shirro @ shirro @aussie.zone

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2 yr. ago

Raising rates is a legit proven way to combat inflation but there have to be more nuanced approaches available. Economic thought seems to have stagnated more than wages. Wage earners with dependents have been going backwards in a big way.

If they want to take the steam out of spending by the investment income class then perhaps they should be targeted specifically instead of making it harder for working families to feed and cloth their kids. We could look at increasing taxes on the wealthy, reducing tax evasion and negative gearing. But no, lets hit the people who will hurt the most who have barely any discretionary spending to influence. The beatings will continue until morale improves.

ML based handwriting recognition has been powering postal routing for a couple of decades. ML completely dominates some areas and will only increase in impact as it becomes more widely applicable. Getting any technology from a lab demo to a safe and reliable real world product is difficult and only more so when there are regulatory obstacles and people being dragged around by vehicles.

For the purposes of raising money from investors it is convenient to understate problems and generate a cult of magical thinking about technology. The hype cycle and the manipulation of the narrative has been fairly obvious with this one.

Many areas of machine learning, particularly LLMs are making impressive progress but the usual ycombinator techbro types are over hyping things again. Same as every other bubble including the original Internet one and the crypto scams and half the bullshit companies they run that add fuck all value to the world.

The cult of bullshit around AI is a means to fleece investors. Seen the same bullshit too many times. Machine learning is going to have a huge impact on the world, same as the Internet did, but it isn't going to happen overnight. The only certain thing that will happen in the short term is that wealth will be transferred from our pockets to theirs. Fuck them all.

I skip most AI/ChatGPT spam in social media with the same ruthlessness I skipped NFTs. It isn't that ML doesn't have huge potential but most publicity about it is clearly aimed at pumping up the market rather than being truly informative about the technology.

Obviously a lot of state actors are involved in forms of information warfare including China and they certainly have the resources to be very effective in that area.

You follow the money and a lot of the time it is going to end up the same place as a disproportionate amount of the world's capital which is in the USA and the west in general. The amount of damage the fossil fuel industry has done to the world is immeasurable and makes China insignificant by comparison. They funded anyone who would take their side and supported many forms of extremism in the process, all to prolong the value of their investments at the cost of leaving a horrendous legacy for future generations.

I am concerned about China's massive military expansion and their impact on regional stability, but dealing with that is on a whole different level of concern to some of the other influences on our media and politics.

Obligatory fuck the CCP, but also they aren't going anywhere unless the Chinese population fights for democracy and we aren't setting a great example for them while we refuse to participate in and improve the democracy we have.

Platforms that offer greater freedom also tend to host visibly more extreme content. My guess is the slightly more advertiser friendly extremism pushed by algorithms on mainstream platforms is far more impactful on society.

Outside of the relatively small number of people engaged with issues like software freedom, privacy, right to repair there is no reason to choose a platform with less views unless your content is banned from the alternatives.

I expect Rossmann's politics are shaped by his experiences as a small business owner. Many such people desire greater economic and individual freedom and are likely economic liberals but that doesn't necessarily influence their views on other matters. He is an outspoken advocate for consumer freedoms including right to repair which I respect. I don't know the guy personally but I would be surprised and disappointed if he endorses far right crazy shit. I am using Lemmy and respect the people who wrote the software but nothing about my politics should be inferred from theirs.

Technology circumvention and copyright infringement are just about the only power consumers have against the near monopolies and cartel like behavior from the tech/media industry since our government regulators have been neutered.

I am grandfathered into a family Premium plan from the old Youtube Red days. The price is close to doubling come April. In the absence of competition or government intervention to punish anti-compeitive, anti-consumer behaviour I will be relying on ad-blocking and other circumvention measures next year. I am willing to pay a fair price but costs of living have gone up a lot while incomes for regular people are stagnant. The executives running these companies are completely disconnected from reality.

Indigenous disadvantage is a huge issue and I don't want to trivialize it by comparison to less important topics but as far as these constitutional referendums are concerned there is some commonality. Both seek to add recognition and self-determination for Australians that are far more appropriate for current and future Australia than was anticipated in a document written near the height of the British Empire.

Parliament can legislate indigenous consultation and although it isn't as resilient as a constitutional change it can achieve much the same outcome for now. We have gone as far as we can legislatively to become an independent sovereign nation and the replacement of the head of state with an Australian citizen is the last obstacle to assert our full nationhood.

Realistically both were going to be lost outside the inner cities. Neither are going to give a No voter cheaper beer and smokes. As long as we have a regional divide in economic status and education, conservatives have an almost insurmountable advantage. Racism might have played a role in the Voice outccome but it is just one of many buttons for a disinformation campaign to exploit.

Passing referendums is very difficult in Australia. People are easily scared away from change with emotional arguments unless there is a very clear message and benefit and I think the voice proposal was lacking. The only reason I voted Yes was to show solidarity with indigenous Australians and to oppose some of the ugly characters and lies coming from the No campaign. Try as I could reading the Uluru statement and other supporting arguments I couldn't get excited about it and I can understand why people on the fence would reject constitutional change.

The government should put as much as they can into legislation and be satisfied and I think we should move on.

Unfortunately I think this result has huge lessons for the republican cause. I suspect there won't be a republican referendum this decade now.

I don't really see the link to communism though I can see the parallels to social democracy.

Private ownership of computer code should lead us to a hellscape where all code is owned by a handful of huge companies and wealthy elites. But instead of doing away with private ownership and making all code public domain we added regulation in the form of free and open source licensing that democratized private ownership and made it serve our community. Perhaps that is the real lesson, not communism.

