• 3 Posts
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Joined 3 years ago
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Cake day: June 14th, 2023

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  • Guns are still a thing here in Australia. It’s just more balanced and reasonable than the USA.

    My town has a shooting club, game reserves and is surrounded by farms. Seasonally we wake up to the sound of gunfire in the distance from hunters.

    I’ve known professional people in the heart of our biggest cities who love nothing more than to head out bush and shoot feral animals when they can.

    You won’t stumble onto a firearm at your kids school for obvious reasons but there could be some under lock and key in a gun safe at your mates house. It’s not unreasonable to know some basics.


  • Star Trek, at least before Roddenberry’s vision was corrupted, was a fictional post scarcity socialist utopia. The AI served the crew and society. It wasn’t there to exploit and replace them on behalf of a handful of Ferengi billionaires.

    Star Trek’s ship AI is nothing like the huge financial scams, exploitation and concentration of power, wealth and political influence we are currently seeing. AI hate mostly isn’t about machine learning and its applications. It’s about the people behind it.

    When we have warp drives, fusion, replicators, universal basic income and free universal health care we may have a different view.


  • For someone who subbed to self hosted almost as soon as they joined Lemmy I am really conservative about what I host. I have tried to keep all media in jellyfin to keep things sinple. But recently I expanded to audiobookshelf and wow!

    Ripped some of my audiobooks and added some podcasts and now we have a family library and everyone has their own progress and settings working across devices. I am still spending a lot of time consuming media but I think it’s a much healthier balance.




  • It was (and is) spot on but Microsoft won the war for minds and lots of people in the Linux community started using Microsoft products like vscode and calling them good guys because they were running Linux datacenters and making kernel contributions. Microsoft employed some really good people working on some cool things. You were called out for being immature and holding outdated grudges if you used slang terms and you couldn’t participate in conversations and be taken seriously.

    Meanwhile Microsoft was still being Microsoft. They bought the defacto town square - github - in an attempt to control the platform. Then they mined the content to train LLMs. Now the LLMs bombard open source projects with crap. Even as Windows is dying they are trying to drag us down as well.

    They are a big company and big companies sometimes do good things. No hate on their engineers. But Microsoft have always been the enemy and they will always be the enemy. It is their nature.




  • The bad guys normalised racism, fraud, sexism and a lot of other evils and had people cheering for them as they flouted the law and protected each other from prosecution. It has been bad for ever regardless of who was in power with the two tier justice system that protected the elites while punishing everyone else. But we are in the end game now. The masks are off

    You too can be allowed to sample the vices of the wealthy elites, in moderation and under their control. In return all they ask is your loyalty. Seems kind of weird and out of touch to me. Regular people mostly just want good health, a place to raise a family, some free time and a decent income. No AI hallucination is going to substitute. They think so little of us.




  • We are just getting into this. One kid has been heavily using lmms the last couple of months. It is very limited but perfect for him composiing game music.

    Other family just do basic editing with ardour. We want to level up a bit. Just bought a reaper licence and have been playing with it and a midi controller and some plugins.

    Bitwig also looks very nice and seems easy to use.

    We are newbs with this stuff. Normally I like to only use free and open source only but both reaper and bitwig feel like pretty good value.


  • A lot of people seem to feel like this. It’s obviously a valid viewpoint. Gnome certainly has some flaws.I think KDE has better technical foundations and is probably much more appealing to Windows refugees.

    And it’s always fun to customise a window manager setup. I usually have another setup or two for playing around. Currently niri as I got bored with regular tilers.

    I always find it a little surprising how much some people dislike gnome. We are all on holiday here and the whole family got up early today and logged into gnome sessions and started recording and editing videos,.composing music and gaming. They don’t tell me their desktop sucks like people do online.






  • Because the idea that cats are devastating to local bird populations and responsible for species becoming endangered or extinct is mostly a myth.

    Native animal extinctions are primarily due to human activity and introduction of invasive predatory species is only one of many destructive human activities. As far as I can tell the messaging that cat impacts are overstated are primarily from a particular pet lobby group which is like asking the NRA about gun control or the fossil fuel industry about carbon emissions.


  • episode of The Wild Thornberrys where she gives the finch a needle?

    No I haven’t but I think I understand the implication.

    The bird had been attacked by a non-native species and was going to be killed by same non-native species tonight. I have no interest in domesticating wild animals or interfering in their lives. It would be illegal to do so in Australia and it requires a permit and a lot of expertise to look after a wild animal. There are serious penalties for doing the wrong thing. We rang a wildlife hotline to seek advice. The bird will be transported and surrendered to the closest vet as soon as they open in the morning.

    I will be getting humane cat traps from the council as soon as I can.



  • The SA premier (SDA supported ofcourse) was apparently influential in the push for national social media laws. He recently emailed parents of school kids to promote waitmate who are like a purity ring thing for mobile phones. Abstinence but for phones instead of sex.

    Apparently they are based on a similar US org. Does anyone know who is behind it? I looked at the committee and it looks like two couples, one with a law firm connections and another in PR and someone else. Wonder if they are foreign backed or backed by religion, gambling etc. SA taxpayers are going to be contributing $6.5million dollars to this orgs campaign here. It’s not like we have any homelessness or cost of living issues to spend the money on.

    Just bought my tween a phone, locked down ofcourse. I control the apps and contacts and content. I don’t know what these people are on. I swear it is another satanic panic.

    Edit: waitmate appears to be a near clone of waituntil8th (8th grade) a US org founded by Brooke Shannon. It is hard to dig further. I have seen glowing discussions about it on US social conservative websites and Catholic websites which I guess is how it got to the attention of our Premier. It looks to me like phones might be the new rock’n’roll. Banning them could be a moral crusade it seems. After the ACL and Greens tried to restrict NSW pokies who knows who the gambling industry might align with if it preserves their business.