AJ Sadauskas

@AvonVilla@aus.social @rene_mobile@infosec.exchange I remember back in high school reading in Nineteen Eighty Four about the 'telescreens' that watch the audience as they watch it. And thanks to LG, you too can now own your very own telescreen.

@johnquiggin@aus.social Let's imagine for a moment this happened on the other side of politics. Imagine one of the unions established a trades training school that received taxpayer money through the federal government. And let's suppose the CEO of this trades training school allegedly channelled money to a particular faction of the Labor Party through donations. Let alone all the other accusations around colourful property developers and the premier's brothers and the attempts to roll the police minister who's from a rival faction or remove the Building Commissioner. You wouldn't hear the end of it! Not from Sky, or the Murdoch tabloids, or Seven, or The Australian, or the Coalition, or One Nation! It really goes to the heart of whether public education money should go to a private school organisation that's so deeply involved in Liberal Party politics. #auspol #nswpol

@gabriel@fedi.gvisoc.com @odr_k4tana@infosec.exchange @Gargron@mastodon.social In the '80s, early home computers booted straight into BASIC. To do anything, even load your space invaders clone off cassette, you had to learn a BASIC command. And to make it do anything really fancy, you had to peek and poke around chip registers on the bare metal hardware. The printed manuals included BASIC commands and programs. Seriously, the Commodore 64 and the ZX Spectrum and the Apple 2 were the best kids' coding teaching tools in history. Kids learnt to code. In the '90s, computers had a graphical representation of a file system. And with PCs, open PCs meant you could upgrade your computer's CPU or RAM or graphics card or sound card or hard disk. Kids learnt about computer hardware and data storage. In the 2000s, building your own website meant learning HTML. And there were sites like GeoCities, Angrlfire, and Tripod where you could build a website for free. Kids learnt how to code websites. So even before they got to university, those Gen X and Millennial IT kids already had a practical knowledge of the basics. How software works. Hardware basics. Data storage basics. Coding basics. Kids got technically proficient because they typed in the game that was printed in the magazine about their home micro this month. Or they installed a better graphics card and more RAM to play Quake. Or they created a Blink 182 fan page on GeoCities. These days? Here's your sealed box. Here's your app. Here's where you enter your prompt. You can't see how it works, upgrade it, you can't modify it, you can't tinker with it. Let's see how that works out long term.

@dragonfi @Daojoan I'd go further. You can only invest in a company if you work for it, supply products to it, or are a customer of it.

The media: Support for One Nation is up! The public: How come? The media: Disillusionment with the major parties! The public: Disillusionment over what? The media: Not being listened to! The public: Listened to about what? The media: Free speech! The public: What kinds of free speech? The media: Offensive stuff! Things that political elites find offensive! The public: So free speech as in Pauline Pantsdown songs? Calling Gina Rinehart an heiress (which led her to threaten to sue journalists for defamation)? Vincent Namatjira paintings? Discussions of the true colonial history of Australia? The media: Not that kind of stuff political elites find offensive! And also there's other issues! The public: What kind of other stuff? The media: The cost of living! The public: Is support up among people who speak a language other than English at home? The media: Ummm... No. The public: First and second generation migrants? The media: Not really. The public: People from non-European backgrounds? Queer people? Trans people? Climate scientists? The media: Probably not. The public: Doesn't the cost of living also affect people from non-European backgrounds and people who aren't straight or cisgendered? The media: I mean it does... But that's not the point! The public: So just who is supporting One Nation? The media: Rural, regional, and outer suburban voters, typically older. The public: But not from non-European backgrounds? The media: Precisely! The public: So whites? The media: DON'T SAY THAT OR THEY'LL GET OFFENDED! The public: So what's her policy on healthcare? Public education? The minimum wage? Award rates? The media: Well, we haven't really asked too many questions about that stuff, but it's fairly safe to say they're all getting cut. Also, Pauline's said on the record that maternity leave should be axed and workers get paid too much. And One Nation has voted against every bill that extends or strengthens workers rights. The public: So if cost of living is the big issue, and people feel they aren't represented by the big parties, why not The Greens? The media: They're extreme! The public: Hold on. If you're a wage earner, The Greens policies, which include increasing funding for public schools, abolishing TAFE and uni fees, and putting dental care into Medicare, are likely to do a lot more to help you out financially than what One Nation's offering. So surely their support would be going up too right? The media: Only among queer people and voters from non-European backgrounds who are concerned about the cost of living. The public: Okay, so what's the real reason older white voters are supporting an anti-immigration party like One Nation? The media: We can't say. The public: Why not. The media: They'll be offended. #auspol #politics #capitalism #socialism #Australia

