“Datacenters” can range from the size of a shipping container to many acres.

By demanding that there be a halt to “all datacenter construction” means that this petition will simply be dismissed out of hand because Australia needs compute capacity of all shapes and sizes for all sorts of business and consumer reasons, not just the giant AI datacenters that this petition is presumably aiming at.

No. The charity muggers in my country come around to my door, or meet me on the street, and they will not take a one-off donation. They want you to go for an ongoing monthly subscription of direct debit from my bank account or credit card that requires time and effort on my part to alter or cancel.

And while they are not the main problem, they are a symptom of the subscription epidemic. When I cannot simply give them 50 bucks because they do not have the means (or willingness) to process it, that is a definite sign that subscriptions have gone too far.

I cannot stand the local charity groups trying to sign me up for a recurring subscription donation. I’d happily give them 50 bucks one-off, but I can’t, so they get nothing.

What are you expecting to break down? A modern internal combustion engine plus continuously variable transmission is one the world’s most complex pieces of engineering in common use today.

An electric drive system is trivial in comparison.

WinXP ran quite nicely on 4GB of RAM. You could boot to the desktop in under 5 seconds if you had a solid state drive.

All the day to day tasks someone needs to do with their computers haven’t materially changed in the last twenty years since XP held the crown. In that time the speed of processors, storage, gpus, and ram has increased by literal orders of magnitude.

And yet, somehow, things have become much shittier since then.

“The average One Nation seat has five hospitals within 15 kilometres. The average Labor or Coalition seat has 38.”

Those numbers seem ridiculously large. What’s their methodology?

DKIM/SPF/DMARC add extra legitimacy to your message, but you can certainly still end up marked as spam if Google thinks you’re sending it.

One line emails, emails that just have links, emails with generic subjects, emails with just a subject and no text body, emails with no subjects - all that massively shoves Google’s spam detection towards spam. But that generally holds true with all providers as all the big players are using some form of Bayesian filtering (and so am I, with SpamAssassin on my incoming). If you send spammy-looking stuff, you’re gonna get marked as spam.

You spend an hour or two setting up DKIM , SPF, and DMARC, so that Gmail/Hotmail/etc can validate that you are who you say you are.

Once there is enough adoption, expect token costs to skyrocket and advertising enshitifaction to accelerate

Models on local hardware that give adequate performance and the availability of non-US models mean that path is doomed to failure. If they crank up the price then people will look elsewhere. While they might not get frontier-level performance out of the alternatives, there’s plenty of stuff out there that’s good enough for 1/4 to 1/10th of the cost. Or just the cost of power, if you’re willing to pay for some hardware and are operating on a small scale.

The only play the AI companies have got now is twofold :

• Regulatory capture, hence all the press releases of basic and frankly embarrassing sandbox failures and “we need to slow down” talk to try and get that rolling, and
• Banning of those nasty, evil, non-US models in the name of national security.

And then what? The rest of the world will just move on to the next most useful thing on the list. There will be ~330 million US citizens to extract wealth out of, to service trillions in data centre debt. That shit’s not gonna fly.

Any other alternative?

Natural Gas maybe.

I’m sure we can throw in a long and expensive process to convert all these diesel buses over to natural gas to solve the problem that we shouldn’t have encountered in the first place, for just twice or three times the cost of buying electric buses in the first place.

And endless ads on how great they are.

And in the ads it’s always the “new” Queensland Government. They’re halfway into their term, are they hoping at the next election people will go, “Oh let’s give them another 4 years, they’re still new” or something?

All they need to do is get governments high on AI mass surveillance and they’ll be golden

All they have to do is be the last AI company standing, then just absorb everyone else’s hardware for cents on the dollar.

This recent “we should slow down” talk is basically just them stalling until the collapse. They’ve spent all they dare to try and be the one on top, now it’s just waiting until the bubble pops.

Meanwhile China is out there being the black swan of the whole field. If they manage to get models with efficiency and/or utility above what these guys are doing, they’re fucked and they know it. So it’s a ticking time bomb, and there’s not that much time left.

Jesus Christ, Julia. Why is it that, in all these online ramblings, you never learned how to drip-feed your blog posts?

One a day, maybe. Don’t blow through them all at once like some desperate gambler trying to strike it rich. Now all you’ve done is gotten yourself onto a bunch of people’s blocklists and now you’ll never be visible to them again.

Lemmings.

Wolfenstein.

Doom.

Descent.

Unreal Tournament.

Missing the point alright.

