shirro

@shirro@aussie.zone

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⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨The country is done for⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:
As long as they don’t call it footy its fine. Football is a broad term for a lot of codes.
⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Who was our worst Prime Minister and why? Any notable state leaders we need to add?⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:
The SA Libs sold off the rights to charge rent on our electricity grid for the next 200 years to a Chinese owned company. Yeah, its not the wind farms and solar panels that are the problem. I want to hate the government that did it but the whole state was plunged into a lost decade after a state government backed bank collapsed and the taxpayer was left to cover their debts. So I should blame the Labor party in government at the time of the collapse? They were cleared by the subsequent investigation. The bank management were the problem.

Most of the blame falls to an establishment private school alumni with a double barrel surname who managed the bank like a personal plaything buying bad assets. They set a whole state’s economic and population growth back a decade compared with the rest of the country and doomed us to paying the highest worlds highest electricity prices for a couple of centuries. Nice. I suspect this is kind of the norm. People gain positions of great trust and responsibility as much by who they know as what they know and then proceed to fuck it up while receiving praise and pocketing bonuses then fuck off with no real consequences and leave the rest of us to clean up.

The worst SA premier imaginable is incomparable to the damage caused to this state by this one establishment idiot.
⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Who was our worst Prime Minister and why? Any notable state leaders we need to add?⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:
Reagan undeniably paved the way for Christian nationalism to take over the republican party.

I disagree on Thatcher and Howard. accelerating fundamentalism, though neoliberalism is a fair call. You were damned if you did or didn’t and Hawke/Keating set a lot of reforms in motion prior to Howard. We weren’t equipped to cope with global changes without major economic reforms. The decision to have reforms advantage some while leaving others further behind was pure shitfuckery and Thatcher did everything as contentiously as possible.

Blair and Rudd strike me more as god botherers than Howard or Thatcher and the ALP have perpetuated and extended Howard’s drive towards private religious education and service delivery. The ALP right has an equivalent group in the Libs. Its all the same here.
⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Who was our worst Prime Minister and why? Any notable state leaders we need to add?⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:
There are lots of contradictory things about Howard. I get why people feel very strongly about him one way or another.

In the end a lot of people voted for him because he put money in their pockets whether it was tax refunds for families, economic reforms, wealth transfer or a booming resource economy. Honestly I wouldn’t mind a bit of that right now. And that is the shitty bit isn’t it. Like you know we wasted opportunities, increased social divides etc. Fundamentally we are just a meaner, nastier bunch. But I kind of get why Trump won so decisively despite being such a disgusting person. You have to grab those swing voters by the pussy and one of the best ways to do that is put money in their pockets and Howard understood that. I hate the alt-right culture war types but if another Howard turned up at the next election I think they would probably win by a landslide.
⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Who was our worst Prime Minister and why? Any notable state leaders we need to add?⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:
Fraser was uncompromising on things like refugees so he gets some credit for that as Howard/Fisher did for gun control. I don’t think Howard was proud of the children overboard stuff and not sure Fraser would have done that but he governed in different times. I think there is at least one PM since who had no moral compass at all, like clinically lacking, there was just the mask.
⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Who was our worst Prime Minister and why? Any notable state leaders we need to add?⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:
I can’t be sure if Howard’s government changed Australian society for the worse or if we were already changing and he was a reflection of that. Either way there is pre-Howard Australia and post-Howard Australia and they are basically different countries. A lot of people did very well under Howard, even a lot of battlers were better off for a time. He is always going to be a highly notable PM. There have been a few since who were just hopeless, ineffective, incompetent and its a struggle to pin that label on Howard regardless of politics.

The trouble with labeling Howard as best or worst is that there were very definitely winners and losers under Howard. I would say he was the worst in terms of impact on society but unfortunately I think he was more a symbol of the times. I think we got nasty, greedy and divided all by ourselves.
⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨NBN Co to accelerate higher speed tiers and launch multi-gigabit speeds in September 2025⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:
I am on aging PMG era copper with no upgrade on the horizon. I expect to die from old age before NBN offers better than 50Mbps VDSL. I will never forgive the cynical partisan politics that produced this shit show or the idiots who knew it was bullshit but went along with it due to tribalism. It was supposed to be a national network.
⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Australian families switching to cycling as car-running costs rise - ABC News⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:
Bikes are only a small part of the picture. Infrastructure needs huge changes for bikes to be safe and we need to incentivise small vehicles like Kei cars and small cheap electric personal transport instead of going in the other direction. Not everyone is physically able to ride a bike and it can be challenging for those that can in some conditions such as heatwaves.

