So is everyone’s fascination with LLMs.

If I want someone to tell me bullshit, I would prefer real creative, human generated bullshit.

“company merged with two US firms” Bloody Seppos.

The old adage “Take only Photos, Leave only footprints” has not been drummed into kids these days.

If the tent came back missing a single peg, we would get a hiding.

If our campsite has anything but leaves and twigs after we left, we would be sent back the next weekend to do an Emu bob.

We also cleaned up after each other because of the story about Everybody, Somebody, Nobody and Anybody.

I feel really old!

The equivalent tent nowadays would be $600-$1200

The bottom end is taken over by crap that I wouldn’t let my dog sleep in and the top end are for prosumer/competitive cross country hikers.

Mid range pricing is either cheap crap (rebranded by scammers) or last years model or expensive product.

This relates to camping equipment and also hardware and electronics.

The worse thing* is that now they will all be known as “Australian-style”.

We used to be known for our electoral system and a variation of the butterfly swimming stroke. Now we will be known for a lame-arse attempt to restrict people’s access to content “for the children”*

*this is not actually the worse thing about this legislation; it actually puts at-risk children at more risk.

I reckon that is one of the reasons. Lemmy’s (and the entire ActivityPub/Fediverse ecosystem/graph) attracts people with a positive, progressive attitude.

Advertising is based on passive attitude and thrives on negative attitudes.

There was a lot of negative being accepted (and sometimes actively pushed) on some instances, but most other instances defederated from them.

Not the only case of this happening; Corporate Social Media providers do not want the Fediverse to succeed at all.

Instagram (and Fascbook, and WhatsApp, and Threads) all censor references to PixelFed.

If you cross post, it is best to watermark your photos with your PixelFed address.

Sorry mate, your Astroturf is not going to grow, no matter how much bullshit spread.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Astroturfing

Who knows the second verse of the national anthem?

(I do) “with boundless plains to share”.

What is a “Encrypted Communication Device”?

It’s great to see these people caught, but are normal plebs going to be arrested for having Signal on their phone or with a Meshtastic/Meshiliscious device?

What about a Cyberdeck running Linux?

Because the UN has declared him a War Criminal.

Hopefully, he is arrested and sent to The Hague.

Yeah, I find it hilarious when I see a RAM that is actually being used by a tradie, with two Rhino Boxes and a short stack of Milwaukee PACK-OUTs taking up all the space in the tray, while a Triton parked next to it has an entire workshop of tools.

I would rather see more trains on railway tracks and buses with rational routes that service everyone than a single Tesla.

This is the most rational path forward.

Unfortunately, the LNP will use the excuse to crack down on immigration, the ALP will use the excuse to crack down on protesters and the Greens will use the excuse to crack down on legitimate gun owners.

Time for an anecdote. When Holden were designing the HQ, there was a design paradigm called “Passive Safety”.

The reasoning was that if the driver did not feel safe driving at speed, they would drive more slowly, and therefore be safer.

That is why the HQ had narrow A-Pillars that were unfortunately in the wrong position to observe cross traffic and a suspension geometry that caused terminal understeer.

As terrible as this paradigm was (they reworked the geometry for the HZ) it was vindicated in the 1990s when inexperienced and unskilled Subaru WRX drivers felt so confident in their handling that they would push beyond the capabilities of their vehicles.

I still believe that deliberately engineered flaws are a terrible idea, but I can tell you that I am ultra careful and ultra aware of the traffic in my tiny little Jimny with bad driver crash ratings and live axles front and rear.

Odometer reading is a relatively unobtrusive metadatum.

It is recorded when the vehicle is serviced so it is already in someone’s database.

If kms travelled had to be reported annually at the time of registration, no-one will complain (except sov-shit cookers, and they don’t pay rego anyway).

ANCAP guidelines are pushing for larger and larger vehicles.

Crumple Zones, and pedestrian protection add significantly to the size and weight of a vehicles, and negatively impact driver awareness.

Driver Assistance is OK to provide an extra level of protection, but result in complacency.

A compact vehicle with good visibility and visceral road awareness will be less destructive on the roads than an oversized SUV with a driver ignoring all the ADAS technology blithely unaware of their surroundings.

That said, a compact vehicle with unobtrusive ADAS would be even safer.

They need to break it down to a Road Levy and a Fuel Levy.

A 2.5T Tesla Model X should pay more for road maintenance than a 900kg Suzuki Swift.

The reason is that there is profit to be made by inefficiency.

When rail is used, the people who profit are;

• the sender
• the recipient
• the railway company
• the train drivers
• the community.

When Trucks are used, the people who profit are;

• the petrochemical companies
• politicians who receive contributions from Petrochemical companies
• vehicle manufacturers
• vehicle maintenance providers
• vehicle parts providers
• the trucking company
• politicians who receive contributions from trucking magnates.
• road maintenance and construction companies.
• politicians who receive contributions from the construction industry.

These are all at the expense of;

• the sender
• the recipient
• the community
• other road users
• emergency services
• the poor truck driver who is high-as-kite on amphetamine in order to meet his outrageous deadline.

Hopefully this leads to a larger divestment in LLMs.

Banning data harvesting of Australian Citizens would also be a good move.