AJ Sadauskas
Australian urban planning, public transport, politics, retrocomputing, and tech nerd. Recovering journo. Cat parent. Part-time miserable grump.
Cities for people, not cars! Tech for people, not investors!
- 25 Posts
- 77 Comments
6·4 months ago@DavidDoesLemmy @Zagorath Here’s an article about a company named RedFlow, that has sold its fourth grid-scale long-duration zinc bromine flow battery to California:
Where’s RedFlow based? Brisbane.
An alternative to bromine flow batteries is grid-scale lithium.
And where is one of the world’s largest lithium minjng regions? Western Australia.
The Coalition’s policy is to ban any further investment in grid-scale batteries from RedFlow or with WA lithium, along with banning further investments in wind and solar.
Instead, it wants to hand roughly half a trillion dollars to largely foreign-owned multinationals to build nuclear power plants in Australia.
Assuming the Coalition can deliver 7 large-scale first-of-its-kind infrastructure projects on time and on budget in Australia, it will take 10 to 15 years to build them. In the meantime, Australia will continue burning coal and natural gas.
And all this for an energy source that costs substantially more per megawatt hour than renewables, coal, or gas.
2·4 months ago@makeasnek On a broader note, I think possibly the best approach for decentralised, open-sourced web search might be an evolution on the SearXNG model.
At the top of the funnel, you have meta search engines that query and aggregate results from a number of smaller niche search engines.
The metasearch engines are open source, anyone with a spare server or a web hosting account can spin one up.
For some larger sites that are trustworthy, such as Wikipedia, the site’s own search engine might be what’s queried.
For the Fediverse and other similar federated networks, the query is fed through a trusted node on the network.
And then there’s a host of smaller niche search engines, which only crawl and index pages on a small number of websites vetted and curated by a human.
(Perhaps on a particular topic? Or a local library or university might curate a list of notable local websites?)
(Alternatively, it might be that a crawler for a web index like Curlie.org only crawls websites chosen by its topic moderators.)
In this manner, you could build a decent web search engine without needing the scale of Google or Microsoft.
@makeasnek @schizoidman YaCy is still around.
And https://searx.space/ is an open source metasearch search engine with many instances. (Try https://searx.be/ if you want to test it out.)
SearX/SearXNG allows you to aggregate results from a number of different search engines. You choose which ones, and they’re stored in your browser without setting up an account.
@trk @TassieTosser Knox City Council in outer-eastern Melbourne did exactly this: https://www.knox.vic.gov.au/whats-happening/news/keeping-your-cats-safe-and-secured .
The council did it because some of its suburbs (The Basin, Ferntree Gully, Upper Ferntree Gully, parts of Boronia, Lysterfield) border national parks and the Dandenong Ranges.
Younger cats can adapt to living indoors.
But the challenge was with older cats, who are used to roaming around.
The happy medium would be to phase it in over five to 10 years, where any new cats registered or adopted after a particular date have to stay indoors, but older cats can continue to roam.
@paulwallbank @franksting @unionagainstdhmo @firstdogonthemoon @stilgherrian @mpesce Crikey/Private Media really could (and probably should) be a much bigger company than it is, just it’s been really horrendously managed.
Hopefully Will Hayward is doing a better job, because many of his predecessors have left a lot to be desired.
For most of its life, Private Media barely turned a profit, and that’s been with Crikey subscriptions and SmartCompany basically carrying the various other websites that have come and gone over the years.
Many talented young journos have worked there, only to move on to the Nine newspapers or the ABC after a year or two.
You had the former CEO who one day was running cables through the ceiling of the old offices next to the Immigration Museum.
You had the other former CEO who loaded the organisation up with sales staff, only for them all to be made redundant within six months.
You had ideas that could have made money (spin out Patrick Stafford’s SmartCompany tech newsletter into its own small business tech publication) knocked back, while vanity projects with no business model (remember Paul Barry’s Power Index?) got the green light.
At one stage, Crikey used a heavily hacked WordPress as its content management system. SmartCompany and LeadingCompany used Joomla!, and StartupSmart used FlexiContent. All self-hosted out of a Port Melbourne data centre.