Virtue signalling inner city hipsters on cargo bikes that cost more than a budget used car don’t necessarily have all the answers.
⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Elon Musk destroys astronomy⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:
I have not heard a car for a few hours. Not even the rumble of traffic in the distance and I can see the night sky without light pollution. It is a very privileged experience in some ways and while it has its advantages we are measurably disadvantaged in most human development metrics: health, education, income etc. Equitable internet access is more important than many people appreciate. If we can improve services to everyone AND protect radio astronomy that is a worthy goal.
⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Question about Australian towns⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:
The loss of life from WWI and WW2 in particular had a huge impact on country towns. They planted avenues of trees, named roads, engraved the names of young people on walls.
⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Are we going down the same path as US politics?⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:
Election cycles are seasonal events and there is a traveling circus that supports them across the English speaking countries. There is also trans-national movement within political influence businesses like News Corp and other lobby groups.

Historically Australia has often adapted media from elsewhere whether it be advertising or television formats and much of the country was so isolated pre-Internet that we never noticed that football, meat pies, kangaroos and Holden cars was a ripoff of hot dogs, apple pie and chevrolet.

I expect over negative/false/deceptive campaigning would be regulated as we have a comparatively robust and fair electoral system. AI is built into popular image editing tools and political staffers aren’t necessarily great graphic artists so I expect we will see more low effort AI images in political advertising and everywhere else as society continues to embrace mediocrity and deskilling.
⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨CrowdStrike impact on aussie.zone?⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:
Pretty much the entire Internet runs on Linux or BSD. The systems are cheaper, more reliable and more flexible than Windows. Also you put only what you need in a container or virtual machine and it runs with such limited privileges there is really no need to have intrusive one-size-fits-all malware detection systems as it would only increase the attack surface and make the system more fragile.

Microsoft spent a lot of money increasing mind share in education and creating developer tools in the past that led to a massive ecosystem developing business logic with their tools. It created a huge software legacy that isn’t going to be replaced any time soon. That leaves enterprise IT in a very different position to orgs running Internet services as they need to secure this legacy from modern threats while facing budget and staffing pressures.

Most Internet facing services were created more recently with tools popular at the time (Rails and PHP at the time of Twitter/Facebook), then Golang, Python, and more recently lemmy uses Rust which has only been in stable release for a decade. While of these languages and associated tools run cross platform, Linux is generally preferred for deployment and often has the most mature support though I believe Netflix is a heavy user of FreeBSD.

The only notable Windows backed “Internet scale” website that isn’t a frontend to some internal business system that I can think of was Stack Overflow though there are probably others.
⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨'Grow up': Rudd goes after Tenacious D for a Trump joke. It's 2024, baby!⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:
What is the appropriate response to fascists though? Can we joke about them getting hung from lamp posts or is it too soon?

I am driving in country SA this morning and I see a fossil in a red trump hat walking in the car park in front of my bumper. He would have been fucked if I was driving a Tesla or one of those stupid yank tanks. Thought about telling him to fuck of back to America or throwing a Seig Heil but I think the sad old fuck was just looking for attention. His grand kids probably don’t talk to him anymore since they succumbed to the “woke mind virus”. Poor fucker, joining a doomsday cult must be isolating.

Over a century ago the locals were goose stepping down the street in support of the Kaiser. Nothing much has changed I guess. While we will be dealing with the consequences if the US fucks things up this isn’t our war. People who are disconnected from society think it is but why become one of those sad fucks.
⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨OzBargain user claims that chicken parma/parmi is "just chicken nuggies for adults"⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:
Have always said this. My preferred deep fried crumbed pub protein is a massive Weiner Schnitzel with gravy.
⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Let's chat about these SEVEN nuclear power plants the LNP want to build ...⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:
This policy is not genuine. The intention is to delay or destroy fossil fuel alternatives to protect investments in that sector. If it creates political division and creates an impression of leadership then it is icing on the cake. I would expect the coalition to become increasingly divided if this was ever realistically pursued. Coalition voters do not want to foot the bill for this idiocy. The market has already voted. Renewables won on time to market and ROI.

For context I am not opposed to nuclear power generation at all. There has been a lot of misinformation about safety and waste for generations that has poisoned debate and I would like to see a more rational debate. I think it irresponsible for countries like Germany to turn away from nuclear and create huge energy security issues as well as increased emissions.

Carbon emissions are a global problem and each country has a responsibility to address it as effectively as they can. We can support nuclear power by supplying uranium and it doesn’t matter for carbon reduction if the reactors are in Australia or overseas.

Our construction costs are very high and we don’t have local expertise. Our research reactor was designed by Argentina. As much as some of us would like to see nuclear power come to Australia it is fantasy economics.
⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Let's chat about these SEVEN nuclear power plants the LNP want to build ...⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:
It makes no economic sense. Fucking idiot.
⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Elon Musk vs Australia: global content take-down orders can harm the internet if adopted widely⁩ ⁨⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:
I think we are more or less on the same page within the bandwidth limits of online conversation.

