Local community run childcare has its north facing roof absolutely covered in pv. Has been like that for many years. Every homeowner and business that can afford it does the same around here. Small scale PV installs on non-productive bits of farmland as well.

We don’t get many power outages. I am not sure if batteries make economic sense everywhere currently. Their time will come I am sure.

I guess a lot of childcare around the country is dodgy commercial operations where they are pocketing all the government grants while their buildings fall apart. Perhaps we should get rid of those and have more community run operations they would put profits back into improving the care and facilities including capital investments like solar.

Yeah, Its is sickening and goes against the spirit of open source. We work around restrictions in creative way to give people the freedom to control their software and have access to the source. We don’t deny people trapped in shitholes with bad laws access to open computing. Force them onto Windows and Apple. I don’t get what is wrong with people these days. They have lost all reason.

Yes, many people can work around the laws in various ways. And some of them can’t. Its not for us to judge. We offer possibilities. Everyone knows many distros will patch this field out. Many will just ignore it like we do the GECOS fields. And where it is unfortunately required it is still going to be better than running Windows. Its completely orthogonal to political participation and fighting these laws.

I am in Australia. Searches on local content and niche tech subjects don’t do very well compared with other engines. It might be lack of tuning more than index and I am sure it will improve. Latency might be due to lack of local servers or resources or my choice of browsers but Qwant breaks all the time. It runs a lot better if I keep ad blocking on. Noticeably faster and more reliable though still high latency on the first result showing. If you turn ads on to support smaller companies you immediately get punished. Ad supported businesses aren’t compatible with good quality service unfortunately, no matter where they are based.

It is amazing that Google was so usable for so long really. Their search people must have fought hard to balance out product quality against the demands of the money people for a long time. I think every service that follows in Google’s footsteps will inevitably repeat all their mistakes.

I recommend trying Qwant, Ecosia and others though. It is my default browser search at the moment, mostly because it isn’t US based. It might be all you need.

There are a few probs with qwant unfortunately and I assume ecosia might be the same. It isn’t available in all countries so it’s sometimes blocked when I am on a VPN. The performance is shocking on the other side of the world. Terrible latency. Often fails completely to return results. Then the search results aren’t really good enough either. Tends to return a lot of links from similar sources like it doesn’t have much of an index. Its ok for really simple mainstream searches but I regularly need to fall back to no AI ddg or udm14 google.

Unless I want a clanker response. Actually I never want a clanker response but web indexing has become so poor in the pursuit of ad revenue then AI that sometimes it’s hard to get anything useful out of search queries these days. It’s very frustrating.

A lot of open source software is kind of ridiculous to many people. Why would you want to reverse engineer some proprietary device? Just choose one that is more open. It isn’t just about the challenge. It is also about extending freedom to do stuff as many places as possible. I might not want age verification in my operating system as its just another way to fingerprint me by big tech. And I probably won’t have it enabled or exposed. But having the option allows people to participate in the shitty, spying. predatory, manipulative, commercial hellscape version of the Internet which is increasingly facing regulation around the world. That is a freedom. Not a freedom I want but a freedom someone wants. It means they are not legally forced to use Microsoft or Apple to give all their data to the NSA and big predatory businesses.

I am literally traveling from the river (Murray) to the sea tomorrow. Very Aussie and quite legal down south.

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I thought Trump would be more interested in targeting girls schools. Seems more like that type.

This government is being nitpicked to death from all sides while desperately clinging to the center of politics and trying not to present a target. The real war isn’t Iran but the ceaseless information war cooking peoples brains.

The official word from the government is that we are considering offering assistance to gulf countries but have ruled out deployment in Iran. Has that changed? When it does I will be out on the streets with half a million others.

I can see the pragmatic appeal. Maintaining a lot of code for an open source project is thankless. Go is designed for idiots like me so it makes sense that an llm should be able to emit code that mostly works. There are classes of errors that are less likely in Go and the compiler and linting will prevent some foot guns and then it would have been tested.

Ethically I hate anything to do with the llm industry and all it represents. I hate the environmental impacts. The social impacts. The disregard for intellectual property. The devaluing of human effort. The scam economics. I won’t use anything touched by it on principle and if that means walking away from a dead Internet so be it. There is enough pre-2020s books, audiobooks, movies, music and code to keep me interested for the rest of my life.

My kids have used Linux from birth. One of them is voting age now. A Chromebook is Linux. They mostly just open steam.

Two observations here. One on the legislation itself and one on the impacts.

Firstly, not everything that claims to be protecting the children is being pushed for that purpose and our politicians may not even know the real reasons. Reportedly (I have not verified) in the USA some age verification legislation is being pushed by groups funded largely by Meta (Facebook). One reason suggested is that they have a massive exposure to fines in the US via COPPA and age verification could offer them protection. Ofcourse another reason might be that the tech industry is substantially funded by harvesting people’s information, habits and connections for various nefarious and profitable purposes and age verification can be a new source of information about people. There are companies like Palantir especially that will be attempting to mine as much of that information as possible. The eSafety commissioner’s previous employment and associations make her appear less independent that I would like. I also don’t believe most politicians really know who has been pushing for these changes.

Secondly, not all adult sexual content online is the same. The “free” sites are funded by promoting paid sites and advertising. They had no age barriers. The assumption always was that these well known sites would be blocked by responsible adults using simple filtering software. They will now require verification for visitors from locations where that is mandated. The paid sites already have a form of verification via payments and likely nothing will change substantially. All the kids today, as they did decades ago, likely have a sad friend with a massive porn stash who happily shares it for social credit. So essentially the Internet is getting a partial reset to the late 90s before everything good got commercialized and a bunch of psychos got stinking rich and started fucking with democracy. Bring on the P2P.

