shirro
@shirro@aussie.zone
- Comment on Users from Other Instances 1 week ago:
It the tragedy of the commons. It is inevitable. Anything good is always ruined by the bad behavior of a few.
It isn’t too bad currently compared to other platforms due to the low traffic. There are many richer targets for manipulators and crazies where they can reach a wider audience.
- Comment on Hundreds of elective surgeries cancelled as 50,000 nurses and midwives walk off job in NSW 5 weeks ago:
Massive difference in education/qualification between average police and nurses. You need a high school certificate to become a cop and at minimum a diploma for enrolled nurse or an undergraduate degree to start on a career as an RN and with specialization the skies the limit. All that time and expense studying while a police officer can be earning good money.
Pay for nurses and to some extent teachers has a basis in historical sexism. Even as these occupations became increasingly professional and demanded much higher levels of education they retained the stigma of being womens jobs. Its a joke.
- Comment on Private health insurance is a dud. That’s why a majority of Australians don’t have it 5 weeks ago:
We keep it out of habit and because the Government bribes us.
Some people probably get good value out of it. There is a lot of faith healing stuff on their policies and those practitioners rely a lot on over-servicing for their income so the people into that shit likely make claims. There is nothing in it for us. Partner went into hospital once and I said why didn’t you use the card to get a room upgrade with nicer wallpaper and its basically not worth the effort. I’m not complaining because if they were offering value it would be at the expense of the public system and peoples health. But hey hugely overcharge for policies that are basically useless and never get claims.
- Comment on Nacc to reconsider whether to investigate robodebt after ‘apprehended bias’ finding against commissioner 1 month ago:
In a country where a 10yo indigenous kid can be held fully responsible for their crimes we still can’t prosecute rich and powerful people who have full comprehension of their actions and know they will never face consequences. We can lower the age of criminal responsibility to sweep inconvenient social issues created by bad economic and social policy under the carpet. So why can’t we lower the bar for criminal responsibility in cases of maladministration, fraud and favoritism by public officials. Surely they should be held to higher standards than some ignorant kid.
- Comment on 'You're not my king': [Senator] Lidia Thorpe escorted away after outburst [at Charles III in Parliament House] 1 month ago:
I think it is more about framing than values. The leading media frame the discussion in biased and emotive terms that then carries over unquestioning into other media, the pub, workplace and social media. Lidia isn’t the only person speaking up for indigenous rights or questioning the monarchy but the others rarely get coverage. Lidia seeks attention and the media uses it for their own purposes and they both get what they want.
There is nothing more Australian than disrespect for authority the media tells us when mythogolizing the Anzacs. What could be more Aussie than a digger not saluting British officers. The media tells us implicitly who can protest and who can’t, who is deserving of a voice and who isn’t and which authorities can be questioned and which can not.
- Comment on Is Chicken Salt Australia's MSG? 1 month ago:
I suspect this shit originates with social media influencers representing companies selling flavoured salt. Many countries have seasoned salt since long before us. We mostly only put it on chips and people are split on whether they like it or not. I would prefer gravy and cheese or better still put the chips in an AB/HSP. I think it is hugely overrated. In actual cooking and other snacks we still have MSG and other sources of umami like fish sauce, soy, bouillon etc.
Nobody is putting chicken salt on their sushi, kebab or banh mi or the hundreds of other takeaway foods we eat that aren’t chips.
- Comment on 'You're not my king': [Senator] Lidia Thorpe escorted away after outburst [at Charles III in Parliament House] 1 month ago:
It is historical. We have a reasonably stable political system as does the UK and so our government has evolved through consensus since the restoration of the British monarchy.
Australia slowing but steadily made all the necessary laws to become a fully sovereign independent nation but we retained an Australian monarch who follows the same rules of succession as the British monarch. I expect the people who worked to obtain our sovereign independence thought the monarchy would be dealt with next and there was an attempt and it got sunk by a nasty scaremongering campaign. Some of the misinformation still circulates today and it has become part of many people’s beliefs.
We need a massive campaign to educate the population so we can achieve the sort of constructive and sensible consensus that are the hallmark of our successful and stable democracy. Unfortunately both social and mainstream media will promote increasingly partisan and divisive misinformation for their own purposes. I am sure many advocates for reform don’t want to deal with the hyper-partisan negativity and army of cookers that will arise flying monarchist flags. Perhaps if the monarchy is left alone they will disappear up their own arses and make it easier.
