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Nursie

19,115 karma · joined June 25, 2012

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Nursie··on Visa, Mastercard, major banks facing new litigation over 'anticompetitive' fees
Cash requires hardware to store in the till, hardware to store your float overnight, staff time in reconciliation, staff time to take to the bank and maybe on top of that bank fees.

It’s not free for the business either. Businesses doing cash discounts are quite likely not reporting all of their sales IMHO, so it’s better for them because they can dodge taxes.

Nursie··on Permanent Daylight Saving Time Could Harm Sleep and Mental Health, Analysis Says
Lived in London for 10 years.

Would have taken permanent BST in a heartbeat. There's little so depressing as getting out of work into the dark for months at a time, IMHO.

I remember being vaguely on board with the a radical proposal that did the rounds about 20 years ago there - Single winter, Double summer. Keep changing the clocks but shift the whole thing an hour later so we got lighter evenings.

Nursie··on So you think you could be an electrician?
Yes, I do think I could be an electrician, because I have an understanding of how electricity works, and I’m pretty good on the tools.

Obviously there would be some retraining and a period as an apprentice, and honestly I’m not sure I could afford that, but if we downsized the house maybe.

But mostly I’m posting here because this article is a pile of crap.

It uses pre-AI figures to try to assure us that post-AI the trades will still pay less than jobs for college graduates. That’s the whole point, duh, that things are changing.

Nursie··on So you think you could be an electrician?
Here in Australia too. Can’t do anything until you’ve done a multi-year apprenticeship, even change a plug or a light fitting, or on the plumbing side you can’t change a tap.

Massive protectionism.

Nursie··on September 2026: The world today, as seen by one Polish guy
Same in the 90s (born 78). The Berlin wall came down, Russia seemed to be on a path to real democracy, the US still had a pretty awesome reputation around the world, social progress was being made. It was a pretty good time to be alive.

Maybe it was just something about the South of England though eh?

Nursie··on Booted up in 1993, this server still runs – but not for much longer (2017)
That's where I came across them in around 03/04, though the company was moving away from them at the time. Two intel processors somehow kept in lockstep, allowing either one (or its RAM) to fail and be replaced with no interruption to the system.
Nursie··on Plan mode is dead
I dived into one or two of the skills there and some of it feels very cargo-culty. In a similar vein to the article, the models have improved markedly now and I’m not convinced that “You are an experienced senior software engineer and an expert reviewer, here are five pages of instructions on how to do a review” style prompts are massively useful any more.

I get great review results (as good or better than colleagues using superpowers or even adversarial review skills) just by asking Claude to review a PR and spit out results in order of severity.

Nursie··on Augustofaces: Pareidolia Fine Art
Are you familiar with "facesinplaces" ?

It's a bit old-web now (on flickr! ancient history!) but they have a lot of good ones - https://www.flickr.com/groups/facesinplaces/pool/

And even put out a book a while back.

I like this horrified house - https://www.flickr.com/photos/chelsea_steve/55448046101/in/p...

Nursie··on Netherlands bracing for potentially devastating US sanctions against the ICC
Sure, and then what'll actually happen? Nothing, if those soldiers are in the US or other non-signatory country.

Only if they travel to ICC jurisdiction countries will anything actually occur.

Nursie··on Netherlands bracing for potentially devastating US sanctions against the ICC
Sure, but there is a difference between not wanting to take part and actively trying to sabotage it for everyone else.

Bush, Obama and Biden wanted to keep the US out of it. Trump wants to destroy it.

Nursie··on Netherlands bracing for potentially devastating US sanctions against the ICC
Because Trump's best bro, Putin, and his good friends in the Israeli government find themselves inconvenienced by it.

The US isn't subject to it, as it didn't sign up, but he's probably also worried that Americans who are accused of war crimes and then travel to countries which are signatories may find themselves arrested and tried.

Nursie··on People hooked on vapes try a new way to quit: cigarettes
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nick_O%27Teen
Nursie··on US criticises Australia's proposed algorithm opt-out laws as 'censorship'
I'm not familiar with this meme, but who are you referring to?

Zuck? Advertisers?

Because if we're talking about users, they'll be given an option, not be forced.

Nursie··on US criticises Australia's proposed algorithm opt-out laws as 'censorship'
Far left? LMFAO, what planet are you from?

