Fuck, imagine being this stupid.

Imagine me typing

I’m moving to Canada to be with my friends.

And still typing that dogshit-brained shit.

What a perfect example of why I’m moving. What a perfect example of vapid Aussie exceptionalism.

I can’t say shit about my full set of motivations without breaking NDAs and doxxing myself unfortunately.

But Australia is worse off environmentally than the public knows. And so many of us that worked in environmental analysis for big engineering firms, which are contracted by government, defence and so on, are gagged.

When people try to blow the whistle, they are put into lengthy court battles which they never win.

I worked on a project a few years ago around water theft, one of the other attached contractors had an analyst go to the media, blowing the lid off the scope of the issue. I have no idea what happened to her exactly, but I know they buried her in court.

I’m moving to Canada, but more to be with friends, and spend the rest of my thirties and onwards enjoying my life. My twenties were brutal, I’m 35 and I’ve never had a holiday. I’ve been an activist for twenty years in Aus as well, this referendum and the result are painful.

https://www.abc.net.au/news/2017-07-23/melbourne-water-supply-could-be-under-threat-within-a-decade/8735400

This, for instance, is in actuality a much more pressing issue than this 2017 article portrays.

You never see these pricks on the street. Fucking turn up in Melbourne and let the Sharpies sort 'em out.

I remember filling these cunts in when I was in my twenties. Big ups to the next generation, you have your work cut out. Happy to see ranks growing.

Yeah, I’ve mentioned to some friends and family that my wife and I are moving overseas. I don’t use Facebook or anything, I’ve purposely not engaged in discussions with them about the Voice.

And some of the hate and vitriol has been astounding. Full mask-off Aussie exceptionalism.

The Voice was just the nail in the coffin for us. We’d been considering moving for a while. I wish Aussies really knew how fucked our work culture is. And how shit our pay is relative to the cost of living.

They’re living in a fantastical version of Australia sold to them by a nationalist media.

Who is calling you a racist lol?

No voters woke up ready to shadowbox today. They’ll do this all the way to the next election, regardless of what anyone says. The vote was done and they were acting like victims on social media immediately.

And I mean if you find yourself frequently susceptible to racist propoganda… Well, maybe…

I feel like anyone who seriously thought a No vote would lead to a better outcome are going to be disappointed when indigenous rights are not revisited until 2050.

More importantly, Dutton or other LNP government can use this result to justify cuts to funding and whatnot.

Awful time to be an Australian. How utterly embarrassing.

Who knows?

I’m done chasing a house and family in Aus. The wife and I are looking to sell up belongings, go meet up with friends in Europe and spend our time kayaking and trekking around the place on the cheap. I have a job in Toronto waiting if I want to settle.

I’m done with Aussie work culture, shit Aussie pay (relative to professional roles overseas) and the worsening “fuck you got mine” attitude imported from the US that seems to permeate Aussie culture now.

A lot of my mates already left, I only held on because I thought we were progressing and I am very connected to the land here. I don’t see it getting better anymore and we’re destroying the landscape anyway.

We have a family premium plan and I still got this message. Guess I’ll cancel YouTube Premium now…

I get most of the content I want via patreon anyway now.

A big problem in Aus is the industry culture. They don’t care about using technology to improve results. They only care about cutting costs, even if the final product doesn’t meet the previous standard.

And we’ve seen that with VFX across the globe, the overall quality dropped drastically. Because studios play silly buggers to weasel out of paying VFX companies what they are due.

From what I hear, even DNEG is in trouble, and were even before the strike.

It’s a race to the bottom it seems.

My honest hope for the film industry is likely the same as yours. That we have smaller productions with access to better post due to improvements in AI-driven compositing software and so on.

