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shirro

@ shirro @aussie.zone

Posts
1
Comments
277
Joined
3 yr. ago

  • Firefox is ending support for Windows 7, 8 and 8.1; Mozilla recommend switching to Linux, for people who can't run Windows 10 or 11

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  • I think we have been taught from birth that we can and should have it all. The most expensive car, the biggest house, the most powerful phone. It is a lie and its becoming increasingly unattainable for more people. It is pure consumerism and doesn't make anyone happier. In truth people are lucky to have any sort of home which is a fucking travesty and an indictment on our society and politics. A 3 year old phone is still a phone. In a city you often don't need a car at all, certainly you don't need a lease for a massive truck that consumes all your income.

    Windows has more and better software available than Linux (most free and open source software also runs on Windows). Most people don't need it. Downscale your life and be happy.

  • Australia’s Social Media Ban Is Isolating Kids With Disabilities—Just Like Critics Warned

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  • Nah, they didn't. The legislation is bad but it was driven by research into mobile phone/social media addiction and harms to teenagers. There is more than a bit of a satanic panic angle but there is enough substance that I think we have to take the concerns seriously. The target is algorithmic addiction machines run by huge predatory companies. Any impact on sites like aussie.zone is unintended and nobody cares about a self hosted forum or list for neurodivergent kids.

    All such laws create unintended opportunities for companies that want to capture identity data like Palantir which must be resisted to protect our democratic freedoms and national sovereignty but that shit has been happening with the massive concentration of power in big companies like Facebook anyway. We have to decentralise and get back to doing stuff locally.

    The problem is people are fucking stupid and they all jumped to evil shit like Facebook and everything else died. I have to go out of my way to find out anything in my local community with sports, school etc because people are moronic sheep. Apparently I am the weird one for not giving all my family and communities data to evil foreign companies that are complicit in all sorts of shit up to and including genocide. The government is targeting the right bunch of unethical cunts even if they are not doing it well.

  • Australia’s Social Media Ban Is Isolating Kids With Disabilities—Just Like Critics Warned

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  • Back in the old days we used to run forums and mailing lists for people of various interests. People used to make their own little idiosyncratic places full of creativity. I miss it so much.

    Then the big US social media companies came in and took everyone away and the old Internet became a ghost town. Lots of online communities died to be replaced by highly predatory foreign companies.

    I don't know why we should listen to people defending predatory social media but everyone ignored us old people telling them that these walled gardens were going to kill the Internet with massive corporate influence. Everyone is so fucking stupid now. Technical people can't even do technical shit anymore. I hate it.

  • Google criticizes Europe's plan to adopt free software

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  • All these craptastic US tech companies originally started on internationally developed free and open source software. They hoover up capital and talent then abuse their market power. Fuck them all.

    They all run on Linux - Torvalds is a Swedish speaking Finn. Greg KH who maintains stable is German. So many libraries and core system contributions by Germans like Drepper and Poettering. Youtube ran on mysql for years from Finnish Widenius. Google built a lot of stuff with Python - from Dutch Guido van Rossum and c++ from Danish Stroustrup. All of the video and audio sites rely heavily on ffmpeg, orginally from French Fabrice Bellard. Lots of them also using virtualisation stuff which includes qemu, also from Bellard. So much comp sci research from Europe and UK. Chrome and Safari originated with KDE (German) code. Europe did all the heavy lifting while the US took all the profits. I'm not even European but every country has the same experience. They have no idea how they are viewed.

  • [Video] Australian police violently beat up protester with his hands up at demonstration against Israeli president Isaac Herzog visiting.

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  • A tankie who has conveniently forgotten the Stasi. What a surprise.

  • [Video] Australian police violently beat up protester with his hands up at demonstration against Israeli president Isaac Herzog visiting.

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  •  
            suspension and retraining

    Discharged from the police force.

    Ideally, if things are as clear cut as shown in the video. If the protestor committed some unseen offense like spitting on the officer it would certainly justify an arrest, something that might require force if resisted. This guy had his hands in the air. Hard to make any case that this response was justified in any way. Even the cops are innocent until proven guilty though so this is all just opinion.

    Going in throwing punches makes it look like the police were drafted out of a particularly incompetent pub brawl. Weird behavior for trained public servants. I don't get how that is justified as crowd control. Makes the cops look terrified and pissing themselves with fear in a country where ordinary people take down armed terrorists with their bare hands and milk crates.

    In my opinion this sort of behavior brings the service into disrepute and if not dealt with sends a message that violently assaulting peaceful protesters is tolerable. Training and recruitment have a cost and there could be systematic issues with culture and training that need to be addressed and dealing with individuals and not the organization and leadership would be short sighted. This should be investigated right up to Minns and the instructions he gave about the handling of the protest. NSW police have earned a bit of a reputation for being political enforcers.

    To be fair to the cops there are protesters whose aim is to provoke a violent response from police by whatever means necessary. The police have no choice but to defend themselves and establish order with that crowd and people get hurt on both sides. There is a time and place where the police have to use violence to maintain order. In my opinion this didn't look to be such an occasion.

  • [Video] Australian police violently beat up protester with his hands up at demonstration against Israeli president Isaac Herzog visiting.

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  • People with no self control shouldn't hold responsible positions. If your having a bad day you shouldn't be in a uniform dealing with people. Goes for any job, not just cops. Imagine if nurses behaved like this, punching every patient who pissed them off. Yet they get paid less than police for some reason.

    I am not anti-police at all. Strongly disagree with the ACAB bullshit in Australia. Some cops are bastards for sure. I think they have a tough job and an important one even if their recruitment and discipline sucks (less so in Australia than the US but we could do better). I feel particularly sorry for the ones who get shot dealing with cookers and some of the stuff they have to see and deal with.

    If the police service can't self discipline and weed out the trigger happy snowflakes then the public lose faith in them. They need to put cops like this on suspension and retraining. They might not have the right personality for this sort of work. It makes them look week. If your an agitator and want to start a riot it is so easy to bait weak minded law enforcement.

  • 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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  • I think a lot of gear will be server/AI specific and won't run in peoples home computers. GPUs with no graphics driver support, no video output etc. Some memory finding itself into HBM modules instead of DDR5. I wouldn't be surprised if they have an agreement with the semiconductor cartels to crush it all so it doesn't land in the consumer market.

  • 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.

  • Australia @aussie.zone
    shirro @aussie.zone

    Age verification fun