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Joined 1 month ago
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Cake day: July 30th, 2026

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  • Can’t wait for the wave of people kicked out of stores because the AI shit the bed and confused them with someone else.

    I just think the key to doing this stuff right is to make the executive level personally and financially responsible for any mistakes and any crimes, “Oh Coles shared too much info offshore and led to a data leak with identity theft… Hope the board enjoys spending the next 4 years in general population.” Oh and time to sell the yacht and the mansion to pay the fine.

    Apparently they get paid the big dollars because they make the big calls, time for them to face the big risks too. That would keep the bastards honest.

    Of course it will never happen, we like corruption in government way too much to make rich people face consequences.


  • It all used to be very easy in Australia, you bought the phone at a supermarket and gave bogus info when registering the SIM. Then the “War on Terror™” began and the government started taking things a bit more seriously started mandating the paper registration forms needed to be completed or the retailers could get in trouble. But your average supermarket worker wasn’t going to take the time to do that and it was way too widespread for the government to actually crack down on it.

    Took a few years but the Telcos started actually paying attention to the fact that the majority of prepaid phones weren’t getting completed paperwork at point of sale so they just moved to make all sim card activations require online or over the phone ID checks.

    Every bit of training I ever did made it clear it was all about catching terrorists, drug dealers and paedophiles, which of course means “We want all that juicy data without citizens asking any annoying questions.”



  • It is a really good filter for me, any company that wants to harvest the bogus information I will use to access them had better do a good job of convincing me it’s worth the effort.

    I have a similar take on online stores wanting me to create a login to get a shipping cost, unless they are offering a truly unique item, or outrageously good price I just don’t buy anything from them.

    If we all had a similar standards these bits of UX fuckery would disappear over time, unfortunately most people don’t even think about it.




  • Imagine being someone who distrusted radium in 1900. Trying to understand this outrageous desire to shove poison into every product under the sun. Watching people literally brushing their teeth with it. Knowing how horrifically bad it was going to turn out.

    Fucking capitalism never misses a chance to fuck people over. In a couple of years time when we are all in the AI hangover it’s going to be curious to see how many people “knew all along” AI was a fantastically bad idea.

    I know the data centres can be repurposed for other tasks once they don’t need that density of compute, but what a waste.

    Oh and before any sheep start bleating about how it’s just a tool, and you can’t stuff the genie back in the bottle…

    Fuck off.

    You willingly embrace the cognitive damage machine I will be maintaining my stance of “Fuck AI” and unless you have a background in neuroscience (and can post your credentials) I will likely be as unconvinced by your bullshit as the last hundred of your ilk who have fed me the same shitty rationalisations.



  • When I was last looking for work one of my contacts told me she could get me a job in a couple of days, pretty much guaranteed and good money. The job was admin in relation to an NDIS provider. I asked why they were paying so well and she told me they have ridiculous staff turn over so they pay high to try to retain the people they can.

    The causes of the staff turn over were apparently almost entirely externalities. People getting abused for the work they do, primarily but mixed with a fair degree of uncertainty about long term career prospects.

    It seems to me this is one of the primary ways that this can be kept front and center. Make sure everyone who uncritically watches Sky News (or whatever they call that slop these days) is angry about it, make sure there is uncertainty at every potential point of failure, keep the money scared. I’m not saying the program deserves unwavering support, but having it as this constantly demonised and criticised topic feels a lot like setting it up to fail.

    AUKUS on the other hand can fuck right off, that shit was a horrific deal from day dot, pissed off our more stable allies and painted a target on our coastlines in the event we ever actually needed to use the program.

    Fully agree about taxing the mining companies though, if the owners can afford to buy both politicians and the media they are not paying anywhere near enough tax.


  • So start making the penalty for data breaches executive fingers. It will really bring home the importance of getting it right.

    Plus there are more than a few companies that will have to work out how to get signatures from people who have lost all of their digits within weeks of that rule being put in place.

    As things stand you have together caught breaking privacy laws, then you have to be unlucky enough to get properly investigated, then you need to be even more unlucky to actually get fined, and truly monumentally unlucky enough to not be able to tie things up in court long enough for the consequences to hit faster than the golden parachute can open.

    Fines are just a cost of doing business and there’s so many avenues for “accidentally” having data leak after all.




  • The thing is we are going to be seeing far more climactic extremes, in part due to this exact sort of person. Building houses with standards is absolutely more expensive up front and usually heaps cheaper over the longer life of the house.

    My in-laws house is built to a pretty damned high standard, compared to my father’s. My old man is forever spending money on small repairs, his powerbills are higher (I mean my in-laws are currently net exporters so their powerbills are almost entirely usage charge free), and his property price is largely based on the size of his block, whoever buys it will just knock it down and throw 2-3 units on the land.

    It’s the Sam Vimes Boots Theory all over again, its expensive to be poor.



  • Yep, sink the country and send us into debt, tank businesses. But on the plus side we get to have another few years of insufficiently taxing billionaires and corporations while they steal all our data and turn the country into a giant network of datacenters that other parts of the world view as warmly as a wet damp fart on an elevator.

    All so her “base” can feel emboldened to express the racism that sits at the core of their being like a festering, weeping fistula of pure evil.

    What a pack of fucking idiots.






  • We are also in a period where we can acknowledge that people exist on a spectrum and people change. My youngest son has ADHD, we got him treatment, support and flexible learning arrangements that mean 99.9% of the time he can be a “regular” kid with a “regular” life. When I was his age it was just drug them, pack them into the special class and forget about them. As much as I agree with your sentiment we do live in slightly enlightened times.

    We assume elderly people are going to struggle with people taking advantage of them in so many other aspects of life, why do we let the media and politicians get away with it?

    To be clear, I am not advocating for stripping anyone’s rights, or giving them a lessened voting weight. I don’t actually have a solution. I just think it’s the sort of thing a mature democracy would be able to discuss in good faith. Instead we get to be told about how much privacy and personal sovereignty we want to sacrifice in the name of “won’t somebody think of the children”.