- Comment on 'You're not my king': [Senator] Lidia Thorpe escorted away after outburst [at Charles III in Parliament House] 1 month ago:
Lidia is losing here attention seeking edginess. She needs to smear herself in shit while yelling sexist and racist comments or something. We still don’t care.
I don’t know why she gets attention for saying the least controversial thing that which is mainstream popular opinion in Australia. Except ofcourse the media is controlled by out of touch regressive monarchist elites who want to lump the rest of us in the crazy bin for wanting a modern independent Australia.
- Comment on Netflix raises prices as password boost fades 2 months ago:
They cancelled one too many shows we liked a long time ago and we swore off Netflix for life. Never going back. If they ever make another good show I will wait awhile to see if they cancel it or ruin it before I go get it from somewhere else. Their burned a lot of their old loyal customers that made them a success and now they have to acquire new customers faster than they lose them which isn’t sustainable.
- Comment on CrowdStrike impact on aussie.zone? 5 months ago:
Pretty much the entire Internet runs on Linux or BSD. The systems are cheaper, more reliable and more flexible than Windows. Also you put only what you need in a container or virtual machine and it runs with such limited privileges there is really no need to have intrusive one-size-fits-all malware detection systems as it would only increase the attack surface and make the system more fragile.
Microsoft spent a lot of money increasing mind share in education and creating developer tools in the past that led to a massive ecosystem developing business logic with their tools. It created a huge software legacy that isn’t going to be replaced any time soon. That leaves enterprise IT in a very different position to orgs running Internet services as they need to secure this legacy from modern threats while facing budget and staffing pressures.
Most Internet facing services were created more recently with tools popular at the time (Rails and PHP at the time of Twitter/Facebook), then Golang, Python, and more recently lemmy uses Rust which has only been in stable release for a decade. While of these languages and associated tools run cross platform, Linux is generally preferred for deployment and often has the most mature support though I believe Netflix is a heavy user of FreeBSD.
The only notable Windows backed “Internet scale” website that isn’t a frontend to some internal business system that I can think of was Stack Overflow though there are probably others.
- Comment on Joe Biden mistakenly calls Ukraine leader 'President Putin', then Trump as vice president 5 months ago:
I am not in the US and struggle to understand why things work the way they do but it seems large parts of the country are impossibly conservative in ways that outsiders simply can’t comprehend. Things that seem like common sense to everyone else can’t happen there for very deep cultural reasons that aren’t in the normal experience of people in other western democracies. They depend on their Supreme Court to decide law on things that elsewhere are determined by legislation because any politician taking a political stance is painting a target on themselves. It doesn’t seem like an environment favorable to young leaders who want to make a difference.
The country was broken by electing a man with brown skin and the thought of electing a woman after sent them firmly down the path to Christian nationalist fascism. Not sure I would want to see how they react to a young candidate. I think the age of the president is by far a lesser concern than their executive team and policies and given both are extremely old and with very obvious health issues they cancel out so people should focus on more important differences.
- Comment on Why are US states, school districts banning smartphones in schools? 5 months ago:
A camera in every pocket isn’t so good for the ASD kid being mainstreamed into high school with a severe phobia of having his picture taken.
- Comment on Why are US states, school districts banning smartphones in schools? 5 months ago:
Got several kids at regular public schools (not in US) and their policy never allowed phones during school hours from the start. It is pragmatic and doesn’t cause any drama. The kids get messages home if needed and can collect phones when they leave. It is a relatively normal society where kids walk and ride to school by themselves and parents aren’t obsessed with stalking kids or bubble wrapping them.
Schools have a duty of care and sadly are as much baby sitters for working parents as they are places of learning and phones create more problems than they introduce opportunities.
- Comment on South Australia proposes a ban on political donations 6 months ago:
Electoral donations are kind of arms length influence. I think we are well beyond that in SA where politician’s families and future careers are deeply intertwined with the businesses and organizations seeking influence.
- Comment on Anon's sister is a NEET shut-in 7 months ago:
Lindt is positioned as a premium supermarket brand in some places where it is usually a little better and more expensive than the default brand eg Cadbury. For many people it would be seen as a bit of a treat over their regular supermarket brand.
- Comment on Enshittification Continues: Discord to begin showing advertisements on it's free platform 8 months ago:
Most of these platforms make no money but have taken huge amounts of VC funding which they have burned through. For the VCs to unload it and cash out they need to show the product can be monetised and them try and shift it before the users leave the platform. Idiot users want all the features of a product developed by lots of talented full time paid staff but don’t want to pay for it themselves so they leap from startup to startup then complain when the inevitable happens while dismissing open source alternatives as inadequate for their needs. Why should we care? I don’t.
