Australis13

joined 2 years ago
[–] [email protected] 33 points 1 week ago (3 children)

As an Australian, my government can go for it. None of the tech companies have appreciated the Australian government's attempts to regulate them ~~(e.g. trying to make Google and Meta pay for using our journalism).~~ (edit: not a good example)

That said, we have had idiots in power from time to time that definitely have worked against us, usually arguing the "security over privacy" nonsense (metadata collection laws, encryption backdoor legislation, etc.).

[–] [email protected] 7 points 2 weeks ago

This is precisely why all the banks I am with use their own app for 2FA rather than send codes via SMS. Even our government services system (myGov) has an app you can use instead of SMS.

Of course, none of these are completely secure, but it's a significant step up from plaintext SMS.

[–] [email protected] 31 points 2 weeks ago (2 children)

I am glad to see this happening. Unfortunately a lot of the damage is already done, though - staff have been lost and may not be easily replaced, studies have been interrupted at critical points and cannot simply be resumed from where they left off, etc. At least this pushback from the courts may reduce the likelihood of further such cuts.

[–] [email protected] 9 points 2 weeks ago

The writing's on the wall for AUKUS. It was a bad idea at the time and it's an even worse idea now. As per Dr. Shortis' article, we should definitely take advantage of this situation to cut our losses and come up with a better defense plan.

[–] [email protected] 16 points 3 weeks ago

That's true, yes, but I suspect the variation across NTs is not as wide as the gap between NTs and neurodivergents.

As an analogy, everybody's colour vision is slightly different. But most people are similar enough that they agree on colour, whereas somebody who is colour blind has a distinctly different experience. Most people don't even think twice that what they are seeing is not what another person might be seeing (and without special software it's basically impossible for people with regular vision to gain an understanding of what a colourblind person might see, whilst a colourblind person can only get an idea of what regular colour vision looks like if they have the right colourblindness profile for a pair specialised filtering glasses to work).

[–] [email protected] 96 points 3 weeks ago (3 children)

To state the obvious: predominantly because they are unaware that their experience of the world is not universal, but in some cases simply because it inconveniences them.

[–] [email protected] 19 points 3 weeks ago

Interesting, I hadn't seen news about that Apple feature before... There seems to be a lot more press around Recall, which in turn amps up the amount of consumer attention and backlash.

That said (and I wouldn't want Apple's "semantic search" even if I had an Apple device), I'd still trust Apple more to manage the dataset securely compared to Microsoft. The Apple ecosystem is far more strictly controlled, whereas in Windows it's more of a free-for-all (most people just used XP as an administrator, the UAC could be easily disabled on Windows Vista and 7, etc.). Especially with Microsoft's move to put advertising in Windows 11 and complete lack of security measures in the initial version of Recall, it is very hard to trust Microsoft in this regard.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 3 weeks ago

I have no idea about the Paramount-Skydance merger proposal, but I think they buried the lead:

After the abrupt resignation Wednesday by Republican commissioner Nathan Simington, the regulatory body is about to go down to just two members (one Republican and one Democrat), raising questions about its capabilities.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 3 weeks ago

Gardening is one of my hobbies but I don't have much retail experience... Guess that's me ruled out then.

[–] [email protected] 10 points 4 weeks ago

I partly agree and disagree with the description of executive dysfunction. I would also break it into two categories, but the first encompasses both aspects of the description by "overwhelmed".

In this case, the anxiety or stress that impedes function is due to uncertainty around how to achieve the desired outcome. The degree of anxiety or stress is dependent on the cost of failure; e.g. something with no perceived stakes (or very low stakes) allows for a high degree of uncertainty and an imperfect or incomplete plan can be executed because the cost of it going wrong is negligible. However, as the stakes rise, the degree of uncertainty required to create a "barrier to entry" (i.e. a sufficient amount of anxiety or stress to prevent action) decreases. The uncertainty itself could simply be not knowing how to approach or break down a task as per the comment, but it is also often the uncertainty introduced by other people. If you know someone well, then you can have reasonable confidence in how they might respond to a particular topic. If not, though, and they are a key part of achieving said goal, then oh boy does that cause stress!

The other category is not directly due to anxiety/stress but instead a result of fatigue, burnout or being overwhelmed (i.e. near meltdown). The brain effectively goes "nope" and refuses to process the required information no matter how much you want it to or how important it is. The irony is that if the anxiety or stress from the previous category is high enough, it can actually create this overwhelmed state, but in my experience severe fatigue, too much sensory input or too many cognitive demands (i.e. being forced to juggle too many tasks/problems/interactions at once) will readily create this situation too.

[–] [email protected] 9 points 4 weeks ago (1 children)

I think Christopher Heyerdahl is Canada's answer to Jeffrey Combs. Not only does he show up in Star Trek: Discovery (Season 3's "People of Earth"), but he plays three roles in the Stargate franchise (two recurring ones in Stargate: Atlantis) and another two recurring roles in Sanctuary (where a lot of other Stargate actors show up too).

[–] [email protected] 8 points 1 month ago (1 children)

Yeah, I really struggle to understand it. No-one in the energy industry supports nuclear as far as I can tell and yet people can't see that the Nationals are pushing it as a way to avoid actually doing anything about climate. It's like the Nationals want to make themselves irrelevant by intentionally (through stupidity, willful ignorance or sheer disingenuousness) harming their constituents.

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