stephen_g

Most Aussies aren't really worried about China... China remains our largest trading partner, and polling shows less than half of Australians think the AUKUS alliance (which includes the nuclear subs) makes our region safer.

It depended on how long the account had been active - one or two of my cousin's kids were pretty sad they lost access to some of their accounts but had new ones the same day with an older sibling or friend's face scan to bypass the age check.

Reportedly more than 3/4 of under-16s who were using social media before the ban still are.

It's not really anything to do with "an era where these [...] provided a pretty steady level of energy", it's just the only way that makes sense to describe it in any case.

Demand is always instantaneous, and transmission lines from a generator need to be sized for the maximum instantaneous generation, so in terms of the size of (any kind of) generator it's the main thing you're interested in. Capacity factor brings in seasonal / daily output variation but that's a whole different thing.

But it’s not what anyone was talking about. Such a cable should be really quite rare because it’s unlikely to work at all in most situations, whereas devices with USB-C ports that don’t work with PD chargers (due to a cent’s worth of missing Rd resistors) are irritatingly common, because they do work with USB-C to A cables!

> The poor man was made into a local Australian celebrity by the media.

I wouldn't say that's quite what happened - I mean, he was explicitly trying to use his profile to raise awareness for brain cancer research so was very public with the progress of his experimental treatment!

Not to the same extent though - for example I can't remember if I ever had to take my shoes off (maybe there was a couple of months where we had to do it back after the attempt happened in December 2021?), so I was pretty shocked to go to the US for a work trip in 2019 and have to do that. Here in Australia there's no liquid limit in carry on for domestic flights.

It depends what your skill set is - professional engineers are qualified to make the flowcharts and sign off on designs. So it’s not about how you see yourself, it’s whether you have the experience and training to be able to follow actual engineering methodology.

Unemployment (JobSeeker payment) is actually pretty brutal here, we have a thing called ‘mutual obligation requirements’ where you have to go to meetings with (very ineffective but extremely profitable) private job service providers who force you to apply for enough jobs per week (no matter if they’re relevant or not).

Decades ago there was what I have read was an extremely effective Government department called the ’Commonwealth Employment Services’ but that was disbanded and contracts handed to private firms for excuses like “efficiency” that (surprise) didn’t end up panning out.

It’s not close to the poverty line, it’s well under it (remember this is AUD not USD) and has been for decades!

How much of that was terminating vs splicing for the optical fibre? I have not done the actual hands on work of splicing but have specified fibre runs a couple of times and all the guidance I have seen is that for reliability you want to always splice on good-quality, factory-terminated pigtails because field terminated connectors are (so I've read) very unreliable. When possible we've just run pre-terminated cables so we don't have to get somebody in to splice and that's been really reliable.

That’s a false dilemma if I’ve ever seen one. As if those are the only options - that’s just silly defeatism and reductionism!

I was very lucky that once I'd outgrown QBasic, my father could get me a copy of Visual Studio 6.0 while it was current, because he worked at the major University in our state and could access it through their campus-wide MSDN subscription.

I played with Visual Basic at the start but was keen to learn C++ because I had heard it was used in systems programming (I had the dream of developing my own operating system). A bit later on I did stumble on homebrew OS dev and started using DJGPP (a Windows port of GCC) but having access to Visual C++ was a very important step!

I got handed down some of these from somebody in grade three or four at school (I think they had belonged to one of my teacher's sons and since she knew I was into computers, she gave them to my mum for me to have). This was around 1999-2000 kind of time so they were a bit out of date, but it was a good learning experience trying to port some of the programs into QBasic!

I was fascinated with these and read them many times cover to cover over the years. Practical Things to Do with your Microcomputer was always my favourite, as well as the robotics one. I also found the machine code one interesting but never really grasped it until later.

I think the ideas in them (as well as some other computer books and magazines I had) really helped steer my interests from just being interested in computers and software to being more interested in hardware and embedded systems, which is where I work today. These were very important in hindsight in shaping my interests!

Not at all, no - embassies are granted special privileges but are still the territory of the country they are in.

Yeah I'm still using an iPhone 12 from late 2020 and it's honestly still fine in terms of its processing power, cameras, features etc. for anything I use it for. It does need a new battery but even that has degraded way slower than earlier phones I've had.

I was using an iPad Pro from late 2018 (mostly just for casual web browsing, reading documents and watching video on, I still do all my real work on laptop/desktops) as well until this year, and would have kept using it if I hadn't accidentally dropped it in water. I don't really notice much difference at all between my old one (when it worked) and the new iPad Air I replaced it with, except for the battery being a little better and having a bit more ram being nice (websites in background tabs are less likely to be purged from memory when I come back to them).

I like wild, it’s a fun word. No need to change if you don’t want to just on account of some grouches here!

Ah, the good old "I never thought leopards would eat my face" after voting for the 'leopards eating people's faces party'...

Somehow I have zero hope the bill she is proposing as a replacement could be any better than the absolute horror that the OSA is though...

I had a similar thing when I was gooling a few days ago, I can't remember exactly but it was like "why does [product] not support [feature]" and the AI summary was confidently wrong, saying "The product does support [feature]", which knew was completely incorrect, and I did find a Reddit discussion or something in the actual results with discussions that were actually about what I was looking for!

It's really depressing how bad things are getting...