I saw several older people around town take up cycling once the law was changed to allow adults to cycle on footpaths. They change between surface based on their capabilities and perceived safety as everyone should. Look out for yourself first and worry about obeying laws designed to kill people second. Cycling on paths has its merits for all ages though it can still be dangerous due to driveways etc. The commonwealth should force universal adoption to bring the backward high road fatality states up to standard. Until then mass civil disobedience is the way.

It was decades ago but Burger King was a bit of a staple for me for a few years when I lived close to a franchise operator that was consistent. It has been awhile and I knew things had gone downhill and some of the franchise operators are very shitty but I was shocked last time we went. The restaurant was filthy and the tables and floors were covered in food. The burgers looked to be thrown together out of bin leftovers. Can't say I blame staff for the lack of enthusiasm given their employer has a known history of wage theft. We couldn't tell the differences between the more expensive special and regular whopper so took the mess to the counter to ask what the fuck we were given and why it looked nothing like the photo. The whole family swore off them for life. Never going back.

Prodigy is excellent. A lot of people who would have enjoyed it never got the chance to watch it.

We had the first few episodes on one of our streaming services and the whole family enjoyed them but they must have lost the rights and we never got any more. I signed up to Paramount which wasn't always available in our part of the world mainly to watch SNW. It was very disappointing to see Prodigy episodes listed but showing video unavailable. They had a fantastic entry point into the franchise for younger viewers that still managed to keep adults engaged.

My junior high school kid said nobody his age even knows what Star Trek is. This seemed crazy to me but then I realized most people have Netflix and or Disney and Paramount+ is practically unheard of here. The movie reboots stopped ages ago. The franchise really is dead for young viewers in large parts of the world. Which makes it even more amazing how badly Paramount has handled the licensing and promotion of Prodigy.

As much as I hate the Disney Borg, they should consider licensing it to the mouse for close to free to save the franchise and create a market for licensed toys and merch. It is as good as any of the Star Wars or Marvel spin offs and it is where all the families are subscribed. Even the BBC is moving Doctor Who there.

Exactly. It depends on the user and their requirements. Windows has far more commercial software support and is pre-installed and supported on a huge number of systems. Linux has many advantages in a large number of niches and if you operate in those niches it is hard to understand why anyone would choose to use Windows but a lot of people don't choose their OS at all. It is chosen for them when they buy their computer or dictated by their job or the software they need.

I am going to need more gaming PCs to keep the family engaged in the post streaming world. Not sure how I am going to do it. Even finding space for them is going to be a challenge.

Some people can't stand advertising and will turn off rather than sit through it. I have been ad blocking and ad skipping for 20 years. I am not going to change my habits. The alternative is piracy. I don't want to go back to piracy. It is a superior product in many ways but it isn't sustainable and I want a fair share of my subscriptions to fund creative jobs (not that that is happening). There are a lot of shows I can't stream or buy digitally here that are only available via the black market which is crazy in 2023 when streaming was supposed to fix this. We have companies taking shows off their services to claim tax writeoffs now at a time when the market is fragmented and overpriced.

The super rich and powerful think we are livestock to lead to slaughter and often they aren't wrong. The sensible thing is for consumers is to walk away (same for X, Facebook, Reddit and all the other time wasters) and let the whole thing burn down and hope that whatever replaces it learns from the mistakes and greed. Unfortunately I don't think enough will to make a difference.

I am out of touch with piracy. I was never a media hoarder but I can't stand ads and the quality of local tv has always been shocking. I used to have a media centre with a tuner and timeshift/ad skip in the mid-2000s but was increasingly getting my tv shows from ezrv. Then I had a login with a cool nzb site but they shut down. I was accessing Netflix over my own vpn long before it was offered outside north america. Streaming was awesome for awhile and I have been happily subscribing to multiple services for years. As the number of services increased and the cost got higher I started putting them in rotation much to the annoyance of the rest of the family. Not looking forward to piracy to be honest. Going to have to relearn where best to find stuff. It was nice having content just there for the family whenever they wanted it and not having to do anything but make some payments.

I don't mind reading the ABC news headlines direct or getting it second hand from lemmy posts to aussie.zone. I find the Twitter/X model annoying and a waste of time and Mastodon is only a little better. Too much noise. It is a shame they recently killed their RSS feeds as it was the OG fediverse and I could see myself going back to using an RSS reader as the rest of the Internet keeps getting shittier.

Request a GDPR export and you will get your entire comment history. There are tools that can read that history and delete all the comments. I did encounter errors deleting a small number of comments which may have been due to the subs being privated. I deleted the problem ones from the json and the rest got deleted. I manually checked a sample of the 12 years of comments to confirm the accessible ones were being deleted.

The typical consumer Windows antivirus was designed to solve a different set of problems in a different environment and analysing files for signatures and behaviors against known threats was very valuable when so many people were running executables from unsafe sources intentionally or not. Even on Windows an antivirus has never been the best way to secure a machine. It was always the lowest common denominator solution that you put on everyone's machine because it was better than nothing.

Linux has been well served for a long time by the division or privileges between root and users and signed trusted distro sources. The linux desktop is trending towards containerized flatpak applications running in seperate namespaces with additonal protection via seccomp. Try and understand the protections Linux provides and how to best take advantage of them first and only reach for an antivirus if you still think it is needed.

It was the Star Trek we needed before SNW and Lower Decks. Seth and the Orville are not universally appreciated but I doubt the Orville escaped the notice of the writers and producers at Paramount. The Orville charted a sometimes difficult and uneven course to the golden age of Start Trek we are currently enjoying and along the way made some excellent episodes and introduced some good lore and characters.