Australian courts can’t enforce their orders directly outside Australia. That is just a fact so there is no point even entertaining it except to incite a mob that doesn’t know better.

The only way such things happen is through international agreements. IP and CSAM are just about universal. I don’t think many services would refuse to take down revenge porn so that is something else that doesn’t seem controversial.

Musk seems intent on turning his plaything into 4chan. Any normal large media company would likely have complied without the tantrums. Anything to get attention I guess.

We might be a bit ahead of the curve with respecting adult victims of crime. Not always a bad thing. We were ahead on tobacco packaging, plastic money, HPV vaccines and other things. The US still can’t adult when it comes to sensible gun regulation. I don’t think we should apologize for trying. This is the rule of law in a moderately functional liberal democracy and couldn’t be further from authoritarianism. It is an overreach for sure but Musk has been aiming for Mars for years.
⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Elon Musk vs Australia: global content take-down orders can harm the internet if adopted widely⁩ ⁨⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:
It is reasonable for courts and legislation to have powers to protect victims of crime and their families from distribution of images and video of their suffering. It is a secondary victimization. How far that should extend is up for debate. Our courts have a limited jurisdiction and it is just a matter of fact that we can’t enforce our domestic laws outside out borders anymore than an autocracy can suppress foreign reporting of their human rights abuses as much as they may try.

We broadly have two fairly obvious sets of international agreements that can get material taken down through most of the world. The first is child abuse material. The second is IP infringement.

Be a 24 year old Aussie battler with a part time job. Copy a Japanese manufacturer’s shitty kid’s game. You now owe $1.5 million dollars. How? Copyright. It is enforceable in practically every jurisdiction.

Find the person who took the video, fairly compensate them for the rights, then issue a DMCA notice to Twitter. Job done. Censorship already exists. It is called IP rights and is enforced internationally through treaties.

I think we could have an argument that on the scale of stuff that should be censored to stuff that shouldn’t, protecting adult victims of violent crime seems like it should fall somewhere between child abuse and IP rights. It is a straw man argument to lump it in with the censorship demanded by authoritarian states.
⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Australian prime minister labels Elon Musk ‘an arrogant billionaire who thinks he is above the law’⁩ ⁨⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:
It might be better to legislate more power and enforcement capabilities to regulate social media companies. Many of them are close to monopolies in their niches and their network effects make competition almost impossible.

I do believe there are areas where it is more ethical and efficient for government to operate services (eg policing, public hospitals, emergency services, schools) but I don’t believe social media is one of them.
⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Australian prime minister labels Elon Musk ‘an arrogant billionaire who thinks he is above the law’⁩ ⁨⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:
I believe Musk would censor anything that upset an authoritarian regime if it aligned with his business/political interests. I don’t believe his arguments are in good faith.

Attempting to enforce the laws of our country against foreign companies that operate here is fair game. We have some leverage. We can have a debate domestically about if we think this should be enforced or not.

Personally I don’t see a problem with protecting victims of crime, their families and community whether it be child abuse material or graphic video of violent crime. I struggle to see a public interest or freedom of political speech angle that would justify a reasonable individual or company ignoring a sensible request to cease distribution.

Not all censorship is equal nor all enforcement mechanisms. We need more freedom here to criticize public figures as our defo laws are bonkers. Also the government should not attempt to apply wrong-headed technical impediments that would have unintended consequences because they don’t have sufficient expertise or the foresight to understand such actions.
⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Ifixit gives fairphone 5 a 10/10 on repairability and maintanence⁩ ⁨⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:
Framework ship laptops to Australia and has a headphone socket. Great company. Great products. Great experience, highly recommend. I can’t recommend products that don’t sell and support in my market. I don’t have any loyalty to Fairphones or Steamdecks or any other product from low effort company that don’t ship beyond NA or Europe.
⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Ifixit gives fairphone 5 a 10/10 on repairability and maintanence⁩ ⁨⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:
I like repairable hardware and own a Framework laptop. It has a headphone socket that I use every day. If Framework made a phone I might be interested. If most fairphones end up paired to disposable wireless earbuds with limited battery life that end in landfill I don’t get how that is more sustainable than adding a socket for the declining but still sizeable number of people who cling to wired stuff that just works.
⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨How many of you actually use the headphone jack on your phone?⁩ ⁨⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:
Every day. Aux in on my car, wired headphones, aux in on old stereo. I could replace it all with bluetooth but it isn’t broken and I can still use bluetooth on other devices. I like choice and I hate waste and conspicuous consumption. Rechargeable wireless devices with limited battery life that can’t be serviced or repaired is peak consumption/pollution bullshit. The headphone jack may wear out before my phone’s usb, battery or something else but that hasn’t been my experience historically.
⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Internode and Westnet shutdown: TPG moves customers to iiNet⁩ ⁨⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:
IMO the only truly difficult part of self hosting is mail delivery because you end up at the mercy of big stupid companies (eg Microsoft) that don’t give a shit. Even then it is possible and possibly advisable to use a paid service for delivery and let them deal with the bastards.

