shirro @ shirro @aussie.zone

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Joined

2 yr. ago

The moment we discuss resource tax reforms in Australia the mineral lobby will stage a coup and remove the PM. It is a stain on our democracy. Nothing anyone can do about it. They own the country and we just live here and do what we are told.

She has nothing to lose and any attack only makes her stronger. She has a remarkable story and I don't think any the less of her because her circumstances give her the freedom to do what most others simply cannot without bringing on their own destruction.

But we should all contemplate on how starkly her freedom contrasts with every other public figure in Australia who lives in fear of what the Murdoch press would do to them. Nobody else can speak freely, not the most powerful political elites or business leaders or celebs. No PM. No Premier. They all kiss the ring. They have no choice.

I suspect he is the Taylor Swift or Mr Beast of talk shows. If you have no experience with music then Taylor is very accessible and easy to discover. Mr Beast will be on the front page when you visit Youtube if you don't have an established watch history. I am sure Rogan tops the podcast apps. The platforms promote him because he has an audience and he is always being discussed.

It is the lowest common denominator stuff. You can likely discuss Rogan along with the cricket or free to air reality tv with regular people and be on common ground.

Rogan's ignorance is comical and a bit concerning how many people hang on his words but he fills a niche that people seem to desire. When they claim to be upset about all the haters they are behaving more or less like Swifties. They absolutely love hanging out with other Swifties and can't understand why we don't all agree with them. That isn't being a victim. That is petulance.

Taking hard won gains from working people isn't going to be popular. Most developed countries like South Korea, Japan and part of Europe already have low enough birth rates already to the point of concern about sustainability of their aging populations.

Let's lift the poor out of poverty and give them access to birth control and social services so that they have choices and all the evidence suggests they will choose quality over quantity and smaller families or careers over large families.

Working people fought for centuries for the conditions we currently enjoy only to have them eroded by crap like the gig economy. We should not give up parental benefits as well. We should give up waste and extreme consumerism not nurturing families.

I love NZ very much. Wonderful people and amazing natural geography. But Australia has higher incomes and more career opportunities and would still be considered a huge career downgrade for many US citizens which probably still favors relocation to the more liberal US cities/states. The city/inner burbs of the major Aus cities are going to be reasonably liberal (in the American sense) and very multicultural probably more so than most of New Zealand outside Aukland. Aus has ridiculously high immigration rates but can be difficult to qualify. NZ currently has a conservative government keeping the divisive culture wars alive while Australia has a centrist Labor federal government as do the majority of Australian states.

For people with experience with any mobile 12th gen intel and the framework 13 AMD, can you quantify what you think the upgrade is worth or would it be better to wait for a refresh to the "ai" series if that ever happens.

I look at the price for board/ram/wifi upgrade and struggle to justify even though I expect the amd cpu to be cooler/quieter and have much better iGPU. I know it should easily outperform the steam deck in raw performance so with some scaling it should be reasonable for some light casual gaming but I don't have any experience with amd outside of desktop cpus and dedicated graphics. Every time I consider an upgrade it makes more sense to buy desktop upgrades and cope with the intel system for a few more years. I don't have a good use for the intel mainboard as it doesn't have much expansion, multiple ssd, pcie etc.

I believe the majority of our growth comes from immigration. If we penalize Australian parents I expect business would demand the government offset a lower natural birthrate with higher immigration. Removing hard fought benefits for Australians would likely only make kids and parents lives miserable and create more inequality and social problems.

Developed countries tend to naturally adopt low birth rates even with fair allowances for parents and care givers as the financial and lifestyle sacrifices are still relatively large. The natural birthrate in Australia also gets a boost from immigration and would likely trend lower if we weren't running a huge pyramid scheme.

They do it because they can. They are squeezing every last drop out of their customers. Clueless people with roo much money won't cancel. People who want to keep the product but are feeling the squeeze will go ad supported.

The rest were probably going to leave at any price as there is a lot more competition now and Netflix has adapted very poorly.

People either hop between services or go sailing wearing an eye patch or increasingly just so something else.

I think a lot of viewing time has been lost to social media, gaming and other alternatives. Don't know if most people these days have the attention span for day long binges with their phones going off every few minutes and the FOMO. I can handle sitting in a room watching a movie with someone with them looking at their phone for half of it

That was obvious.

Option 1: a nation of predominantly anti-intellectual xenophobes organically discover a foreign language community and embrace it or option 2: a bunch of influencers from an existing platform are recruited to promote a competitor to a bunch of addicts looking for another fix. Social and mainstream media universally promoted the incorrect narrative.

I wish US citizens didn't look so much to authoritarian states like Russia and China when they have old friends who they worked and faught alongside for years. These friends have been happily enjoying the benefits of social democracy despite an onslaught of anti-democratic propaganda, much of it from US citizens and their media.

Which brings me to the other narrative that pisses me off. That Chinese media are a national security threat but Meta and X are not. Lets be real. It is all the same shit. Any organized effort to manipulate mass opinion: politics disguised as religion, social media, conspiracy theories, cults etc have the potential to derail rational political debate, elevate populists and hand the keys to a generalissimo and it always leads to mass graves. Left or right doesn't change the outcome which is shit. We all have to take some responsibility to fight back against this influence. Engage with people who are sucked into this shit and encourage them to disconnect.