Yeah it's pretty incredible, the way they came together the plane on top came pretty close to blocking the canopy of the bottom one, if it had gone a bit differently those pilots could have had nowhere to go but into the bottom of the other aircraft!

It's not quite even that - he wanted to bail out his cousin's failing solar business with Tesla shareholders' money, but to try and justify it, they pretended that Solar Roof was a fully developed, ready to sell product that was going to be revolutionary and worth buying SolarCity for, when it was actually just a concept they'd quickly come up with and some 3D renders.

They actually had to develop it (with Tesla shareholders' money) after buying out the failing SolarCity.

Regular solar panels yes, but not the Tesla panels!

Yeah if you can do it cheap enough. Here in Australia a standard 6.6 kW system (but with a 5kW inverter, maximum most utilities let you export with single phase) costs around $US6000 before subsidies, but around $4500 after. The systems are all basically exactly the same components, and these installers can probably do two houses a day with a stock standard system.

I have a system this size and it's fairly rare for me to make less over the day than I use (we have pretty sunny winters where I live and at -27 degrees latitude am not super far from the equator). In summer I tend to produce at least twice as much energy than the house draws.

The economics have skewed a bit as export tariffs have dropped (due to there being so much solar) but batteries have become so cheap and are now subsidised quite a bit too that most people aren't getting just solar systems anymore but now are doing solar+battery.

It would probably technically be a bit more efficient to do larger neighbourhood arrays and batteries, but if they're cheap enough it works fine to do individual homes.

I’ve heard this idea but don’t believe it was actually a serious claim? Surely it’s only ever been more of a post-hoc PR kind of justification for the massive energy use that nobody genuinely believes?

They are in Australia, and it’s probably safe to assume this law would be pretty similar to ours. In our version, Part 52B explicitly renders these three things as being exactly the same for the purposes of the law:

(a) the content is reproduced on the service or is otherwise placed on the service; or

(b) a link to the content is provided on the service; or

(c) an extract of the content is provided on the service.

Which quite literally means that they consider a post that only contains hyperlink (b) or a link and only a title (even just the title would fall under (c)) to be as bad as a social media site ripping off the whole article!

This was the same conflation used by the supporters of the law and pretty much every news article about it before it was passed, basically all of which dishonestly claimed that social media sites were doing (a) when they were mostly only posting a title and sentence or two synopsis (that is supplied by the news site itself in its meta tags!!)

But as I understand it, the Web Archive does respect robots.txt, while LLM scrapers absolutely do not and use all sorts of dodgy methods to get around it already...

The actual root cause is that we're allowing LLM companies to completely disregard copyright laws for their profit. Whether the LLM companies scrape the Web Archive or the original source doesn't change the copyright infringement implications in any way, and cutting off the web archive doesn't practically change anything (because as I understand, LLM scraping is already prolific all over the web).

LLMs have other ways of accessing the content, they don’t need the Web Archive.

Every LLM company can afford to spin up a new subscriber account every day, proxying to appear different IPs from all sorts of ASNs, do some crawling until the account gets banned, and then do it again, and again, and again.

In a leveraged buyout you actually buy out the company so you take the risk of the debt and the sellers get the cash... Trying to do a 50% cash, 50% share deal, (where the shares hold the debt that generated the cash) is asking eBay's shareholders to be paid with cash borrowed from themselves!

> That was the hard part of the deal: will (enough) eBay shareholders want to be GameStop shareholders.

There is no upside for eBay shareholders - a leveraged buyout makes sense if it's for 100% cash, because the buyers are taking the risk and the debt, and the sellers get the cash. But in this deal, Gamestop need to borrow the money to pay 50% to eBay's shareholders, but then the other 50% eBay's shareholders get is shares in the company that holds all that debt!?!

It would be better for eBay's investors if eBay themselves just borrowed $20bn to do share buybacks. I mean, it would still be dumb and make absolutely no financial sense (because they still hold shares in the company that holds the debt) but at least they wouldn't have the extra liability of Gamestop's dwindling business on the side.

I like browsing stuff in stores too, but that's not what eBay is for - I'm in Australia, the whole point is I can buy stuff from other states in my country, or from the US or other countries if I need, and in the same way I can sell stuff to people in Europe or the UK or Canada or the US from home.

Seeing stuff in person is cool but for an 'eBay Store' you're only going to have a tiny assortment of items, and likely hardly anything you really want in any one physical location... These kind of things already exist (e.g. pawn shops, or here in Australia we have a chain called Cash Converters but it's mostly disappearing) and eBay's value proposition is different in that it opens that up from just items from people within driving range, to anyone around the world.

So having physical stores doesn't add much value for eBay.

They did manage to ride the meme stock insanity to build up $9bn in cash (their market cap is $10bn so it's not worth much more than their cash in hand, because their business has been declining for years).

They propose to borrow $20bn, twice their market cap, to buy a company worth five times their market cap. And 50% of it would be in Gamestop shares, which would be insane for eBay investors to accept. Yes the combined company would now own eBay, but would have the massive baggage of Gamestop's dwindling business plus $20bn of extra debt - a recipe for collapse.

There's no upside for eBay's shareholders, even if Gamestop was capable of pulling off the transaction, which is extremely unlikely even if eBay was crazy enough to be willing to accept it.