Don’t age verify. Find another hobby.

Ageist bullshit is exactly the same as all other bigotry. Fuck that bullshit.

The people who should be taxed more are the rich and their huge companies. They own the media and set the agenda. They own some of the politicians and they threaten other politicians with opposition from ad campaigns and media opposition if they don’t get their way. They fund massive misinformation campaigns and populist right wing politicians who claim they are there for the little people. Their are trying their hardest to kill democracy.

Our tax system should be fair. It isn’t. Those who can afford to pay the most often pay very little. The party created to represent working Australians is terrified into inaction despite having a massive mandate and no effective opposition. What does that say? This is not a time for complacency. All the gains made by ordinary working Australians are at stake.

We stand ready to come to the assistance of Canada, Greenland or the American people when they request assistance to overthrow their oppressor.

Nah. I disagree. There were good intentions from many of our politicians even when some don’t know good from bad.

There are still people who go into politics in Australia because they want to make the world better. They aren’t all crooks. Of course once you get into politics you want to be successful and when you have a populist policy that will win votes sometimes you don’t want to look too closely at the cons.

It’s all open to manipulation. There is a very real threat to our privacy, freedom, democracy, sovereignty and more when we supply personal data to these companies. I agree this shit is very dangerous. I don’t believe that was the intention. It’s just a consequence. Either way we should be concerned.

Nah, it was the point I think. The people who wanted it were genuinely concerned with the welfare of kids and there was evidence to support that the big tech companies are predatory and doing immense harm.

The problem is that having good intentions is never enough. Someone is going to take the opportunity to further their own aims. There is a huge mass surveillance industry backed by people like Peter Thiel that will take full advantage of ID requirements to increase their grip on power

Not only is our political class not smart enough to see the dangers and legislate to protect us, but many have already been lobbied by the surveillance industry.

I wouldn’t be at all surprised if the orgs that have been pushing the message to protect kids from social media were either part funded or infiltrated by the mass surveillance industry. But I do believe there are people genuine in their concern about social media harms. Many parents put their foot down on this long ago, but unfortunately most did not.

This nation is a federation of states used for convict transport and one colonized by free settlers. And although it is a blind spot for the Poms, then and now, there were lots of people here before they arrived.

The convict states are mostly proud of their heritage. Highly recommend a visit to Port Arthur. A lot of the convicts were victims of prejudice and poverty. The people who come off worst in Australia’s history by far are the English who sent their poor and the Irish here to use as forced labour, committed genocide on the native people, nuked service people and traditional owners, and sent our young to die in futile battles.

Everything this country has done and continues to do to redress the shit legacy of the british empire, including their insane white supremacist, born to rule bullshit, reflects well on us.

Non-religious is growing and is going to be the majority but herding cats is an unsolved problem in politics. It is hard to work out how to appeal to them as a block. It is easier to talk to religious lobby groups, make mega church appearances, fund faith based schools, dog whistle stuff that appeals to faith based prejudice.

If Labor doesn’t go after the faith vote then other parties will. And Labor isn’t just putting on the faith stuff to win votes. It is a long standing part of the party. There is pipeline from Catholic school through Catholic dominated unions to the Labor Right faction that goes back decades.

A group of Libs tried very hard to be the Christian party with branch stacking and factionalism and likely hoped to ride a wave of Christian nationalism to Trump-like victory. They couldn’t get the numbers and that is in part because Labor’s very strong Christian (predominantly Catholic) Right faction with people like Minns and Malinauskas are more authentically mainstream Christian than some hack playing Christian to get votes. In the US there isn’t an expectation that a person’s lifestyle and their politics should align. So many of the biggest proponents of the White Christian Nationalist stuff clearly don’t live Christian lives. Their politics is more like professional wrestling. The character you play is more important than who you are.

Most people of faith aren’t all that extreme in their politics. This is not the US. We have the mega churches and hate preachers but we also have a lot of thoughtful moderate mainstream religious voters and we want them to have options in the center supporting moderate policies that benefit everyone.

The only thing I respect about One Nation is they wave the flag and the white nationalist bullshit and muslim hate but not so much the cross so far. Though they have recruited people like Bernardi now so things could change.

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Driver’s-licenses for vehicles ought be based on the collision-energy contributed by that vehicle, & that goes up with the square of the speed,

And taxes based on 4th power law for the cost to road surfaces and infrastructure. I know rail freight was so underfunded and outdated it had to go or be upgraded for the first time in a century in some places. So obviously it all got turned into bike tracks. But road freight and the owners of the big trucking companies are massively subsidized road users. If we took the money government spends on fixing the damage they are doing to our roads and spent it on rail and freight handling I reckon we would be well in front. Road freight is transferring public funds into the private wealth of a very few. The owners of the trucking companies are all great mates with politicians and generous party donors for a reason.

What does it do to public health having triple trailored road trains roll through the middle of small towns all fucking day and night? And shitty diesel tanks idling at school pickup. But we are worried about e-bikes?

To be fair heaps of new people riding e-bikes and scooters who look like absolute tools. Often carrying a passenger with no helmet. Three people on an electric scooter isn’t uncommon. If taxpayers were not subsidizing their accident treatment and rehab then leave them to it. Not hurting anyone but themselves.

Lots of bikes very obviously overpowered and much faster than 25km/h that are meant for offroad being ridden on footpaths. The people who had them before to help their commute or their aging legs tended to ride them more sensibly and legally. So many dropkicks with them now it puts me off them.