I almost wish I hadn’t started using FBReader. It’s ruined me for everything else.

Everytime I try a different reading app it just feels wrong.

The way things are going, I wonder how long before a politician admits that it is more efficient to have the kids positively identify themselves and then be forced to provide their if details to which ever paedophile asks. We can’t have the inefficiencies of yesteryear in our modern world kiddy fiddlers need to move fast and break stuff.

After all it turns out the people agitating for these laws, when the mask is ripped off them like a pirate ghost at the end of a Scooby Do episode, the villain was the people who most directly benefit from government mandated doxxing all along, like fucking Meta and OpenAI. What a fucking amazing coincidence.

I have some regulars, probably more mid length than long form but they all have the occasional longer piece every so often:

History with Kayleigh - Charming Dutch creator with a focus on pre-historical human and hominids

Extra History - Cartoonified History with a humorous style

Flight Formula - Aviation History

History Buffs - Historical Analysis of Movies and TV

Technology Connections - Ascerbic presentation of technology often delving into the historic context

Gavin the Medievalist - Dr of English who specialises in medieval literature

Four Keys Book Arts - Calm and Patient Book Binder, sidelines in paper marbling

Noah Caldwell-Gervais - Video game analysis, super in depth with a focus on games as narrative

Missing a heap but those are the channels that sprang to mind.

For one, what’s her name? Perhaps I just forgot meeting her, otherwise my point still stands.

For two, I’m Australian, it would be extremely insensitive for you to make negative statements about my dialect.

I will admit I am being inflammatory with that language, but honestly the only person I have met who I would call an honestly good person who was super positive about LLMs, giant math nerd who talked over my head for 10 minutes about the implementation of convolutional networks. He might have just been super excited I was taking an interest and doing my best to ask questions that didn’t make me sound to dumb.

You haven’t been keeping up to date on the damage they are doing to existing projects have you? Ask the team behind curl how useful the slop submissions are. They are reaching breaking point just keeping up the flood of crap. It’s not that LLMs will out compete, they will overwhelm and infect.

So LLMs are going to achieve what Microsoft has been unable to, destroy open source and upend the world of coding. Nice. We really are living in the dumbest timeline. Can’t wait for Nintendo’s lawyers to decide they found a fragment of Nintendo code in the output of an LLM and start the lawfare to destroy the pesky breeding ground of emulator writers.

Said it in another thread, I have yet to meet a strong advocate for LLMs that isn’t a cunt.

Audiobookshelf is fantastic, however if you aren’t ready to self host I would have a long think about if you want to start pulling that thread.

We are not IOS users so can’t comment on client software but the experience on Android is pretty good.

Got my wife set up and a few titles from Librivox for her to stream while driving across my home state for work and she essentially jumped from Google Play Books to Audiobookshelf without missing a beat, saved us a lot of money on a voice she largely ignores to help her focus.

You forgot the Dropbears. Want to reassess relative threat levels of the various species of alpha predator?

I bet you the Venn diagram of doing this crap and being incapable of comprehending why women picked the bear is a perfect circle.

I had a manager tell me that my unproductive time was right on the borderline once, like 1 more minute of unproductive time and I would be getting coached. Then casually mentioned that the timer resolution is down to 6 seconds, so I was actually 24 seconds off coaching. The same manager wanted to have a company representative (aka a company Doctor) present for my Doctors appointment when I got diagnosed with Shingles, since people in their 30s can’t get Shingles according to her Telco middle manager training. My Doctor offered to have his lawyer present at the same appointment and they backed off, I miss that guy.

Oh, oh no. I’m having severe flashbacks to working in a call center. Quick someone tell me the company pays me to turn around the customer within a reasonable time, and that I should be balancing my call metrics, having a near perfect FCR, NPS and hold time doesn’t excuse me having an AHT 40% higher than my colleague who is getting coached around dropping every call that seems more than middling complex.

I feel like Ryan isn’t getting the full experience unless Sharon has 2 levels of middle management over her in that office alone, all 3 levels trying desperately to justify their existence.

I knew a Penthouse Pet when I was a regular/part of the furniture in a strip club got to know her pretty well and drove her to and from home and the airport a couple of times.

A few months after meeting her on a quiet night while having a bit of a banter with her she disputed the correct spelling of my name. I bet her a coffee date she was wrong, added a stipulation she had to wear jeans and a t-shirt not any of her usual wardrobe.

I won, we had coffee a couple of days later, she turned up in denim shorts so cut off she was risking being done for indecent exposure and a t-shirt that looked like it was purchased from the kids section.

I spent our “date” getting the expected looks from every other guy in the cafe wondering how the ugliest guy in the place was with the girl who looked (and dressed) like a pornstar. Was fun. Glad I don’t move in those circles anymore.

Still kinda entertaining to me that I was at the strip club 2-3 nights a week for a good 7 months when I was unemployed and had no money, use to pick up odd jobs for the bar and get dancers rates on my drinks cause I was friends with the management. Once I was working and had money I pretty much stopped going entirely.

Hard disagree, at some point investors are going to start asking these AI companies when they will be done burning cash and when the profits will start rolling in. Arguably OpenAI is already starting to see these concerns. If the US gets a new government at some stage there might be enough political will to draw a line in the sand with NVidia and tell them to stop manipulating markets. Finally there may be some pushback against datacenters literally killing the areas they are built in. What we are seeing is a fraud against the world originating from a group of hyper rich arseholes that may last a surprisingly long time, but eventually they will need to pay the piper.

I did have someone tell me this has all the hallmarks of the space race. We are going to see enormous amounts of efforts and resources thrown into AI only for these pioneers to realise there is no clear way to monetise at which point all that energy will be redirected, until then China keeps on egging the US on to make them increasingly commit more and more of their economy to a concept that is going to be a lead anchor on the country left holding the bag.