But it’s likely that a role that was earning $$$ before is devalued significantly. And while I’m an unabashed anti-capitalist, I think a lot of folks misunderstand what this sudden downward pressure on income can do. Cost of living increasing while wages shrink is an awful combination

I’m 35, left a six figure job, folding my company and starting an electrician’s apprenticeship. To give you an idea around what my views about AI are. And of course this is as an Australian. We have a garbage white collar work culture anyway.

I think there will be a net improvement. But I worry that others will fail to adapt quickly. Too many are writing off AI as this thing that already came and went, but the tools have just landed, and we don’t yet have workflows that correctly implement and leverage these yet.

There was a smallish VFX group here that was attached to a volume screen company. They employed something like 20 people I think? So pretty small.

But the volume screen employed a guy who could do an adequate enough job with generative tools instead and the company folded. The larger VFX company they partner with had 200 employees, they recently cut to 50.

In my field, a team leader in 2018 could earn about 180,000 AUD P/A. Now those jobs are advertised for 130,000 AUD, because new models can do ~80% of the analysis with human accuracy.

AI is already folding companies and cutting jobs. It’s not in the news maybe, but as industries shift to compete with smaller firms leveraging AI it will cascade.

I had/have my own company, we were attached to Metropolis which unfortunately folded. I think that had a role to play in the job cuts as well. Luckily for me I wasn’t overleveraged, but I am packing up and changing careers for sure.

I’ve been an environmental activist for roughly 20 years. I’ve been arrested, I’ve been in fist-fights with Nazis, with the facial scars to prove it, I’ve done it all.

It feels like there are fewer activists today than there has ever been.

I’m planning to leave the country.

In Australia we are currently voting on a constitutional amendment. It would create an advisory body that represents first nations people. It’s super basic, doesn’t really cover how it will work, because they can’t really even work on that until the amendment passes.

But presumably it will allow them to directly advise government, rather than through the spiderweb of community leaders, NGOs and whatnot that exist now, and provide some structure for Aboriginal representation in parliament

The sheer amount of disinformation circulating is staggering. I was lucky enough to really avoid most of the drama, until I went and had a look this past week finally.

What interested me, was rather than the usual short posts and snarky racist comments, of which plenty exist. These long diatribes were dominant, on places like Reddit and Facebook.

Then it struck me, they all sound like they were written by the same person. Not just a little, if you had removed the names and pictures of the users, I would have flat out assumed it was the same person.

We have opened Pandora’s Box. We don’t need “AGI” or whatever, this is plenty enough to do us in.

The issue is that ads on YouTube used to be fairly innocuous. Now I get batshit conspiracies pushed, non-stop Aussie gambling ads and so on.

Where I was once happy to sit through some food ads, or some tourism ads to support the platform. I’m not happy being blasted with non-stop, low-quality propoganda.

Granted the $22 family plan for me and my wife has worked well. We both use youtube music extensively as well. It’s the only streaming service I pay for, the only other subscription I have is for a VPN.

Do you have a hole in your head? We incarcerate indigenous people at rates way above other demographics.

Get out of here with that conspiracy bullshit.

Yeah I managed to solve that for some games by installing the proton EAC plugin. Squad works for instance.

But games introducing kernel-level DRM I wouldn’t install on my Windows machine anyway. I guess the person I replied to potentially doesn’t know how to deploy a new operating system. So they might not care about all that anywho.

But calling everyone else dumb because they don’t know how to do something is ridiculous.

These days it’s more “which games don’t work on linux?” Rather than “which games work on linux?”

Semi drivers are generally good.

Dump truck drivers have Swiss cheese brains.

Even funnier given that urban planners in charge of our cities have stated time and time again that the future of our cities is car-free.

The people whose job it is to plan our cities, are saying that we are transitioning to pedeatrian-friendly cities. This is a shift that occurred in education and best-practice some time ago. But age 60+ project managers are finally fucking retiring.

But you are apparently in an “echo chamber,” lol. Peak projection from Wooki.

Remember kids.

If Vicforests leave plant equipment laying around in sections of state forest, you can score free diesel engine parts!