@adamsteer@mapstodon.space @DjityDjity@mastodon.social Even though the economy is deliberately set up so there are more workers than jobs. Even though if the unemployment rate gets too low the Reserve Bank will step in to raise interest rates. Even though the media, led by Murdoch, will scream to cut government spending if unemployment gets too high. Even though industry groups will scream about skills shortages if there are more jobs than workers in even one profession. Even though the government will issue more skilled visas if there are more jobs than workers in even one profession. The unemployed worker gets blamed, even with everything I've mentioned above.

@TheBreadmonkey@beige.party All up, Amazon borrowed US$31.5 billion in 48 hours, including both bonds and loans, from some of the world's biggest banks.

So what happens if Amazon can't pay the money back?

From the article:

"Companies are burning through exorbitant sums of money to keep pace in the AI arms race. Debt is climbing. Amidst this flurry of activity, Amazon has signed a deal to borrow some $17.5 billion from a number of financial lenders, according to Bloomberg.

"The banks behind the loan reportedly include Citigroup, JPMorgan Chase, Wells Fargo, HSBC, and BofA Securities. The deal has been characterized as a delayed draw term loan, meaning Amazon can draw down the funds on its own timeline rather than taking the full sum upfront, giving it flexibility in how and when the money gets deployed.

"The loan comes just two days after it was reported that Amazon would also raise $14 billion in a Canadian bond sale, bringing its total new financing to roughly $31.5 billion in the span of roughly 48 hours."

https://techcrunch.com/2026/06/10/fresh-off-bond-sale-amazon-borrows-17-5-billion-from-banks-as-ai-spending-continues/

#AIbubble #Amazon #ChatGPT #LLM #OpenAI #Anthropic #Gemini #Copilot #AI

Sydney is really five different cities in an oversized coat, and they all secretly despise each other... #Australia #Sydney #NSW

@simon_brooke@mastodon.scot @jannem@fosstodon.org @gabriel@fedi.gvisoc.com @odr_k4tana@infosec.exchange @Gargron@mastodon.social And it's important to highlight that thr two things are not mutually exclusive. You can provide a slick UI and also full access to the internals. Think about Linux for a moment. You can quite comfortably use KDE or GNOME without knowing a single Linux command. Yet if you want, you can have full access to the internals. That's very different to a lot of walled garden consumer tech these days, where all user access to the internals is blocked by design.

@jannem@fosstodon.org @gabriel@fedi.gvisoc.com @odr_k4tana@infosec.exchange @Gargron@mastodon.social You still benefit from a system being open and repairable, even if you never repair or tinker with it yourself. If an appliance or a car or a computer is closed, and it breaks down or had an issue, you really only have two choices. Take it back to the manufacturer for repairs, of replace it. If it's open, then you can take it to your choice of third-party repairers. If the closed system can be repaired or upgraded at all, you're limited to the parts that are authorised by the manufacturer. Usually at a hefty markup. With an open system, you can take it to a repair shop of your choice for repairs and upgrades. And that shop can offer you third-party replacement parts and upgrades. And then with a closed system, once the manufacturer decides its time for planned obsolescence, your system is e-waste. With an open system, even if they try that, you can potentially circumvent that. Think installing a deGoogled Android OS on a smartphone. And here's the important part. If you have the skills and expertise, you can maintain it yourself. But if you don't, you can still get a friend or relative to help, or take it to your choice of third party repair shop.

@jannem@fosstodon.org @gabriel@fedi.gvisoc.com @odr_k4tana@infosec.exchange @Gargron@mastodon.social Cars and home appliances that can't be repaired is a horrendous idea. It means if even one component has an issue, the whole thing needs to be replaced. It means you might need to replace the whole thing at the manufacturer's whim. It means you need to pay them an economic rent to use the thing you have already purchased off them. That's great for corporations. For customers? Not so much.

@Pkbwood@mastodon.online Melbourne. Don't think of this as a public transport service quality issue. Think about civic pride. You're being comprehensively beaten by not just Sydney, but also Adelaide!

@mast0d0nphan@beige.party @joannaholman@aus.social Totally agree. Widget the World Watcher would be great for a remake for the same reason 😊

@stufromoz@aus.social Nice photos, I love the reflection on the water 😊

@MichaelTBacon@social.coop @davidgerard@circumstances.run C'mon, you know exactly what comes next. Too big to fail. Government bailouts.

