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shirro

@ shirro @aussie.zone

Posts
1
Comments
269
Joined
3 yr. ago

  • Australia in danger of becoming an ‘artless country’ as enrolments in creative courses collapse

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  • Being a starving artist living on the safety net is more difficult with cost of living increases.

    Lots of music came from countries like England, Sweden, Australia which were reasonably wealthy and had some minimum level of social welfare. We lost affordable tertiary education and it is one less place for people to meet and form bands or experiment.

    Young people looking at creative careers are seeing management everywhere turn to AI slop and looking elsewhere. Everyone is hoping to find work that can't be outsourced, can't be automated, has fair labour practices, won't put them in massive student debt and will still be around in 20 years. The choices seem to be narrowing.

  • My feelings on the Super Bowl

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  • Football? But it's still cricket season.

  • The AI boom is so huge it’s causing shortages everywhere else The $700 billion AI spending spree has few precedents. Good luck finding an electrician or a reasonably priced smartphone.

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  • Massive opportunity cost. People will say that could have been spent on social programs and I agree but realistically that can't happen until voters stop being manipulated sheeple and wake the fuck up. Which in the USA is never. Brainwashed and neutered.

    Until then that capital could have been invested in other industries, creating sustainable jobs and long term economic growth. But it is tied up in a bubble and a huge amount of wealth will be destroyed, invested in rapidly depreciating equipment and data centres that have no prospect of returning their investment.

    If you thought it was hard to source computer parts at reasonable prices, imagine what the capital market must be like for anyone but the AI con artists. So when AI tanks, everything else is in limp mode, so the economy will be doubly fucked.

  • Epic Games CEO Tim Sweeney supports the $900 million lawsuit against Valve, arguing Steam is "the only major store still holding onto payment ties and 30% junk fee"

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  • Microsoft lost $357 billion in market cap as stock plunged most since 2020

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  • Could go down a lot further, a lot quicker when OpenAI Enrons. The whole tech space is a house of cards. Better to get out early and lose a little than be caught late and lose a lot.

  • Mozilla is Building an AI 'Rebel Alliance' To Take on Industry Heavweights OpenAI, Anthropic

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  • At the moment it's a better browser than all the alternatives with more market share for my uses. Huge vote of no confidence in both the foundation and management. They need a cleanout and put people focussed purely on web tech and user experience in there.

  • Mozilla is Building an AI 'Rebel Alliance' To Take on Industry Heavweights OpenAI, Anthropic

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  • They are trying to destroy the last credible non-shit browser engine. How do we rescue Mozilla from their board and management?

  • Cop gets 20 years for fatally shooting woman who called 911 for help

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  • You misunderstand the use of the royal prerogative in countries like Australia. They aren't for personal use by an individual to show favour to their friends and supporters. The process for their use is very different and there are considerable checks and balances on executive power. I can't speak for the other countries on the list. It is literally true that "leaders cannot randomly pardon people" under our system. No Australian leader has that power. I am no constitutional scholar so I will refer you to Professer Anne Twomey who is: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ShMyCNrrQ-M

  • Microsoft is working to rebuild trust in Windows

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  • Rebuilding trust for most companies means some bullshit marketing campaign. New catch phrase. Some promotion. It rarely means admitting fault and changing direction. It would take something really huge for that to happen. Perhaps a combination of AI bubble burst, leadership change, shareholder revolt.

    Everything anti-consumer in Windows is a deliberate choice aimed at extracting more revenue from customers. This isn't unique to Microsoft. They exist to make money for their shareholders.

    If like me you think a lot of companies have been incredibly short sighted and are burning their brands and customer loyalty for short term gains, just look at the stock prices. Short termism is making a killing for tech companies while the rest of the economy is treading water. Is it sustainable? I don't think so. Does it matter for Microsoft or any of the other tech companies?

    I have been a customer of companies that were awesome for years then sold out and their prices sky rocketed. They were clearly bleeding customers but every time they did they just put the price up more. Some people always stay for some reason. This can go on for years. As long as they keep screwing people faster than people leave they are probably making a lot more money in the short term than they would have made with a longer vision. That is business these days. People aren't building products for the long term anymore. Now that thinking seems to have moved to companies. Modern business leaders are about gobbling revenues up like a locust plague then moving on to the next pasture.

  • Invasion Day: police investigate ‘device’ thrown into Perth crowd as huge marches held across Australia

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  • Didn't some neo-nazis go straight from an anti-immigration rally to attacking indigenous people last year?

