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.

Not really. The legislation is stupid but the big tech companies are predatory and needed to be regulated. As does the gambling industry. There is a long list of stuff Labor should be doing but mostly aren’t because they are piss weak. They chose social media because it didn’t upset any major supporters and it was judged to be popular with average voters.

It is just very poorly done. I have to go find a new music app now for the family as we can’t all use Youtube Music Premium anymore so it is a waste of money. My kids youtube accounts were managed under family link and had comments disabled some content restrictions and no ads. The ads are as harmful as social media IMO - sexualising kids, creating insecurity over appearance, clothing, weight, pushing unhealthy food, gambling, divisive politics, consumerism.

I can use hacked youtube clients on some platforms but they are closed source from less trusted parties and could be a security risk. I can try and trick YT with vpns and a set of new accounts but thats going to be tricky. Making fake adult accounts is no good as I can’t manage adult accounts under family link and apply the restrictions I want.

But reddit can fuck right off. Hope they get laughed out of court.

sport

I stopped watching sport years ago. I used to watch the footy every weekend. Summer tv was cricket. I rang a tv station once as a kid infuriated because I had been watching golf all day and they cut away just as the competition was being decided. Now all sport is tainted by gambling, overpaid and obnoxious personalities, and too much commercialism. I don’t know who plays for the teams I used to follow. I don’t care anymore.

All my browsers are ad-blocked. I sometimes pay subscriptions to remove ads. I was time shifting for a few years to ad skip commercial tv but there was better content in higher quality on bittorrent, then streaming and now I don’t bother plugging an aerial into tvs or tuning the channels.

Perhaps one day the ad market will collapse and sport will move back to the public broadcasters where it was before people worked out how to ruin it with money. Until then I can live without it.

Yep. The ads are worse than the content. I am sure the government doesn’t care. They love that industry almost as much as the gambling and mining industries. I was happy to pay family premium and have some portion of the revenue go to creators though I wasn’t happy about the multiple price rises.

I would be using specialized apps if I had little kids but I gave my little kids ABC for Kids and a media library instead when they were young. They are older now and I want them to learn to be responsible media consumers with some assistance. I also want them to be able to use their settings across a wide range of devices. They have access to a large number of devices with an assortment of operating systems. A kiosk solution isn’t what I am looking for. Youtube’s family accounts and premium gave me everything apart from removing shorts and front page which I could do with browser extensions. Those last two are what should have been regulated IMO.

These are unofficial workarounds for features that could be regulated if esafety had a clue and weren’t working for the industry. Google could add options in acct settings and in family link. They don’t because they make more profit by driving engagement.

Kids will now watch YouTube without logins,.lose their hand picked educational subscriptions and get lowest common denominator engagement bait on their front page. The ALP just handed kids over to the bad guys. I am furious. I will probably block YT via DNS now because the gov took my parental control away. They clearly don’t give a fuck about my kids.

YouTube’s parent controls allowed me to set “age appropriate content” sort of(my kids are older) disabled comments, remove ads with premium. But they never allowed me to remove shorts or recommendations either for myself or my kids because they want the addiction dial set to 11. The government have made a mess of things but the companies are far from innocent. It’s a shame the govt went after age verification instead of consumer rights to disable all the crap. Very poorly advised. Big tech will come out of this stronger and more evil and will work out ways to target vulnerable people without logins.

I have been very proactive as a parent keeping my kids away from shit social media. The government never asked me. I sent them feedback. They gave me a form response. I support being able to opt out of algorithms and attention spam. I should be championing what they are doing. I support protecting kids from immoral corporations who don’t give a fuck about their welfare. But the response is half arsed and full of bullshit. We deserved better.

And we deserve more variety in politics. Sensible moderate parties with sensible policies as an alternative to the ALP for Labor voters. I suspect a lot of trad liberal voters feel the same about their mob.

They should raise a motion to investigate the SDA and put them into administration.