Read the fictional press release below. Then replace “Black Lattice” with “OpenAI” and ask yourself, “Why isn’t anyone in jail right now?”:

INTERPOL PRESS RELEASE

Lyon, France — 27 September 2026

International operation dismantles “Black Lattice” cybercrime network; 14 charged across 9 countries

A coordinated international operation supported by INTERPOL has dismantled the cybercrime group known as “Black Lattice,” which is alleged to have infiltrated the networks of more than 60 corporations and 11 government agencies over a three-year period.

Codenamed Operation Silent Meridian, the 18-month investigation brought together law enforcement agencies from Australia, Brazil, Canada, Germany, Japan, the Netherlands, Singapore, the United Kingdom and the United States, working through INTERPOL’s Cybercrime Directorate and its Cyber Fusion Centre in Singapore.

Key outcomes

Across simultaneous raids on 23 and 24 September, authorities arrested 14 suspects, seized 212 devices including servers, laptops, and mobile phones. Investigators also took offline the group’s leak site and three command-and-control servers.

Suspects face charges including unauthorised access to computer systems, extortion, and participation in a criminal organisation. Several are also charged with the theft and sharing of classified government data.

Modus operandi

Black Lattice allegedly gained initial access through credential theft and compromised third-party software vendors, then moved laterally within victim networks for months before exfiltrating data. The group then publicly bragged about the breaches, naming several high-profile victims directly. Sectors affected included finance, healthcare, energy, logistics and public administration.

Statement

“This operation shows that no network is too hidden and no border too wide for coordinated law enforcement,” said Director of Cybercrime Elena Varga. “Black Lattice believed anonymity protected them. International cooperation proved otherwise.”

Ongoing investigation

Analysis of seized infrastructure continues, and further arrests are anticipated. Organisations that believe they may have been affected are encouraged to contact their national law enforcement agency.

Notes to editors INTERPOL is the world’s largest international police organisation, with 196 member countries. All suspects are presumed innocent until proven guilty in a court of law.

Media contact: press@interpol-mock.example

“This just in - running commands that induce a kernel panic causes a kernel panic, we’ll have more at 11.”

The QR code is pretty dense , probably plenty of space to include the panic reason and stack trace.

Edit: For those of you that don’t know, exiting or crashing the init process (PID 1) causes the kernel to panic. Essentially it’s the, “Well what the hell do I do now if I have no processes to serve?” response.

Still, a QR code is a marked improvement on the “Something went wrong :(” message of recent Windows releases.

Battery technology has finally reached the point where range is adequate for most people living on the coastal fringe of Australia. That’s about 20 million people.

I can drive a week in city traffic for $80 in my small petrol car. Or I can drive a week in city traffic for $15 in my EV which has three times the horsepower and is always fully charged in the morning when I leave the house.

And now the BYD Atto 1 EV is now the cheapest car in Australia for $19,990. Range isn’t that hot in that base model, but for a second “work car” it’s perfectly fine.

So I fully expect that the percentage of EVs sold is going to climb every month from here on out.

Ashby owns a block of land in Yeppoon.

The company – jointly owned by Ashby, Hanson and the party’s national treasurer, Alexander Jones, gets a shed worth 56k and puts it on his land. Note that it’s “valued at” in the council documents, not “price paid”.

Firstly, it’s a blurring of ownership between a company owned by political leaders and the private holdings of one of them. (Added edit: Any good accountant or solicitor will tell you not to mix business and personal assets. From an accounting perspective it makes things harder come tax time because the tax man thinks you’re shielding personal income/assets via the company. From a legal perspective it exposes your personal assets to risks incurred by the company, and vice-versa. For example, the bank comes around and forecloses on your personal property. What happens to the company’s shed that is on top of it?)

Secondly, the company is described as “non trading” which implies it doesn’t have the resources to get a shed and put it on land that it doesn’t own.

Which leads to the possibility that the shed supplier has given or heavily discounted the price of the shed because it’s going to a company that’s jointly owned by political leaders with a reasonable amount of sway in local electorates. I.E. there’s a bit of expectation that this favour of a cheap shed will be repaid at some stage by those people who also just so happen to be able to use the public purse in their political endeavours.

There is nothing substantial. But all of it stinks of corruption. Add in the “donation” of a car for “work use only”, and Gina’s plane that Ashby flies on a regular basis and you start to wonder if perhaps people are getting personal gains while in office.

English is rather notorious for having these phrases

English is essentially just a whole bunch of corner cases that its speakers agree on. Mostly.

I have a QNAP box at home, with Forgejo running as a container on it. It’s pretty much a standard docker install straight from Forgejo’s repository. It can run tests and a build on each push, which is not strictly necessary, but nice. Took me about half an hour to setup Forgejo, and about 4 hours of swearing setting up CI for a few repos, because I’ve never done it before.

This doesn’t easily scale to a whole organisation’s worth of repos like OP wants, but it easily fits a small business/single dev situation.