zoning laws restrict building high apartments through the vast majority of city suburbs, and approvals of builds and plans for all builds are very slow. Streamline it, and relax apartment height restrictions.

  So if you look through this list you start to realize that the problem is actually predominantly wealthy fucks. They own multiple homes, they get tax incentives to buy more homes, they lobby, they don’t want tall apartments in their wealthy suburbs potentially affecting their views, and they run campaigns to vote against any changes to the status quo.

  Not immigrants.

  If you drastically reduce immigration, you kill the economy, because we are having kids at well below replacement rate and kids and additional people drive economic growth. Economy goes down, forget young people buying a house because they won’t have a job. Add to that more than half of our doctors are first gen immigrants and you quickly see that immigration is helping Australia a lot more than hindering it - which us why these rallies that paint immigration as the main contributor to the housing crisis are dumb as fuck.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Android’s most beloved launcher may be done for good⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  I just use the Fairphone 2 Launcher and it’s fine 🤷🏻

  I used Nova on my last phone and it worked great, I paid for pro. So I know what I’m missing, not worth it to get back in the Google Play Store system though. I like being anon with no Google account, especially considering Nova sold to a company that data mines user data?

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨What If There’s No AGI?⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  Yeah and it only took evolution (checks notes) 4 billion years to go from nothing to a brain valuable to humans.

  I’m not so sure there will be a fast return in any economic timescale on the money investors are currently shovelling into AI.

  We have maybe 500 years (tops) to see if we’re smart enough to avoid causing our own extinction by climate change and biodiversity collapse - so I don’t think it’s anywhere near as clear cut.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Say hello to Bary⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Thank you - my friend was only thinking in terms of smaller by mass not thinking about volume.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Say hello to Bary⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Thanks for the explanation, clears it up completely.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Say hello to Bary⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  My friend is silly - he was thinking of smaller as in by mass, not by volume. Thanks for explaining it to him.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Big Surprise—Nobody Wants 8K TVs⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  The consumer has spoken and they don’t care, not even for 4K. Same as happened with 3D and curved TVs, 8K is a solution looking for a problem so that more TVs get sold.

  In terms of physical media - at stores in Australia the 4K section for Blurays takes up a single rack of shelves. Standard Blurays and DVDs take up about 20.

  Even DVDs still sell well because many consumers don’t see a big difference in quality, and certainly not enough to justify the added cost of Bluray, let alone 4K editions. A current example, Superman is $20 on DVD, $30 on Bluray (50% cost increase) or $40 on 4K (100%) cost increase. Streaming services have similar pricing curves for increased fidelity.

  It sucks for fans of high res, but it’s the reality of the market. 4K will be more popular in the future if and when it becomes cheaper, and until then nobody (figuratively) will give a hoot about 8K.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Say hello to Bary⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  My dumb friend wants to know why adding more mass would make Jupiter smaller, can you help explain it to him?

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨No justice, no peace.⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Save 30 seconds by not having to find the correct shims and just use your handy screwdriver.

  What’s the worst that could happen?

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨AI was a common theme at Gamescom 2025, and while some indie teams say it's invaluable, it remains an ethical nightmare⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Yep that’s absolutely not what people are talking about when they say ‘climate change’ in this context, they mean anthropogenic climate change, and you know it. Your bad faith response shows you have no interest in an honest discussion.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Zuckerberg's Huge AI Push Is Already Crumbling Into Chaos⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ 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 ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ 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 ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Sorry, corporations are only legally ‘people’ when it suits them - like when paying bribes contributing 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 ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨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 ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨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?⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨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⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ 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 ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ 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⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ 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 ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ 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 ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ 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 ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ 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 ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ 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 ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ 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.