Labor is in bed with big business, the gambling lobby and the resources sector. Ain't nothing 'left' about any of that.

The only people who think Labor are far left are those who have swallowed the ON/Wannabe-MAGA propaganda, as they try desperately to portray the mainstream as radical. The problem is that Albo's a boring, grey, middle-of-the-road, managerial type of PM so it's laughable to anyone with half a brain.

Don't get me wrong, there are a ton of problems with how Labor are going about governing, this is not an endorsement of them. But the idea they're far anything is such utter brainrot.

Nursie··on US criticises Australia's proposed algorithm opt-out laws as 'censorship'
They're in bed with the resource and gambling sectors, and other big business.

Their record on making actual changes to benefit the people of the country vs keeping their donors sweet is pretty terrible lately. They've half-arsed so much in the last few years it's becoming a meme.

Fabians, AFAICT, pride themselves on evidence-based policy direction. That would have (for example) implied a full ban on gambling advertising as the government's own enquiry recommended, rather than whatever watered-down industry sop Albo actually pushed through.

Nursie··on US criticises Australia's proposed algorithm opt-out laws as 'censorship'
> What is an "algorithm"?

To you and me it's a very wide category, and there may be hundreds or thousands or even millions involved in me simply typing this, it being saved somewhere and then served back to you.

For lay-people though, it's become a term which means "The thing which measures your preferences and usage patterns then decides what to show you". So for lay-people to want to turn off the algorithm, they tend to mean going back to "just what your friends posted, in order"

> When does an algorithm become harmful?

I think this is a research subject. AFAICT it's pretty certain now that social media 'algorithms' have been optimised for addictiveness, which is likely to overlap somewhat with what users find interesting, but also cover things they find mildly titillating and/or outrageous.

The harms come in a bunch of forms. The never-ending scrolling of bite-sized videos seems massively destructive to attention span, and people seem to get addicted to it and may neglect other parts of their life. The platforms also seem really keen to send men and boys off to pretty hateful 'manosphere' content which is apparently making life hell for women (including teachers of teenage boys). Then we have all the body-image and anxiety issues caused in teenagers constantly exposed to influencers showing off their (faked) wealth, beauty etc.

Switching off the "shoving this all in your face" part of social media seems to me to be a win. When it was actually a way to keep in touch with friends and family it was a different game.

Nursie··on People hooked on vapes try a new way to quit: cigarettes
That's how I quit cigarettes - got 0% liquids in a few flavours, hard-quit the smokes and puffed like crazy on a vape to assuage the habit. After around 3 months I noticed I'd stopped caring about the vapes so much and just put them down.

Worked well for me, might not work so well for others.

Personally I thought that was the whole deal with vapes, use them as a tool to beat the addiction to 'real' tobacco products, but it looks like the world proved me wrong on that one.

Nursie··on AI coding has made CI a bottleneck, so we reworked ours to keep up
> Why have we not seen an improvements in products?

Ours is moving faster than ever in terms of feature delivery, and we've used AI to really hammer at the security aspects and clear a load of backlog stuff.

Nursie··on In September, AI generated code has made up 17.25% of all Linux Kernel patches
And this is why I’m considering retraining as an electrician :)
Nursie··on In September, AI generated code has made up 17.25% of all Linux Kernel patches
This analogy may well be very apposite.

But what is that cobbler supposed to do during that time? He can keep his head above water using the machine, suspecting the factory is coming for him too or ... he can refuse to modernise and fail now as others outperform him?

"Stop the factory being built" is not within his power.

Nursie··on BYD Slashes Price of Electric Car and Becomes Cheapest in Australia [video]
> No one cares about you.

Then why respond to a post in which I say what I'm thinking about doing? You don't care.

> You’re good mate, you’re rich.

I'm not rich, I'm just a homeowner, 66% of the Australian public live in houses they own, so your cost-of-owning-a-house discussion points are irrelevant to most people.

> It’ll still be cheaper than having to buy a new car, plus house, plus solar & battery.

Which most people won't have to do, as they live in houses they have already bought, solar is subsidised, and is useful far beyond EV charging so a lot of people already have it. Plus maybe they can take advantage of the free electricity period tariffs on offer in a lot of states now. Makes this car very cheap for a huge number of people. And that's before we get into the possibilities of novated leasing with zero FBT on EVs.