With a bit of research and a methodical approach I think just about anybody comfortable setting up other linux network services should be fine. I like being in control of my own mail store. I choose to do my own delivery and the only persistently difficult provider is Microsoft’s free email offerings which I care about about as much as they care about running a reliable mail system for their users. They seem to penalize infrequent low volume senders. I have always been signed up to their spam monitoring bullshit and have never had a negative report but they don’t seem to communicate there so you can be blocked and nobody knows how or why. They blocked most of my hosting provider once so I routed my outgoing email with correct dkim, spf etc from a server hosted elsewhere. Easy to do with Postfix.
⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Google admits it's making YouTube worse for ad block users⁩ ⁨⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:
Long time family premium user (household of parents and kids). Anything Youtube do to preserve their revenue within reason doesn’t bother me too much as long as they don’t reduce the split with quality creators. If they were successful with all this bullshit perhaps they wouldn’t have needed to notify me that subs are almost doubling next year. My guess is all they are doing is fucking things up for everyone. It is only going to get worse when their premium subscription base reduces. They should be pushing premium as an alternative to ad-blockers but instead they are pushing people including premium subscribers towards ad-blockers.
⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Internode and Westnet shutdown: TPG moves customers to iiNet⁩ ⁨⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:
There isn’t much to differentiate ISPs anymore. It used to be a huge benefit to have unmetered, low latency game servers, streaming radio mirrors, usenet feeds, IP phone services and ISP email. Internet offered a huge amount of extra value through the dialup, ISDN, ADSL1, ADSL2 era. They offered IPv6 early which was interesting to a techie early adopter and were rolling out ADSL2+ in some exchanges and wireless systems. I stuck with Internode for a long time because if your system just works there isn’t a lot of incentive to chase other providers who are more or less the same. In the NBN era hey were a bit slow to deal with congestion a couple of times and I ended up moving to Superloop. I don’t think they are anything special but that is kind of the point these days. The industry is commoditised and as long as their network and billing is competently run all the NBN resellers should be fairly comparable.
⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Epic win: Jury decides Google has illegal monopoly in app store fight⁩ ⁨⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:
Probably comes down to the unwillingness of US legislators to create clear laws. Too many compromises to satisfy lobbyists and avoid any negative campaign they might sponsor. Judges likely do the best they can trying to interpret the mess of case law they depend on in the absence of modern legislation. I have no idea why the US supreme court gets to decide on matters like abortion based on hand wavy interpretations of historical documents when in any normal democracy the politicians do the will of the people and enact legislation that reflects modern society.
⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Epic win: Jury decides Google has illegal monopoly in app store fight⁩ ⁨⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:
My interpretation of the article is that it wasn’t Google’s app store but the deals Google did with other manufacturers and big studios that caused them problems. Unlike iOS Android has both open source and commercial forks. Amazon have their own app store for their own range of devices and you can load that app store on regular Android I believe if you want to access a shittier range of apps. There are degoogled versions of Android and many people including myself run f-droid or side load apks. It is much more open than Apple’s system which won.
⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Coalition tells Cop28 it will back tripling of nuclear energy if Peter Dutton becomes prime minister⁩ ⁨⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:
I am moderately pro nuclear but the coalition is not. They are on the payroll of the fossil fuel industry (as are some in the ALP) and their fake fascination with nuclear is entirely a delaying tactic to prolong the value of fossil fuel investments. Renewables have been getting all the investment and R&D and that is reflected in the declining costs and ease of deployment. Nuclear has stagnated and the economics and time to market suck. The fossil fuel lobby is not threatened by nuclear which won’t take business away from them in Australia. Send uranium to France where they have a mature nuclear industry and restart reactors shut down by fools in places like Germany. Meanwhile lets ramp up our deployment of renewables and shut down more carbon emitters.
⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨How Reddit Crushed the Internet's Largest Protest⁩ ⁨⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:
All reddit did was unmask themselves a little but only for those with their eyes open. Social media is close enough to a cult operation utilizing addictive behaviors and conditioning to control people. People don’t want to leave their church and be shunned. Every tried to convince someone to leave Facebook? Reddit is just another exploitative techbro run business. It isn’t a social enterprise or open source community and it is weird that volunteers invested so much of their time and effort propping it up shareholder value instead of contributing to real communities.

Plenty of independent thinkers left and found federated alternatives or walked away. The predatory and manipulative nature of social media was bad enough when it was all about controlling and manipulating the masses but now it is also a huge machine learning harvesting operations. The only people who really benefit are the ultra rich.