To expand a little Australian politics has a bad habit of coming up with grandiose solutions to problems that they can push for headlines then worrying about details afterwards. If we had GDPR like privacy and data security laws in place before this it would be better. If we had a clear and understandable reporting system for data breaches, better again. If we had actual education programs to demystify and explain Internet awareness and literacy. If we had control over the scope of data harvesting.

But no we jump straight to the headline, details and workability can come sometime later.

Oh cool we solved identity theft then, right? Right? Seriously this is a poorly veiled mechanism to have Internet usage tied to specific identities, the people pushing for it are not even going to be the public faces we see doing the pushing. I also find it really telling that they have weaponised the grief of a mother who lost a child to suicide after sustained online bullying, but are choosing to ignore the fact that youth advocates are outright telling them that loss of online safe spaces and community will be jeopardising the safety of marginalised kids such as the LGBTQI+ community. How many suicides is an acceptable trade off for them?

My own kids will be forced to log out of YouTube, this makes it harder for me to monitor their usage as now it will all be anonymous and as much as I can helicopter around them at home, as the government seeming wants me to do, I won’t be able to see any of the content they are consuming when I am not directly behind them. The current method is so smooth and frictionless that the kids don’t bother with finding workarounds, the new system…

My take, leave the kids logged in with accounts and start holding social media companies accountable for the content they provide. It will be imminently more traceable when this stuff is reported and knowing they could be fined hundreds of thousands of millions of dollars when they fail their subscribers might convince these companies to do better.

Lastly, the government is already seeing alternatives spring up to take over these niches in the ecosystem. The fact that the ban hasn’t even gone into effect yet and the whack-a-mole has already begun really says something. The only way these current laws can be salvaged once this cycle starts will be to institute blanket bans, rather than targeted. When every website with a comment section begins to ask for ID things are going to get messy, at that point OpSec goes out the window.

Apparently the eSafety commissioner can bring fines of up to $850k per user whose data has been mismanaged, but I don’t see that happening. Discord leaked a bunch of details recently and to the best of my knowledge all that was required of them was a pinky promise to try harder.

So to maintain AI supremacy the US will now phase out all climate targets and begin the great AI vs Climate Collapse race.

People around the world will be on tenterhooks as they see AI get out to an early lead as politicians fire anyone who can call out the ever so subtle “Unprecedented Events”.

Gaze in wonder as climate strikes back by disrupting society with apocalyptic weather events to attempt supply chain disruption.

Watch in rapt disgust as the AI instructs the puppet like mouth pieces to pay lip service to citizens while doubling down on supply and logistic support while restricting the publics access to the same.

AI vs Climate Collapse: No matter who wins we lose

When I called my federal representative about the laws and the miles wide holes in Australian privacy laws and more particularly who would be responsible for covering the costs associated with helping citizens recover in the cases of rampant identity theft these laws are going enable, I got assurances that the eSafety Commissioner would be able to hold large tech companies to account. I pointed out that if Meta was to suffer a breach that exposed the details of say a thousand Australians I could see them ponying up the fine, just cost of doing business, if the details of 2 million Australians got leaked then with potential fines stretching into the billions why would they even fight it, so much simpler to cut Australia off like a gangrenous limb. I was assured that the eSafety commissioner would be monitoring these large companies to ensure their data security was up to standard, I laughed. I was told that our parliament may be looking in to strengthening data protection laws and was promised an email with details about this (3 weeks ago with not even a message to say sorry for the delay). I was thoroughly disgusted, this I’ll thought out plan to scrape as much data as Australians can be tricked into handing over is going to result in massive costs to the tax payer before too long. Discord has already leaked data related to age verification and Australia hasn’t even got its law started yet.

I really think we need remove a lot of the protections from Politicians: “You want to spy on the Australian public at the behest of a shadowy cabal of Intelligence Community wonks? Ok we can do that, but you are personally liable for it when it goes wrong, you will be personally paying all the costs associated with the following scenarios we are categorically stating will occur if you proceed with this nonsense. If you do not have sufficient money to cover these costs all of your assets will be sold and you will become an indentured servant of the Australian public until your debt is cleared.”

I got an interesting response when I told the guy at the MPs office that I would shutdown or abandon any app, website or service that demanded my ID. There is no service online which is worth providing a drivers license or sufficient photos to create a reasonable reproduction of my face.

Oh no had you not heard, in most denominations of Christianity the way you lived your life doesn’t mean a thing, it’s the instant of your death that matters. If the church is to believed there is no act too heinous, no person too far gone for redemption. This is why there are instances of murderers taking the lives of victims who fail one of the arbitrary standards the church requires people meet to be eligible to be saved, then repenting on their deathbed.

I’m going to level with you, I didn’t get far on your linked YouTube video, I couldn’t listen to that self congratulatory tone for too long. As a religious leader he could be out there calling for holy crusade against the worst excesses of the republican party. He is choosing the path of appeasement instead, historically this has only gone well when used to navigate relations with fascist, I can’t imagine this ending differently.

The problem with these control schemes is they were instigated as a way to exert control over the masses and then had hundreds of years of being tweaked to overcome the most obvious revealing mistakes, as they have this collection of stolen plot points and retroactive continuity the whole thing becomes unwieldy.

Give the Warhammer 40k community a few more hundred years and see what kind of mess you wind up with, I doubt it will be more incoherent than Christianity but it might be approaching.

I always love hearing that I am an Atheist so I can rape and or murder people. Thankfully Penn Jillette’s response to that statement gets them every time, “I do rape all I want. And the amount I want is zero. And I do murder all I want, and the amount I want is zero.” I always enjoy then asking how many people they are not raping and murdering solely because a book (or their imaginary friend if I am feeling spiteful) tells them not to.