> Choose a different car for under $5000 then.

No thanks, they're still all shitboxes at that price and they still need to be fuelled. Given that's probably in the range of $2-3k per year on average mileage and current fuel prices, and that I wouldn't expect a $5k car to last all that long, it'll be pretty quick to make up that price difference.

> Also won’t work for anyone living in a unit / flat / appartment, whether they rent or own.

Charging at public points, in car parks etc is still cheaper than petrol mate.

Seriously, why so weirdly bitter about this?

Nursie··on Ctenophores: Wonders of Biology
I never saw a “Venus girdle” myself while diving, I saw some little boxy ones though, in relatively shallow water, catching the sunlight.

So I can’t vouch for that first video, but I can vouch for the rippling rainbow cilia (scroll down to the second video on that page), they really do look like that IRL.

They’re very pretty.

Nursie··on BYD Slashes Price of Electric Car and Becomes Cheapest in Australia [video]
Nice, I have great respect but also a level of “WTF” when encountering cyclists in the deep wilds, especially in the heat!

Passed an old guy on a pushbike with a trailer on the nullabor in 2010 and just thought “wow, that’s commitment”

Nursie··on BYD Slashes Price of Electric Car and Becomes Cheapest in Australia [video]
It certainly forms part of the picture.

Another part of the picture is that you can more often get away with buying a truck “for business” if you’re a small business-person, regardless of whether it actually ends up being used for that.

And by ‘unsafe’ I mean for pedestrians and they contribute to the vehicle-size arms race on the roads, they’re generally very safe for the occupants.

Nursie··on BYD Slashes Price of Electric Car and Becomes Cheapest in Australia [video]
Been thinking more along the lines of the Munda-biddy actually :)

But I haven’t got on my bike for a few years now because at the moment all my spare energy goes on managing our plot. There’s always something needs moving, sawing, building, repairing, digging… So I’ve gone from having a (pudgy) cyclist’s physique with very strong calves to more of a farmer’s build with bigger arm and shoulder muscles than I’ve ever had before and a big ‘ol belly.

But in all seriousness I also like to go remote once in a while and access national parks. I’m not going to be hooning it round destroying dunes, but getting to beautiful places like Cape Peron is tough without a the right vehicle.

Nursie··on BYD Slashes Price of Electric Car and Becomes Cheapest in Australia [video]
I’m not in a rental home, and wouldn’t be anyway.

I want solar and a battery (don’t have it yet, it’s on the list) to cut my energy bills and guard against power cuts anyway.

So neither of these things is an ‘extra’ expense for me getting a small EV.

There are a total of 5 corollas available in Australia for $2k or less. Each one is ratty, beat up and 19+ years old, I wouldn’t want to chance taking any of them on the freeway, and you’d still have to fuel them.

Nursie··on BYD Slashes Price of Electric Car and Becomes Cheapest in Australia [video]
Australia doesn’t tariff Chinese car imports, on account of no longer having any car industry of our own to defend.

That said we do still have a hefty “luxury car tax” for anything over $80k, which is a hangover from when there was an industry here. The government aren’t going to lift that any time soon.

Its current function is to select for expensive trucks over expensive sedans, because trucks are “commercial” and exempt, making our roads less safe overall. Thanks government.

Nursie··on BYD Slashes Price of Electric Car and Becomes Cheapest in Australia [video]
It’s pretty tiny too, so not a road trip car IMHO.

That said, coupled with home solar to power it, this is a very cheap way to get on the road and I will likely go this direction in future - one of these for the city and something a bit bigger/more rugged to go bush once in a while.

Nursie··on The first new cat species discovered in 100 years
Yeah it’s not the only one known.

Unfortunately while people are going wild as if someone found a never-before-seen cat, this is actually more “after genetic analysis we now know that the tiger cats that everyone already knew about in Bolivia are actually a different species to the ones in Brazil”.

But that’s not very exciting so people and news outlets seem to be running with the story as if nobody had ever seen one before.

Nursie··on Ctenophores: Wonders of Biology
Mysterious and interesting things, first read about them after going scuba diving and seeing a few of there barely-there diaphanous whisps of creatures, with rippling iridescent spines up their sides.

Amazing to learn they were cilia refracting the light, not chemical bioluminescence, and that despite appearances they are absolutely not jellyfish!

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