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shirro

@ shirro @aussie.zone

Posts
1
Comments
231
Joined
2 yr. ago

  • Canada’s Submarine Dilemma: Type 212CD vs KSS-III

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  • It used to be nobody needs nukes, but...since our most powerful ally is the only nuclear power stupid enough to actually use them we get the deterrent value anyway. As client states we were all (UK, Australia, Canada etc) actively discouraged from developing independent capabilities that would reduce our dependency on the alliance or US arms industry.

    If people found the US nuclear umbrella re-assuring then, many don't now. I am Australian, but submarines and the US alliance are a huge issue here as well.

    Canada's geography is very important strategically to the USA like practically no other place. Canada has less need of nukes than just about anyone. Currently the fate of other US allies feels far less secure. It seems we are all just bits of land to be traded to our enemies by the US administration in return for who knows what? It is a very sad state of affairs.

  • Infosys co-founder once again calls for longer than 70-hour weeks - and no, he's not joking

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  • You could replace most management people with a rack of GPUs and nobody would notice. Mostly they are a very unimaginative lot parroting the same misguided group think that devalues the employees that create all their companies value. Infosys is a consulting company. They don't make anything or own valuable IP. They pimp out Indian labour to undercut the labour rates and conditions in developed countries which already makes them a shitload of profit.

    You would think with increasing options to Indian professionals, their recruitment people would be shitting bricks trying to hire talent with this bullshit out there but they have probably sacked them as well. Though, if I wasn't poor I would probably say all sorts of shit to pump share prices and cash out before the AI bubble bursts.

  • E-bike rules in Australia will soon change with possible ban on sale of bikes faster than 25km/h

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  • We need to roll back much of the the vehicularisation of cycling that empowers risk seekers, predominantly men, to ride invisibly amongst massive trucks and deters everyone else. That means building out more separated infrastructure for old people, children, families and risk averse cyclists who don't want to live out the rest of their lives with severe brain injuries sustained when the driver of a motor vehicle has a momentary lapse of attention.

    We can't have high powered electric motor bikes amongst human powered bikes on separated infrastructure. If they want to kill themselves riding amongst cars, just class them as motor bikes and upgrade their brakes and helmets and let them do 300km/h on the roads. Their organ donations are much appreciated.

    25km/h is fine for mixing with other traffic not protected by steel boxes and airbags. It might even be too much for some older cyclists. You might need more power than 250W for a heavily laden cargo bike going up a hill but those things also have the potential do more damage if they hit someone so perhaps they should just use gearing and take their time.

    First we decide to provide safe cycling infrastructure independent of the roads and cars so we aren't fighting over who gets what. Then we decide what is compatible with that infrastructure. I think we need to be more accepting of risk on mixed bike/pedestrian paths and less accepting of risk on mixed bike/motor vehicle roads. The pedestrian lobby kills cyclists. But not sure exactly where the balance lies. Some states don't even let cyclists on foot paths. Insane and irresponsible.

  • Screw it, I’m installing Linux

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  • I still use Debian all the time. Have for over quarter of a century. I develop in a debian container and run Debian in production. For years I used unstable, pinning etc on desktop/laptop and can make Debian work on modern hardware. I tried arch and was suprised how much I liked it. It is a very vanilla upstream experience. The Debian maintainers have added a lot of baggage over time and some of it annoys the hell out of me (particularly when they add shit patches to ssh). Otherwise it might have been my distro for life.

    All Linux regular distros give the user complete control over their system (as they should) and that can be a problem for people coming from Windows. Microsoft had to protect them from deleting their system directory because it turns out people are actually that stupid. People like Linus Sebastian get views telling a Youtube audience of millions how one command made his Linux install unusable. And it is a legit criticism for a typical Windows refugee. We need to re-learn all the shit Microsoft discovered over the last 30 years about what complete morons their users can be because we never cared about that. Linux was for power users and destroying your system a right of passage.

    Our football team preferences make no difference to Windows refugees. They want a game console experience, an android/ios experience. Something better than the shitshow that is Windows. We can do that. I have never used Bazzite and it might be shit but they are trying to address those users. SteamOS and ChromeOS do a very good job providing a safe install for non-technical users based on arch and gentoo. The base distro ultimately doesn't matter as much as we think it does. The differences between Ubuntu and Debian aren't that huge. But you ship updates as a signed immutable root with a fallback to the previous install and run everything else out of user storage and your in consumer appliance territory.

