Being a sovereign nation should mean we can tell the yanks they can fuck off.

Unfortunately they have their corporate and defence hooks into us really badly.

If the current US administration has any global impact it is this: We all need to wake the fuck up, diversify our strategic relationships, and reduce our dependence on the US.

My kids run Arch linux on their desktops. I won't let them use a closed source foreign adware/spyware operating system that doesn't give full control of hardware on principle while they live under my roof and expect me to provide tech support. So operating system restrictions are out of the question for me.

My kids have zero curiosity or interest in social media outside of youtube where they mostly watch really cool creative, education or gaming content which I support or if I think content is low quality brain rot it is something we discuss.

I am very content not to engage in social media if age verification proves too intrusive. Its a time waster for me and increasingly I feel like I am responding to prompts to train corporate AIs to replace employees, creatives etc. The human aspect of it all is getting lost. I think we need to learn how to live offline more. It could be our national competitive advantage. We are half way there already with our shit Internet.

Never been in a tropical storm but I have been forced to leave areas ahead of bushfire fronts and to travel close to fire effected areas. I dread the day some extremist nutcase defunds ABC Radio. You can't always rely on phone reception. A lot of old tech is better. Less distracting. More reliable.

It isn't relevant to the Linux kernel at all. Even though Torvalds wrote git to support Linux development they operate on a different development model (email, patch sets etc). It is very relevant to the wider ecosystem (Linux distro vs Linux kernel). Most open source software development is hosted on one of these platforms and even non-developers sometimes need to interact with them. Anyone starting a project or looking to share it finds themselves asking the same questions.

I prefer this sort of engagement farming question to the ones asking which laptop to buy or which distro or desktop environment is best. Though it is arguably healthier and more productive for me to be doing almost anything else with my life. I increasingly feel like I am filling out a captcha every time I answer such a question. It feels like something any reasonably competent human could discover trivially hitting a small number of websites and reading. Even the people who cut and pasted low effort LLM responses pretty much nailed most of the facts - arguably more than good enough. What is the point of participating here really?

Systemd provides a modern user space which fixes a huge number of problems. At first I found it difficult to learn but it had things I needed and I made the effort. I will always be nostalgic about things before systemd because I started using linux in the mid 90s.

I'm not going to throw away my GPU and multi-core CPU and go back to a 386 running dos because multithreaded applications and speculative execution scare me. There is no way to match what modern systems can do by taking old architectures and just adding more gates or faster clock speeds. And there are parallels in software architecture.

There is absolutely nothing wrong with running a BSD or a non-systemd linux distro if you like. They are still perfectly usable in a lot of situations doing the same stuff people did for years in these systems. If you have a server with a static set of devices that runs a fixed set of services at startup you don't really need systemd. I still have some systems like that but systemd also handles those cases more efficiently and robustly.

You see these sort of link dumps from people who think vaccines cause autism or that some diet will cure cancer. Whatever the intention behind it I always associate it with a bad faith attempt to fuck with people's heads by bamboozling them with more information than they can rationally analyze.

Believe what you want but you might want to consider that all the experts working on systemd and using it productively might know their shit.

This policy is not genuine. The intention is to delay or destroy fossil fuel alternatives to protect fossil fuel investments. If it creates political division and an impression of leadership then it is icing on the cake. I would expect the coalition to become increasingly divided if this was ever realistically pursued. Coalition voters do not want to foot the bill for this idiocy. The market has already voted. Renewables won on time to market and ROI.

For context I am not opposed to nuclear power generation at all. There has been a lot of misinformation about safety and waste for generations that has poisoned debate and I would like to see a more rational debate. I think it irresponsible for countries like Germany to turn away from nuclear and create huge energy security issues as well as increased emissions.

Carbon emissions are a global problem and each country has a responsibility to address it as effectively as they can. We can support nuclear power by supplying uranium and it doesn't matter for carbon reduction if the reactors are in Australia or overseas.

Our construction costs are very high and we don't have local expertise. Our research reactor was designed by Argentina. As much as some of us would like to see nuclear power come to Australia it is fantasy economics.

I don't think about Microsoft at all mostly. I supported their stuff professionally in the past and friends/family but otherwise total avoidance. They own some big game studios so I probably use some of their products like Minecraft but I haven't used their operating systems or applications for decades and I dislike and distrust cloud services and theirs is no exception. All big companies tend to be the same. Try not to depend on any of them.

They are in linux forums spruiking chatgpt/copilot as well. Mods deleted my comment the last time I told them to get lost. The rampant commercialism is so frustrating. The FOSS community has done so much to empower users/developers and give everyone the tools to learn, grow and customise their systems with amazing documentation and access to source code. And it is going to be Disneyfied within a generation with the fruits of our labor locked up behind billionaire controlled subscription services in flagrant disregard of our copyright and licences. Our kids won't know how to tie their shoelaces without paying Nadella, Altman and their shareholders for instructions.

I don't really see the link to communism though I can see the parallels to social democracy.

Private ownership of computer code should lead us to a hellscape where all code is owned by a handful of huge companies and wealthy elites. But instead of doing away with private ownership and making all code public domain we added regulation in the form of free and open source licensing that democratized private ownership and made it serve our community. Perhaps that is the real lesson, not communism.

Some people can't stand advertising and will turn off rather than sit through it. I have been ad blocking and ad skipping for 20 years. I am not going to change my habits. The alternative is piracy. I don't want to go back to piracy. It is a superior product in many ways but it isn't sustainable and I want a fair share of my subscriptions to fund creative jobs (not that that is happening). There are a lot of shows I can't stream or buy digitally here that are only available via the black market which is crazy in 2023 when streaming was supposed to fix this. We have companies taking shows off their services to claim tax writeoffs now at a time when the market is fragmented and overpriced.

The super rich and powerful think we are livestock to lead to slaughter and often they aren't wrong. The sensible thing is for consumers is to walk away (same for X, Facebook, Reddit and all the other time wasters) and let the whole thing burn down and hope that whatever replaces it learns from the mistakes and greed. Unfortunately I don't think enough will to make a difference.

The typical consumer Windows antivirus was designed to solve a different set of problems in a different environment and analysing files for signatures and behaviors against known threats was very valuable when so many people were running executables from unsafe sources intentionally or not. Even on Windows an antivirus has never been the best way to secure a machine. It was always the lowest common denominator solution that you put on everyone's machine because it was better than nothing.

Linux has been well served for a long time by the division or privileges between root and users and signed trusted distro sources. The linux desktop is trending towards containerized flatpak applications running in seperate namespaces with additonal protection via seccomp. Try and understand the protections Linux provides and how to best take advantage of them first and only reach for an antivirus if you still think it is needed.

Having grown up watching matte paintings, shaky plywood sets, bubble wrap monsters and people running up and down the same corridor repeatedly and then decades of soulless bad CGI I have nothing bad to say about modern productions standards. There is something special and human about the artistry of matte paintings, scale models and physical sets but I don't know that today's viewers have the same capacity for suspension of disbelief. LED walls allow some story telling that would otherwise be to expensive to visualise.