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.

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 hipsters on cargo bikes that cost more than a budget used car don’t necessarily have all the answers. Still need to pay rego and service that car you use to drive the kids in the heat and rain when the ABC aren’t watching.

My current vehicle is mid 2000s, much older than 2015 and standard equipment includes a backup camera that engages in reverse on its perfectly usable 4:3 standard definition screen.

The climate controls are buttons with led indicators and rotary encoders that control a display so while it isn’t as distracting as a touch screen it can’t be operated fully haptically while eyes are on the road either. It makes sense though as the rear climate controls can be adjusted independently with a wireless remote and in that application it is almost impossible to do things with simple sliders and selector knobs. I am not an absolutist on these things but I appreciate designers putting some thought into the usability of controls instead of going with the cheapest/flashiest solution.

I don’t want to drive a smart phone or have it drive me. Give me a car with a pre iPhone dash and Bluetooth and I am happy. I am hoping there will be a market for old people cars with real controls when the vehicles we drive now are no longer maintainable.

Not sold on declarative systems in all domains. It often creates unnecessary complexity for little advantage.

Immutable root has huge benefits in large deployments for consumers, enterprise or servers. Really great for Chromebooks and consoles. Probably would benefit the majority of Windows installations, certainly in enterprise. I do not like the idea of critical systems being updated with random shit becoming standard practice as in WIndows/Clownstrike land. Those guys have normalised insanity to the point they think we are the crazy ones.

However I like to mutate my desktop and development systems. I use linux because I like the freedom to tinker and that includes the freedom to mess stuff up. In practice having root writable only by a privileged user, a signed software distribution and knowing what I am doing mostly keeps me out of trouble. On the very rare occasions I find myself without a bootable system (it has happened to me more than once in 30 years) I know how to recover and it doesn’t stress me.

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.

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.

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 off back to America or throwing a Seig Heil but I think the sad old fuck was just looking for attention and I wasn’t going to play. 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.

Currently school holidays here and we have multiple machines running Steam on Linux all day playing a good variety of games. None of them are competitive online games that require a rootkit so we are just fortunate I guess that the household prefers co-op lan games, sims etc. I suspect these rootkits are about as effective as anti-doping in sports. Determined cheats still cheat so anyone installing malware to play those sorts of games is probably fooling themselves.

Apple, like Nvidia, are a hostile hardware platform. I have a lot of respect for the ingenuity of the people who invest time and energy to unlock closed hardware. That is the true foundation of the free software movement. I am far less sympathetic to people who support these vendors financially and then complain when things don’t work. Caveat emptor.

Windows 9x was extremely time consuming to install with multiple reboots and before that it was all config files. Out of the box 95 couldn’t play media, connect to the internet (thanks trumpet), even access a cd. Normies bought machines pre-installed and got help when the system shit itself. Before there were scripted alternatives large scale Windows deployments were all imaged because of the hours it took to set up a single machine swapping floppies and writing to spinning rust. You had to reboot numerous times and use third party drivers and apps for everything. I recently installed a disposable Win 10 to do a firmware upgrade and Microsoft have come a long way though having to disconnect the Internet to get a local login is very dark.

In the mid 90s the Japanese Aum Shinrikyo cult were producing chemical weapons which were used in a deadly sarin gas attack on the Tokyo subway. Prior to the attack Aum briefly owned a million acre cattle ranch in Australia where they tested sarin and may have tried to mine uranium ore.

Several nuclear powers are run by autocratic theocracies/cults and the US could be heading in that direction.

Have always said this. My preferred deep fried crumbed pub protein is a massive Weiner Schnitzel with gravy.

This policy is not genuine. The intention is to delay or destroy fossil fuel alternatives to protect fossil fuel investments. If it creates political division and 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.

Not a fan of how Boeing managed Starliner but this headline is clickbait. This is the time to find remaining issues with the vehicle so they can be corrected before it begins regular operational flights. Running tests on the service module in space is good value because after it separates for reentry it is destroyed.

NASA doesn’t always feel like a totally trustworthy source. They appeared to downplay problems with Artemis I but the OIG blasted the Artemis I Orion and said the numerous problems represented a significant risk to crew safety that could lead to a future loss of crew. The problems with Starliner could be more serious than they look but it has successfully de-orbited and landed twice and I think there is a very good chance it will again with crew onboard.

It makes no economic sense. Fucking idiot.

Reality. ‘AI’ application just spyware that tracks your spending habits and sells them to mega corps that then adjust the products and pricing to you to maximise profits. Uptake is below investor expectations as most intelligent people realise the service is an expensive con. VC funds run out and backend is shut down. User left with expensive non-functional device.

So basically the same as half the school administered laptops full of remote spyware. We had one of those bought home, supplied to teaching staff, the spyware was never disclosed and it used to sit on a desk in the bedroom. The rule now is we buy and control our own devices, even if they have to run shit like Windows for compatibility on some. Enterprise versions of Windows will almost certainly ship without crap like Recall as it might conflict with the enterprises third party spyware. Unfortunately there is still intense institutional resistance to moving away from the Microsoft ecosystems in some organizations.

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.