  • Screw it, I’m installing Linux

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  • Nothing wrong with Arch as a distro base. The meme stuff is all bullshit. It is a peer of Debian and Fedora. These foundational community distros are not a good starting point for a beginner or for a painless consumerist experience but they are solid for experienced users and have the best support and documentation.

    If you are approaching Linux from the PoV of someone who wants to learn rather than someone who wants a reliable consumer computing platform the big community distros are still absolutely the right way to go IMO.

    People go on about Mint being friendly for users but under the surface it is Ubuntu which itself is pulling from Debian. People laud Bazzite despite it being Fedora based. ChromeOS is shipping Gentoo to school children. If you package Arch well and ship it to people like Valve has its an extremely pleasant consumer platform. CachyOS improves the arch installation and micro-optimises FPS but you can screw it up as easily as any other mutable Linux system so fundamentally it is not much better or worse than Mint or Ubuntu or Fedora for a consumer experience.

    SteamOS, Bazzite and ChromeOS all recognise that immutability is the key to a reliable experience for consumers - an experience that surpasses Windows. Updates are the most likely way to break a system and the hardest thing for non expert users to troubleshoot and rectify. Immutable distros with good support for new hardware have to be the S tier choice for Windows refugees. I have never tried Bazzite and likely never will (I use arch btw, with one system being a cachyos hybrid) but on paper it seems like the most sane choice barring a general release of StreamOS. A distro like Mint might be user friendly but it is bringing nothing new to the table when it comes to a reliable experience for consumers.

    The real solution for the majority of WIndows refuges is going to be pre-installs with the supplier guaranteeing all the hardware is supported like Steam Machine. That way you get rid of all the cursed Nvidia systems. I think something like PopOS is the wrong way to do it for normies as the old LTT videos demonstrated, it is still a fragile system for naive users underneath the friendly skin.

  • Is it normal to see this static when you close your eyes?

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  • It is hard to know exactly what we see because our brain processes it so much and then we have to put it into words and we could easily be describing different experiences the same way or same experiences differently.

    I would guess any light receptor produces noise whether that is a few stray protons or just thermal chemical/electrical processes. I would think for most people the brain is receiving noise very much like this but how they experience it depends on how it is processed. Unless there is some after image from recently staring at something bright, when my eyes are shut my brain gives me an impression of nothing which is almost certainly not what my retina is detecting.

  • Why go through the trouble to use Arch?

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  • It isn't any trouble. Rarely an upgraded service requires user intervention. This is usually documented and if not it is easy to search for a fix. I find arch faithfully follows upstream packages and provides a very pure linux experience. As much as I love the Debian community, their maintainers tend to add lots of patches, sometimes exposing huge security flaws. Most other distros are too small to be worthwhile or corporate controlled or change the experience too much.

  • Hands-On with Steam Machine: Valve's New PC/Console Hybrid

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  • People keep on saying stuff like this like these games are all people care about. Meanwhile Silksong sales crippled stores. Indy games and older games are hugely popular. I don't know a single person who plays these games that don't work. My kids friend group is playing on cobbled together hand me downs and half broken laptops and can't play AAA titles.

    They will sell millions of these things. People who demand a 5090 and Windows 11 to play games are the true niche. Everyone else is having too much fun to care.

  • Bread tags on long list of plastic items to be phased out in NSW

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  • NSW is ridiculously conservative and behind on so much. It took them (and Vic) 40 years to catch up with SA on container deposit. You still can't ride a bike on a path there. Does all the entertainment still shut early?

    Haven't seen a plastic bread tag for over a year. The cardboard ones are not as sturdy but kids go through bread quickly and we have a lot of reusable clips.

  • Australian households to get free electricity three hours a day

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  • Call me cynical but I suspect this will mainly shift load for the benefit of the network operators.

    I wouldn't be surprised if supply charges and non-free hours go up to offset any income loss for the electricity suppliers. Weatlhy home owners with solar pv, large power demands, and expensive appliances who can take advantage of free hours might be better off. People in rentals or poorer home owners might be worse off and it could be yet another wealth transfer.

  • At least three nations 'willing to kill' on Australian soil, spy chief says

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  • No theft? Tell it to East Timor.

  • Australia's spy chief warns anti-immigration rallies are being exploited by neo-Nazi groups and "Russian operatives" to sow discord, spread disinformation

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  • This OP account (randomname) along with a couple of others are foreign accounts which only post here to agitate against Russia, China and others.