It used to be nobody needs nukes, but…since our most powerful ally is the only nuclear power stupid enough to actually use them we get the deterrent value anyway. As client states we were all (UK, Australia, Canada etc) actively discouraged from developing independent capabilities that would reduce our dependency on the alliance or US arms industry.

If people found the US nuclear umbrella re-assuring then, many don’t now. I am Australian, but submarines and the US alliance are a huge issue here as well.

Canada’s geography is very important strategically to the USA like practically no other place. Canada has less need of nukes than just about anyone. Currently the fate of other US allies feels far less secure. It seems we are all just bits of land to be traded to our enemies by the US administration in return for who knows what? It is a very sad state of affairs.

You could replace most management people with a rack of GPUs and nobody would notice. Mostly they are a very unimaginative lot parroting the same misguided group think that devalues the employees that create all their companies value. Infosys is a consulting company. They don’t make anything or own valuable IP. They pimp out Indian labour to undercut the labour rates and conditions in developed countries which already makes them a shitload of profit.

You would think with increasing options to Indian professionals, their recruitment people would be shitting bricks trying to hire talent with this bullshit out there but they have probably sacked them as well. Though, if I wasn’t poor I would probably say all sorts of shit to pump share prices and cash out before the AI bubble bursts.

Some.people hate her but others vote for her. Nasty little old ladies who call themselves Christians and proud Australians sit in coffee shops saying “I’m not a racist but…that Pauline makes so much sense”. They don’t give a shit about anyone other than themselves. Nasty little people full of hate.

We need to roll back much of the the vehicularisation of cycling that empowers risk seekers, predominantly men, to ride invisibly amongst massive trucks and deters everyone else. That means building out more separated infrastructure for old people, children, families and risk averse cyclists who don’t want to live out the rest of their lives with severe brain injuries sustained when the driver of a motor vehicle has a momentary lapse of attention.

We can’t have high powered electric motor bikes amongst human powered bikes on separated infrastructure. If they want to kill themselves riding amongst cars, just class them as motor bikes and upgrade their brakes and helmets and let them do 300km/h on the roads. Their organ donations are much appreciated.

25km/h is fine for mixing with other traffic not protected by steel boxes and airbags. It might even be too much for some older cyclists. You might need more power than 250W for a heavily laden cargo bike going up a hill but those things also have the potential do more damage if they hit someone so perhaps they should just use gearing and take their time.

First we decide to provide safe cycling infrastructure independent of the roads and cars so we aren’t fighting over who gets what. Then we decide what is compatible with that infrastructure. I think we need to be more accepting of risk on mixed bike/pedestrian paths and less accepting of risk on mixed bike/motor vehicle roads. The pedestrian lobby kills cyclists. But not sure exactly where the balance lies. Some states don’t even let cyclists on foot paths. Insane and irresponsible.

I still use Debian all the time. Have for over quarter of a century. I develop in a debian container and run Debian in production. For years I used unstable, pinning etc on desktop/laptop and can make Debian work on modern hardware. I tried arch and was suprised how much I liked it. It is a very vanilla upstream experience. The Debian maintainers have added a lot of baggage over time and some of it annoys the hell out of me (particularly when they add shit patches to ssh). Otherwise it might have been my distro for life.

All Linux regular distros give the user complete control over their system (as they should) and that can be a problem for people coming from Windows. Microsoft had to protect them from deleting their system directory because it turns out people are actually that stupid. People like Linus Sebastian get views telling a Youtube audience of millions how one command made his Linux install unusable. And it is a legit criticism for a typical Windows refugee. We need to re-learn all the shit Microsoft discovered over the last 30 years about what complete morons their users can be because we never cared about that. Linux was for power users and destroying your system a right of passage.

Our football team preferences make no difference to Windows refugees. They want a game console experience, an android/ios experience. Something better than the shitshow that is Windows. We can do that. I have never used Bazzite and it might be shit but they are trying to address those users. SteamOS and ChromeOS do a very good job providing a safe install for non-technical users based on arch and gentoo. The base distro ultimately doesn’t matter as much as we think it does. The differences between Ubuntu and Debian aren’t that huge. But you ship updates as a signed immutable root with a fallback to the previous install and run everything else out of user storage and your in consumer appliance territory.