    Like we all know who is behind the anti-immigration protests. It isn't the environmentalists concerned about unsustainable resource exploitation who might respect indigenous people and culture. If it was the protests wouldn't get so much positive coverage in the media.

    Anti-immigration is the acceptable mask of white supremacy at the moment. When they have power the mask will come fully off but you would have to be willfully blind to not see they are the same people. The media messaging is all about downplaying the racism and anti-democratic aspects of the movement to make it more broadly popular.

  • Substack won't let me in without verifying age, and VPN doesn't work; any ideas?

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  • I can't tell other people how to behave but I would just walk away from any foreign service demanding proof of id. Wouldn't even bother trying work arounds. That and other enshitifications have given me back so much of my time it has been brilliant. Getting through so many books and getting so many things done. I wish the world had turned to shit earlier. Now I need aussie.zone to sell out to US private investors and start running botted engagement, targetted ads and pushing AI anti-features.

  • Report: Feels Like We Should Be Making A Bigger Deal About Someone Throwing A Homemade Explosive Device Full Of Ball Bearings At Aboriginal People On January 26th

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  • Are you mixing up SA Greens Senator Sarah Hanson-Young (SHY) with Queensland One Nation Senator Pauline Hanson (PH)? I assume it was Pauline doing the right wing talking points. The media never cover Greens policies or opinions unless they are attacking them.

  • Has anyone tried out SteamOS?

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  • SteamOS is an immutable Arch. Valves aim is to reduce support costs by ensuring everyone has the same build and to only support a hardware subset (AMD APUs) so it's less general purpose than a regular Linux distro intentionally. A steam deck is just a PC though and it is usable for non gaming tasks the same way a gaming focussed immutable system like Bazzite is. I even did development on a Chromebook for a month or more years ago as a challenge. It's possible. It wasn't ideal. The further you get from steam hardware and use case the more hoops you will need to jump through.

    Games generally run more or less the same on any Linux system if they have the same kernel , steam runtime, mesa and proton in my experience. CachyOS might get a few more FPS until the patches they use get more widely distributed. Some compositors will get a little more performance than others.

    Some games have detection for Steam deck that works around bugs they haven't bothered fixing for proton users in general. I have one game I had to set an environment variable so it would behave like on steam deck.

    I think SteamOS on a mini amd apu system hooked up to a tv as a gaming system would make a lot of sense. Running it on a regular desktop for non gaming taks is more of a novelty thing. It's less practical than using a more general distro.

  • Pornhub, YouPorn, Redtube, and other content sharing platforms will block new users in the UK starting next week(February 2)

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  • Pornhub, YouPorn, Redtube, and other content sharing platforms will block new users in the UK starting next week(February 2)

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  • That's where the puritans came from.

  • GOG now using AI generated images on their store

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  • Cycling without a helmet and high-visibility jacket may be made criminal offences in Ireland

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  • As an Australian who has lived with compulsory helmets for decades I think wearing a helmet and high vis is probably bare minimum if you have to share with cars and not nearly enough if you have to use door lanes and deal with Ford Rangers and garbage trucks.

    Unfortunately once you go down this route cycling partipation drops and its a net fail for public health.

    Sedate cycling on seperated pathways and through parks gets lumped in with high risk road cycling. It ends up being completely inappropriate for the type of cycling most people would like to do (not high risk vehicular cycling).

    Why bother building expensive dedicated safe infrastructure when people have a magical inch of styrofoam on their noggins and a yellow shirt to protect them from 2 tonnes of murder machine.

  • ELI5 How is this legal? Doesn't the constitution give us the right to tell them piss off?

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  • This is very satisfying in a schadenfreude kind of way. I have been lectured to by Americans and those influenced by them for decades about the importance of their constitutional freedoms to shoot children and spread hate speech.

    Some liberal western democracies don't even have a codified constitution and still have better human rights and fairer government than the USA. Without a well functioning representative democracy with preferential or proportional voting, concentrating enormous executive power in a single tyrant without strong protections was always obviously exploitable.

    I think a lot of them are still living in denial and think the good guys are going to come in and defend the constitution at the last minute. Hope they are right. It is one hell of a gamble for them and the rest of us.

  • "We kill enemies": Spy firm Palantir secures top Australian security clearance

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  • I really, really hope there are some smart patriotic people in our military and public service that have developed a backup command and control system independent of the US.

    Hopefully we will never need such a thing but with a President who isn't fit for office threatening NATO and Canada it would be prudent to have well developed credible alternatives even as we play the game of placating and ingratiating ourselves with the US leadership and their cronies.

  • Australia @aussie.zone
    shirro @aussie.zone

    Age verification fun