There are ways to implement age verification that address privacy concerns, for sure. It remains to be seen whether the government chooses to use them, or if they will use this as an excuse to de-anonymise Australian social media users.

In any case, blind signatures (or other cryptographic methods) won't address the issue that Australians will be banned from any social media platform by default, until the developers get around to implementing the required age verification system (whatever that ends up being).

If anyone didn't see this post yesterday, public submissions close *today* for the rushed senate committee review of this proposed legislation: https://aussie.zone/post/15477521

In the US, the vast majority of mortgages have a fixed rate over decades.

90% of mortgages are fixed-rate for 30 years according to this page: https://www.mortgagecalculator.org/helpful-advice/how-many-years-mortgage-loan.php

I don't know the details of how that works, but yeah, it's possible for the vast majority of home borrowers to be on fixed rates.

I don't think they were asking the cops to do anything, they just were refusing people service.

But I agree with your conclusion. If they weren't using the data for commercial reasons, they were using it as a deniable trial to see what they could get away with.

Fucking Coles is using Palantir and has their checkout face cameras, so I suspect in the wake of this we'll hear more about this sort of thing with other companies.

Article says they've got 30 days to publish it, and also that they're planning to appeal, so that might delay it further.

I'm an Australian, and I also don't know why I know Oodnadatta! Probably it's just one of those words that sticks in the brain, and it comes up every so often because it is a key point between Adelaide and Darwin.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oodnadatta (population 102)

Wittenoom, WA - population 0

I didn't instantly recognise the name, but I've heard the story.

Coober Pedy, SA - population 1437

This is a very solid one.

@gnu@lemmy.zip beat me to the punch with Port Arthur, and I think they've hit the nail on the head there. Although, as they note, maybe the name recognition isn't there for younger generations.

Here's some suggestions that haven't been made yet:

• Gundegai - population 2,057 (2021 census) - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gundagai
  • Featured in songs and poetry, most famously Along the Road to Gundegai
  • 'The Dog on the Tucker Box' sits on the road outside the town (and is itself a reference to a poem mentioning Gundegai)
• Betoota - population 3 (2023) - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betoota,_Queensland
  • Known because its name was adopted by the satirical news website The Betoota Advocate

Are the major vaccines the RNA ones where it’s just the protein?

• Moderna and Pfizer are mRNA.
• Novavax is protein subunit.
• AstraZeneca is viral vector (not an attenuated SARS-CoV-2, a completely different virus).

Ruby:

a || b

(no return as last line is returned implicitly, no semicolon)

EDIT: As pointed out in the comments, this is not strictly equivalent, as it will return b if a is false as well as if it's nil (these are the only two falsy values in Ruby).

Well, if it's shitty things you want: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dave_Matthews_Band_Chicago_River_incident

Here is how platforms die: first, they are good to their users; then they abuse their users to make things better for their business customers; finally, they abuse those business customers to claw back all the value for themselves. Then, they die.

I call this enshittification, and it is a seemingly inevitable consequence arising from the combination of the ease of changing how a platform allocates value, combined with the nature of a "two sided market," where a platform sits between buyers and sellers, holding each hostage to the other, raking off an ever-larger share of the value that passes between them.

From https://pluralistic.net/2023/01/21/potemkin-ai/#hey-guys

if this is to protect kids on your network

Sadly, I suspect this is to protect adults on the network...