Most mobile/laptop devices should be encrypted by default. They are too prone to loss or theft. Even that isn't sufficient with border crossings where you are probably better off wiping them or leaving them behind.

My desktop has no valuable data like crypto, sits in a locked and occupied house in a small rural community with relatively low crime (public healthcare, social security, aging population). I have no personal experience of property theft in over half a decade.

I encrypt secrets with a hardware key. They are only accessed as needed. This is a much more appropriate solution than whole disk encryptiom for my circumstances. Encrypting Linux packages and steam libraries doesn't offer any practical benefit and unlocking my filesystem at login would not protect from network exfiltration which is a more realistic risk. It adds overhead.and another point of failure for no real benefit.

I was a huge SpaceX fan from the early days so watched a lot of Musks presentations and interviews and noticed a lot of repetition and always felt he was strongly working from talking points combined with a reasonably good high level understanding of the topic.

He didn't work as well off script and seemed to have stunted emotional development, not unlike a lot of internet age manboys raised on memes, video games and porn. It is difficult to reconcile his behaviour with an adult, father and manager of people and money. I suspect he has some seriously competent peiple around him like Shotwell who cover for his fuck ups.

IMO he probably is the kind of guy who can soak up stuff around him, turn it into a set of talking points and repeat it with the appearance of expertise. I think he may have had some cognitive decline due to age and lifestyle but I think he was a pretty competent bullshit artist in the past.

I am not an expert at anything but like many IT people discovered long ago that I can pick up most things in my general field with a bit of research. It is a dangerous mindset sometimes. There really is the feeling that with some basic undergrad math and comp sci and a weekend of googling you can understand quantum field theory and it's totally delusional of course.

Unfortunately the fake it to you make it culture seems to have won. It doesn't matter how crap you are, if you put yourself out there with confidence you will outcompete the quiet competent types. And when you get caught out there never seem to be consequences.

There is a whole world of obsolete stuff nobody will ever do with a linux system anymore. Terminal servers with lots of serial terminals or modems for a BBS. Making a fax server, IVR, digital answering machine for analog land lines. Using removable optical or magnetic media. Recording broadcast tv. SCSI, Firewire. It is interesting to imagine what from today will be obsolete in a few years.

I don't want to see the terminal emulator. No chrome. Needs solid emulation. That's about it. Still using kitty and it's got a good balance of stuff I use. I don't really get the point of ghostty. These things are a bit like browsers, they just display the content and are interchangeable. People get super weird about terminal emulators and window managers.

I have been using Linux since the early 90s. I don't know it all. I read man pages. I use -h or --help. I read the arch wiki. I read docs. I read source files and examples. Lots of reading. You will never know it all. There is too much information.

You need to know how to find information. It can be tricky. Knowing how to ask the right questions often requires you to know a bit of the answer.

Stumbling about trying to find answers is training the skills you need.

I think it helps if you have a programming background and IT support experience. Not just because you will understand more concepts and terms but because you have already developed some of those skills but some people come from other backgrounds and pick things up really quickly because they have well developed research skills.

The only software I have paid for in the last couple of years are games. The licensing is still crooked but they are ephemeral entertainment so its not like they control your life.

The problem with commercial software isn't the price. It is the lock in. They have you by the balls whether you pirate or pay so I don't pirate as it doesn't address my main issue with closed source software which ismt price but control. I prefer to adapt, sometimes live with less features and use free and open source.

Its hard if you have to work with others which is the whole network effect BS, everyone is on Reddit and shitter so why aren't you. If you can work independently though you can get a lot done and have more control.

Exactly.

I wonder what their reaction would be to a tv show where a bunch of CEOs were forced to compete to the death to entertain the masses.

Would that get a McDonald's merch tie in? I think seeing private healthcare and fast food CEO's being mown down by machine guns in a battle royale would be a real crowd pleaser.

Wasn't the original Squid Game a social commentary, a critique of inequalities created by capitalism in South Korea kind of like Parasite? Anyone else think it completely went over the heads of Mr Beast, Netflix, McDonalds and most of the viewers?

No but there is an ideological basis for free software though it is firmly based on practical experiences dealing with the consequences of close source devices.

Red Hat and Ubuntu are business. Debian and Arch are communities. Some of the smaller distros are basically that one guy in Nebraska.

People promote them for various reasons. An IBM employee will have different reasons to the supporter types who latch on to a distro and mascot like it was a football team. Now football, there is a religion. Its all ritual, nothing they do has any practical use, people congregate once a week and in some parts of the world it turns violent.

When the deb users start committing genocide on the rpm users I'll call it a religion. Until then its just a bunch of anime convention fans arguing about their favourite isekai.

It will be 35 years way too soon. I can't remember the last time I compiled a kernel let alone what exactly I was doing with a computer in the early 90s.

Its weird that most of the world runs on Linux outside of desktop and we still have these discussions. I didn't know what a distro was in the beginning. It was a Linux kernel and gnu user space someone had compiled to get people started. If the disk sets had a name I didn't know or care.

I have been using PayPal increasingly for online payments. Not sure why. I have heard old stories about PayPal but Honey seems really bad. Its basically a given that any fintech company are going to be dodgy scammers but PayPal seemed almost grown up and respectable. Guess not.