Despite owning a digital media company, the people in charge at the time didn’t know enough about digital tech to know what a massive resource black hole this was.
(Eric Beecher had to bring in consultants to tell him!)
I could go on…
#Auspol #Media #Politics #Crikey #Politics #Business #Melbourne #Sydney #Fairfax #Economics #Journalism #Vicpol #NSWpol
@franksting @paulwallbank @unionagainstdhmo @firstdogonthemoon @stilgherrian @mpesce Grundle is still around, and still writing for Crikey: https://www.crikey.com.au/author/guy-rundle/
@Dymonika @MossyFeathers I’m guessing you’re overseas?
Super fund, short for superannuation fund.
Basically, in Australia 11% of wages are automatically deposited into a compulsory retirement savings account, known as a superannuation account.
A superannuation fund is a financial institution that manages these accounts.
More information here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superannuation_in_Australia
@Dangdoggo @Rentlar Or allow it to be downloaded in a DRM-free file format that can be used with other apps, platforms, or services…
Also , if connecting a server is an absolute necessity and you are not longer going to maintain it, release the server source code as open source.
7·5 months ago@HubertManne @sqgl Yes, the linked article is about the Australian ABC, rather than the American one.
The two entities are not connected. The Australian ABC is a government-owned public broadcaster, while the American one is owned by Disney.
It’s basically claiming a former Murdoch executive, who was appointed to manage the Australian ABC, is still working to promote his former boss’ political and business interests.
@unionagainstdhmo Definitely a bad take by Bernard there.
As for whether Crikey as a whole is any good?
Honestly, I think it and its parent company Private Media have been really poorly managed at times.
Many of the best reporters at the Nine papers and The Guardian used to write for Crikey and its sister publications at one time or another.
Some current and past Private Media journos/contributors are active on the Fedi, including @firstdogonthemoon, @paulwallbank, @stilgherrian, and @mpesce.
@Ilandar Most major platforms are based in the US.
A DMCA request basically means the flagged content is taken down globally, not just for the US.
If the person who uploaded that content is not a US citizen, it still gets pulled.
@LostXOR @yogthos @NoIWontPickAName @technology There’s a few other steps they could potentially take.
The first would be to block any financial institution in the US, or that deals with the US, from sending any payments to or from ByteDance’s accounts.
They could also freeze any assets currently held by US financial institutions.
Second, if they can get Apple, Microsoft, and Google on board to help do their bidding, they could pull the ByteDance app from the Apple and Google Play app stores.
That includes removing it from any apps where it’s already installed. Globally.
They could also request that TikTok is removed from Google and Bing search results.
On top of this, they could do what you suggested, and ask ISPs and mobile carriers to block domains and IP addresses used by ByteDance.
And the US could apply diplomatic pressure on other countries to implement similar financial and ISP-level blocks and bans.
So, potentially, it’s also blocked in the UK, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Japan, and elsewhere.
@shirro @MHLoppy @australia The irony here is that the Digital Millennium Copyright Act is a piece of US legislation that is regularly used to take down content globally. Even when it’s posted by people who aren’t Americans.
@crispyflagstones @yogthos Someone is named @dansup who also created @pixelfed, the app is called Loops, you can follow his progress here: @loops
@shirro @tardigrada
Not just *would*, but *has*.Here’s the “free speech absolutist” Elon Musk, in his own words, in 2023:
“The rules in India for what can appear on social media are quite strict, and we can’t go beyond the laws of a country … If we have a choice of either our people go to prison or we comply with the laws, we will comply with the laws.”
https://edition.cnn.com/2023/05/29/tech/elon-musk-twitter-government-takedown/index.html
@skribe @danbeeston @Salvo The other option would be to set up an official gov.au Mastodon instance, and give each government department, agency, and Parliamentarian an official account.
People can then have their choice of instance, whether that’s community run or private (e.g. Threads).
In the longer term, there might be scope for some other government institutions — particularly universities — to set up their own instances as well.
@naught101 @lost_faith It predates the internet.
Back in 2000, a guy named Robert Putnam wrote a book based on his research into why there has been a breakdown in community in America: http://bowlingalone.com/
(If you ever hear someone use the phrase “social capital”, they’re alluding to his research.)