Now at @aj@gts.sadauskas.id.au
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Now at @aj@gts.sadauskas.id.au@aus.socialto
Australia@aussie.zone•Let's chat about these SEVEN nuclear power plants the LNP want to build ...
6·2 years ago@DavidDoesLemmy @Zagorath Here’s an article about a company named RedFlow, that has sold its fourth grid-scale long-duration zinc bromine flow battery to California:
Where’s RedFlow based? Brisbane.
An alternative to bromine flow batteries is grid-scale lithium.
And where is one of the world’s largest lithium minjng regions? Western Australia.
The Coalition’s policy is to ban any further investment in grid-scale batteries from RedFlow or with WA lithium, along with banning further investments in wind and solar.
Instead, it wants to hand roughly half a trillion dollars to largely foreign-owned multinationals to build nuclear power plants in Australia.
Assuming the Coalition can deliver 7 large-scale first-of-its-kind infrastructure projects on time and on budget in Australia, it will take 10 to 15 years to build them. In the meantime, Australia will continue burning coal and natural gas.
And all this for an energy source that costs substantially more per megawatt hour than renewables, coal, or gas.
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Technology@lemmy.ml•Google Admits Its AI Overviews Search Feature Screwed Up
2·2 years ago@makeasnek On a broader note, I think possibly the best approach for decentralised, open-sourced web search might be an evolution on the SearXNG model.
At the top of the funnel, you have meta search engines that query and aggregate results from a number of smaller niche search engines.
The metasearch engines are open source, anyone with a spare server or a web hosting account can spin one up.
For some larger sites that are trustworthy, such as Wikipedia, the site’s own search engine might be what’s queried.
For the Fediverse and other similar federated networks, the query is fed through a trusted node on the network.
And then there’s a host of smaller niche search engines, which only crawl and index pages on a small number of websites vetted and curated by a human.
(Perhaps on a particular topic? Or a local library or university might curate a list of notable local websites?)
(Alternatively, it might be that a crawler for a web index like Curlie.org only crawls websites chosen by its topic moderators.)
In this manner, you could build a decent web search engine without needing the scale of Google or Microsoft.
Now at @aj@gts.sadauskas.id.au@aus.socialto
Technology@lemmy.ml•Google Admits Its AI Overviews Search Feature Screwed Up
2·2 years ago@makeasnek @schizoidman YaCy is still around.
And https://searx.space/ is an open source metasearch search engine with many instances. (Try https://searx.be/ if you want to test it out.)
SearX/SearXNG allows you to aggregate results from a number of different search engines. You choose which ones, and they’re stored in your browser without setting up an account.
Now at @aj@gts.sadauskas.id.au@aus.socialto
Fediverse@lemmy.ml•Federated Blogging Platforms
6·2 years ago@sabreW4K3 Plume doesn’t appear to be active, unfortunately 🥺
There’s a notice on the official Join Plume website saying the former developers don’t have the time to maintain it anymore. Most of the former public instances now throw up errors of various kinds.
WriteFreely ( @writefreely ) is alive and well. I was seriously toying with the idea of setting up a blog through its main instance, which is called Write.as Professional. The sticking point for me was that the official on-platform monetisation tool (Coil) appears to be dead, and doesn’t support members-only posts (like Ghost).
Ghost, when federation goes live, looks like it will be the best option for my blog.
WordPress plus @pfefferle 's plugins is another great option, depending on what you want to use it for. (There’s no shortage of WP plugins!)
As for Lemmy, I could see a blogging-focussed front end being created for it, in the same way FediBB put a traditional message board front end on it, but one doesn’t appear to exist at present.
Now at @aj@gts.sadauskas.id.au@aus.socialto
Australia@aussie.zone•Keeping pet cats indoors would save millions of native animals and billions of dollars. So what's stopping us?
22·2 years ago@trk @TassieTosser Knox City Council in outer-eastern Melbourne did exactly this: https://www.knox.vic.gov.au/whats-happening/news/keeping-your-cats-safe-and-secured .
The council did it because some of its suburbs (The Basin, Ferntree Gully, Upper Ferntree Gully, parts of Boronia, Lysterfield) border national parks and the Dandenong Ranges.
Younger cats can adapt to living indoors.
But the challenge was with older cats, who are used to roaming around.
The happy medium would be to phase it in over five to 10 years, where any new cats registered or adopted after a particular date have to stay indoors, but older cats can continue to roam.
Now at @aj@gts.sadauskas.id.au@aus.socialOPto
Asklemmy@lemmy.ml•I'm thinking seriously about getting Google out of my life, and trying NextCloud.
2·2 years ago@geillescas @jajabor @asklemmy That, and also making files/emails/calendar events synced across your computer and your phone.
Now at @aj@gts.sadauskas.id.au@aus.socialOPto
Asklemmy@lemmy.ml•I'm thinking seriously about getting Google out of my life, and trying NextCloud.