    Yes, I have noticed. I don't mind the anti-Russia stuff. Fuck Putin. Our relationship with China is complicated and nuanced. While we need to prepare for hypothetical threats we also need to make the most out of our current relationship. I think promoting anti-Chinese sentiment plays into the hands of the supposedly Russian influenced racist neo-Nazi types the account is supposedly critical of and does nothing for the 1.3 million Australians with Chinese ancestry or other Australians of east asian descent.

    Social media makes it too easy to do a huge influence operation and get unintended consequences. Polarized, angry societies that can't engage with each other for the common good are a bad outcome.

  • Australia's spy chief warns anti-immigration rallies are being exploited by neo-Nazi groups and "Russian operatives" to sow discord, spread disinformation

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  • Much earlier. The protocols of the elders of zion, a core conspiracy doc, dates back to 1903, Russian Empire, long before the Bolshevik revolution, the KGB or Putin. Russia has a lot of competence in the information space. It is a tool like any other and it is well documented that they use it to their strategic and economic advantage as any nation would. The western alliance have played similar games with propaganda and destabilization.

    There are a huge number of people and groups in the anglosphere and Europe who are sympathetic to this propaganda and create plenty of it themselves. They would still be around and very dangerous to our liberal democracies with or without Russia's involvement. Russia's playbook in this is to fan fires that already exist. I suspect most of the real money and direction is from within.

    Russia to some extent is a scapegoat for our own failings and highlighting their involvement an attempt to de-legitimize these movements by association. I think these groups are de-legitimized by their existence. I don't need Russian involvement to hate a bunch of Nazis.

    I believe there is evidence of Russian operators attempting to infiltrate marginalized groups and stir up discontent. If it turned out their operators were inflaming discontent in indigenous groups, amongst the poor, homeless, alt-health, environmentalists or whoever might have reason to distrust or dislike the current establishment I am not going to judge them like I am a Nazi.

    I don't like to touch on this one on social media but it is probably fair to say Israel and Iran are in a huge information war and Isreal is losing badly in Australia, UK etc because of the very bad optics of their actions. Does knowing that Iran is to some extent funding anti-Isreal debate delegitmize concerns about a Palestinian genocide? I don't think so. So its complicated.

  • Chinese companies are largest shareholders in two Australian mines producing minerals vital for Beijing's hypersonic missiles, helping China to access key resources

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  • If they don't buy from us they will buy from someone else. The main thing is to get our fair share and using it to build a better future for our kids. Which never happens and it doesn't matter if the mines are owned by Chinese or as is more often the case US/UK. We should own all our countries resources and these companies should be extracting them under contract to the owners, not stealing the legacy for our future generations and evading payment of tax.

  • OpenAI valued at $500B in new deal with Microsoft — too big to fail?

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  • While there is a huge amount of circular money happening because it's all a financial scam, it is inflating share prices which are invested in by lots of institutions so when the bubble bursts and those shares are worthless a huge amount of wealth will be wiped out and the suffering will be very widespread hurting regular people.

    The billionaires won't be the ones queing for food. Hard to see much glee ahead unfortunately.

  • Scientists demand cancer warnings on bacon and ham sold in UK

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  • I think it is because US bacon is streaked with huge amounts of fat that they render down until it goes crispy. Elsewhere bacon is often more meaty and less fatty and cooking the shit out of it doesn't do anything for it.

  • Scientists demand cancer warnings on bacon and ham sold in UK

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  • Perhaps, but the fiber cleans that bacon sandwich out of your colon quicker.

  • Scientists demand cancer warnings on bacon and ham sold in UK

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  • Is the UK going to start putting cancer labels on Gin, Scotch Whisky, ale and cider? Because alcohol is not just a proven carcinogen but also toxic to a number of organs and a huge public health problem. It is a much, much larger health problem than bacon. The anti-meat lobby is extremely passionate about their cause. They have some strong arguments about the ethics of factory farming and the environmental impacts but it does make any proposal like this suspect because you just know that some of the proponents are more concerned about the ethics of meat eating than the health impacts.

  • Australia has amongst the highest teacher shortages in the OECD

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  • I believe it is largely a retention problem. Major political parties are thoroughly captured by the private school lobby and the religious enterprises that run them. It's almost like they are running the public system down to help out their mates.

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    shirro @aussie.zone

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