Nothing wrong with Arch as a distro base. The meme stuff is all bullshit. It is a peer of Debian and Fedora. These foundational community distros are not a good starting point for a beginner or for a painless consumerist experience but they are solid for experienced users and have the best support and documentation.

If you are approaching Linux from the PoV of someone who wants to learn rather than someone who wants a reliable consumer computing platform the big community distros are still absolutely the right way to go IMO.

People go on about Mint being friendly for users but under the surface it is Ubuntu which itself is pulling from Debian. People laud Bazzite despite it being Fedora based. ChromeOS is shipping Gentoo to school children. If you package Arch well and ship it to people like Valve has its an extremely pleasant consumer platform. CachyOS improves the arch installation and micro-optimises FPS but you can screw it up as easily as any other mutable Linux system so fundamentally it is not much better or worse than Mint or Ubuntu or Fedora for a consumer experience.

SteamOS, Bazzite and ChromeOS all recognise that immutability is the key to a reliable experience for consumers - an experience that surpasses Windows. Updates are the most likely way to break a system and the hardest thing for non expert users to troubleshoot and rectify. Immutable distros with good support for new hardware have to be the S tier choice for Windows refugees. I have never tried Bazzite and likely never will (I use arch btw, with one system being a cachyos hybrid) but on paper it seems like the most sane choice barring a general release of StreamOS. A distro like Mint might be user friendly but it is bringing nothing new to the table when it comes to a reliable experience for consumers.

The real solution for the majority of WIndows refuges is going to be pre-installs with the supplier guaranteeing all the hardware is supported like Steam Machine. That way you get rid of all the cursed Nvidia systems. I think something like PopOS is the wrong way to do it for normies as the old LTT videos demonstrated, it is still a fragile system for naive users underneath the friendly skin.

It is hard to know exactly what we see because our brain processes it so much and then we have to put it into words and we could easily be describing different experiences the same way or same experiences differently.

I would guess any light receptor produces noise whether that is a few stray protons or just thermal chemical/electrical processes. I would think for most people the brain is receiving noise very much like this but how they experience it depends on how it is processed. Unless there is some after image from recently staring at something bright, when my eyes are shut my brain gives me an impression of nothing which is almost certainly not what my retina is detecting.

It isn’t any trouble. Rarely an upgraded service requires user intervention. This is usually documented and if not it is easy to search for a fix. I find arch faithfully follows upstream packages and provides a very pure linux experience. As much as I love the Debian community, their maintainers tend to add lots of patches, sometimes exposing huge security flaws. Most other distros are too small to be worthwhile or corporate controlled or change the experience too much.

People keep on saying stuff like this like these games are all people care about. Meanwhile Silksong sales crippled stores. Indy games and older games are hugely popular. I don’t know a single person who plays these games that don’t work. My kids friend group is playing on cobbled together hand me downs and half broken laptops and can’t play AAA titles.

They will sell millions of these things. People who demand a 5090 and Windows 11 to play games are the true niche. Everyone else is having too much fun to care.

NSW is ridiculously conservative and behind on so much. It took them (and Vic) 40 years to catch up with SA on container deposit. You still can’t ride a bike on a path there. Does all the entertainment still shut early?

Haven’t seen a plastic bread tag for over a year. The cardboard ones are not as sturdy but kids go through bread quickly and we have a lot of reusable clips.

Call me cynical but I suspect this will mainly shift load for the benefit of the network operators.

I wouldn’t be surprised if supply charges and non-free hours go up to offset any income loss for the electricity suppliers. Weatlhy home owners with solar pv, large power demands, and expensive appliances who can take advantage of free hours might be better off. People in rentals or poorer home owners might be worse off and it could be yet another wealth transfer.

No theft? Tell it to East Timor.