- Comment on Anon buys an air fryer 8 months ago:
It is a small fan forced oven. Good for heating up frozen snacks but usually too small to cope with large families and probably not worth bothering if you have a good oven. Since I have a completely shit oven that cooks unevenly, never the right temp, takes ages to heat and heats the whole house up in summer just to make some chicken nuggets for the kids I think they are awesome. If I actually gave a shit about cooking I probably wouldn’t bother. If was single I would probably still rate the toaster oven as the most versatile benchtop appliance (though the biggest fire risk) followed by sandwich press but if you have to heat up manufactured rendered chicken waste shaped like dinosaurs for kids they are fucking brilliant.
- Comment on The fall of Firefox: Mozilla's once-popular web browser slides into irrelevance 11 months ago:
I made an effort to only use Firefox because browser diversity is important for.the web. It can be rough sometimes when things like.chromecast only work.via unstable extensions.
I suspect the Mozilla corporate structure and leadership needs to be reviewed. They don’t seem to know where they are going and get sidetracked a lot.
Things like lack of good cross.platform.support for passkeys (fido2/ctap stuff) is going to hurt them even more as people won’t be able to use Firefox to login to many sites on Linux where there is currently no blessed platform libraries for this. Unfortunately stuff like that is going to drag me back to Chrome for some stuff which handles this fine on Linux.
- Comment on ‘Star Trek: Prodigy’ Producers Talk Janeway/Chakotay, Season 2 Legacy Connections, And Season 3 Hopes 1 year ago:
Prodigy is excellent. A lot of people who would have enjoyed it never got the chance to watch it.
We had the first few episodes on one of our streaming services and the whole family enjoyed them but they must have lost the rights and we never got any more. I signed up to Paramount which wasn’t always available in our part of the world mainly to watch SNW. It was very disappointing to see Prodigy episodes listed but showing video unavailable. They had a fantastic entry point into the franchise for younger viewers that still managed to keep adults engaged.
My junior high school kid said nobody his age even knows what Star Trek is. This seemed crazy to me but then I realized most people have Netflix and or Disney and Paramount+ is practically unheard of here. The movie reboots stopped ages ago. The franchise really is dead for young viewers in large parts of the world. Which makes it even more amazing how badly Paramount has handled the licensing and promotion of Prodigy,
- Comment on SNW: Subspace Rhapsody | "Status Report" Lyric Video 1 year ago:
If I didn’t have yt premium I would be ad blocking or give up and go elsewhere so I don’t know what youtube ads look like. I don’t tolerate advertising well. Do they really monetise their channel promotions? I guess that is because Paramount is going broke, and also perhaps part of why they are going broke.
- Comment on SNW: Subspace Rhapsody | "Status Report" Lyric Video 1 year ago:
It is ridiculous how Paramount region locks promotional content. They operate a global streaming service and I am a legit paid subscriber in a non-US market and probably amongst the first to view new episodes due to my timezone. They are very out of touch.
- Comment on Episode Discussion | Star Trek: Strange New Worlds | 2x09 "Subspace Rhapsody" 1 year ago:
Yeah, Dawn’s Ballet or something very like it. Cool reference.
- Comment on Episode Discussion | Star Trek: Strange New Worlds | 2x09 "Subspace Rhapsody" 1 year ago:
Did I hear a bit of the music from Once More With Feeling in engineering near the start?
Or maybe midgets.
- Comment on Episode Discussion | Star Trek: Strange New Worlds | 2x09 "Subspace Rhapsody" 1 year ago:
It could be bunnies
- Comment on Episode Discussion | Star Trek: Strange New Worlds | 2x08 "Under the Cloak of War" 1 year ago:
I like that a lot of the drama with the characters feels real and motivated by their history. It is great to see characters who were undeveloped in TOS get fleshed out.
I know Orville was widely disliked by critics for uneven tone because they wanted to shove it in a pigeon hole but this is where episodal tv really shines. I don’t think Orville did it this well but given the substantial departure from Discovery and Picard I wonder if Lower Decks or SNW could have existed in Kurtzman’s Star Trek without MacFarlane showing there was still demand.
I hope they use the release of inhibitions in the musical episode to delve into the inner thoughts and feelings of some of the characters as they did in Buffy’s Once More With Feeling which was cathartic for a lot of the characters.