3·2 years ago@denshirenji @asklemmy On photos, does NextCloud Photos or Memories play nice with Digikam or any other desktop photo gallery applications? And what about Immich?
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Technology@lemmy.ml•Google Cloud accidentally deletes a financial institution account due to ‘unprecedented misconfiguration’
2·2 years ago@Dymonika @MossyFeathers I’m guessing you’re overseas?
Super fund, short for superannuation fund.
Basically, in Australia 11% of wages are automatically deposited into a compulsory retirement savings account, known as a superannuation account.
A superannuation fund is a financial institution that manages these accounts.
More information here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superannuation_in_Australia
Now at @aj@gts.sadauskas.id.au@aus.socialto
Fediverse@lemmy.ml•Ideas to build a federated StackExchange alternative
17·2 years ago@lemmyreader Here’s a starting point for a fediverse StackExchange: Make sure it’s interoperable with Lemmy.
Now, you may not get the full feature set on Lemmy, but you should be able to interact with it from Lemmy as if it’s a group on there.
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Australia@aussie.zone•Stop Killing Games Australian Petition - Open for Signature Until **20 May 2024**
6·2 years ago@Dangdoggo @Rentlar Or allow it to be downloaded in a DRM-free file format that can be used with other apps, platforms, or services…
Also , if connecting a server is an absolute necessity and you are not longer going to maintain it, release the server source code as open source.
Now at @aj@gts.sadauskas.id.au@aus.socialOPto
Fuck Cars@lemmy.ml•So despite climate change, Australia's federal government has just committed an extra $3.25 billion into building a toll road and a 20-lane freeway widening.
7·2 years ago@AllNewTypeFace Of course there were.
For commuters:
* More densification around existing stations and tram lines instead of suburban sprawl.
* Upgrading buses across Melbourne to a 10-minute minimum frequency and straightening out existing bus routes.
* Rolling out high-capacity signalling and automatic train control across the Melbourne suburban rail network
* Building Metro 2 from Newport to Clifton Hill would double the number of trains that can run on the Hurstbridge and Mernda lines.
* Building the Doncaster Railway.
* Building the Heidelberg to Box Hill section of the SRL first.
* Extending the 48 tram to Doncaster and giving it dedicated lanes for more of its journey.
And then for freight, there’s a bunch of things too:
* Converting more suburban lines to dual gauge.
* Converting more regional Victorian lines to standard gauge
* Electrifying regional rail and freight services
* Building more multimodal facilities near existing rail lines.
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Fuck Cars@lemmy.ml•The toll road scam: A government-made monopoly you pay for.
8·2 years ago@alcoholicorn Yeah, that’s not how it tends to work in Australia.
What happens is a state government puts up a good chunk of time construction costs (as much as half in some cases), plus public land.
In some cases, the freeway already exists, but the state government wants one more lane built, because it thinks that will ease congestion (as happened with sections of the Tullamarine and Monash Freeways in Melbourne).
It gets handed off to Transurban, who builds it under a long-term operating agreement (30 years is common).
In some cases, the agreements have clauses saying railways that compete with the toll road can’t be built.
As the end of the lease approaches, Transurban offers to build one more lane — in exchange for extending the agreement.
Now at @aj@gts.sadauskas.id.au@aus.socialOPto
Fuck Cars@lemmy.ml•The toll road scam: A government-made monopoly you pay for.
24·2 years ago@alcoholicorn It is when it has been privatised to a company that pretty much pays no tax (hi Transurban!), for roads that taxpayers helped to pay for, and those toll roads connect car dependent suburbs that have next to no public transport.
Now at @aj@gts.sadauskas.id.au@aus.socialOPto
Fuck Cars@lemmy.ml•So the RTA's own modelling showed the Rozelle Interchange would be a traffic disaster—but generating more toll road trips for Transurban was more important.
3·2 years ago@Gurre @fuck_cars The road lobby’s big answer to the mess they’ve created with the Rozelle Interchange is to build a second road tunnel under Sydney Harbour.
Engineers at the inquiry into the Rozelle Interchange fiasco have already testified that will only create traffic jams elsewhere on the road network: https://aus.social/@ajsadauskas/112383313109173146
Just one more lane, bro!
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ausmemes@aussie.zone•Map of the different climates in Australia
3·2 years agoSo they reckon that both Sydney and Melbourne have the same climate (?!), and that climate is just like England (?!?!).
No.
Just no.
Now at @aj@gts.sadauskas.id.au@aus.socialto
Australia@aussie.zone•Elon Musk vs Australia: global content take-down orders can harm the internet if adopted widely
3·2 years ago@Ilandar Most major platforms are based in the US.
A DMCA request basically means the flagged content is taken down globally, not just for the US.
If the person who uploaded that content is not a US citizen, it still gets pulled.





@naught101 @lost_faith It predates the internet.
Back in 2000, a guy named Robert Putnam wrote a book based on his research into why there has been a breakdown in community in America: http://bowlingalone.com/
(If you ever hear someone use the phrase “social capital”, they’re alluding to his research.)