@si_fuller@aus.social From Mel B herself: ""It was actually a lazy journalist that couldn't be bothered to remember all our names, so he just gave us nicknames," Mel B said. "And we were like, 'Oh, well, that kind of works. I don't mind my name. Do you like your name? Baby? Posh?' We were like, 'Let's just go with it.'" "That "lazy journalist" was Peter Loraine, who was editor of the British magazine Top of the Pops and led the 1996 meeting in which the names were devised. "We laughed the most when we came up with Scary," Loraine has said. "Jennifer Cawthron, who was also from Leeds, came up with that one because Mel B was so loud and had tried to take over our whole photo shoot."" https://www.huffpost.com/entry/mel-b-spice-girls-nicknames_n_55f85d6de4b0c2077efc42d7 So there you go. A couple of white British journalists (descendants of the people colonised Africa and also ran the trans-Atlantic slave trade) decided the Black woman was "scary" because she was loud and also voiced her opinions during a photo shoot.

I've got a question about Australian customary units of measurement. You've probably heard of very large volumes of water being measured in Sydney Harbours. For example: 'Three times the amount of water in Sydney Harbour.' My question is how much of the harbour are we including here? Like, is Middle Harbour included in a Sydney Harbour of water? What about the Lane Cove River? Are we cutting it off at Goat Island? Or Cockatoo Island? Or are we including the Parramatta River here? If so, how far up? All the salt water bits? In high tide? Or low tide? Or are including the water past the weir at Parramatta Quay? If so, are we measuring in regular conditions, or when the Parra River floods? And how far up the river are we going? Parramatta Lake is part of the same river system. Is Parra Lake included in a Sydney Harbour of water? Inquiring minds need to know... #Sydney #NSW #Australia #auspol

David Swan has written an article about the people behind Firmus, an Australian bitcoin mining turned AI data centre start-up that withdrew its $43.7 billion sharemarket float this week. It's really quite something: "Oliver Curtis, Firmus’ 40-year-old co-chief executive and the husband of public relations entrepreneur Roxy Jacenko, is a former investment banker who served a year in jail for insider trading a decade ago. He has since called his actions “incredibly, gravely stupid”. "He co-founded Firmus in 2019 as a bitcoin mining business with his cousin Tim Rosenfield, who ran a luxury lingerie brand, and Jonathan Levee, who handles the engineering. Neither co-chief executive came from the technology industry. "They signed up big names all the same. Nvidia, the world’s most valuable chipmaker, is a shareholder and James Packer and former treasurer Joe Hockey hold stakes. “As a father, I’m incredibly proud of what Oli’s done,” Curtis’ father Nick, a mining entrepreneur and major shareholder, told The Australian last week. "Firmus earned about $US50 million ($73 million) in revenue last financial year. It asked to be valued at about 600 times that. ... "The price had climbed quickly. Firmus sought a $1.2 billion valuation in late 2024 and raised money at $15 billion in August. Then it asked public investors for almost three times that. "The road to Friday was rocky, to put it lightly. This week Firmus confirmed that a $73 billion partnership with CDC, an established Australian data centre operator, was over. The Financial Review reported that a test of Firmus’ prized cooling system had flooded part of CDC’s Melbourne data centre earlier this year. ... "The banks running the float, JPMorgan, Bank of America, Morgan Stanley and Morgans, told investors on Monday that demand at $11 a share was “well in excess” of what was on offer. One Morgans adviser emailed clients that demand had been “enormous”. "By Wednesday, the banks were discussing cutting the price to about $9. On Thursday morning, they told fund managers that bids made that morning were “not held”, then went quiet. “Bankers gone to ground,” read one message doing the rounds of brokers and investors. By midday the offer documents had been pulled from view." https://www.smh.com.au/technology/two-tech-outsiders-tried-to-sell-a-44bn-tech-company-it-didn-t-work-20261009-p6145h.html #business #AI #LLM #DataCenter #DataCentre #Firmus #capitalism #AIBubble

@98Percent@mastodon.nz @glent@aus.social @lackthereof@beige.party I'd think a few of them could make great AFL and NRL players. *ducks*

@acb@mastodon.social @bastardsheep@aus.social @pdcawley@mendeddrum.org We had a C64 and then an Amiga 500 at home, but my folks sometime bought home a very early black and white Win 3.1 laptop from work occasionally over long weekends. The big difference back then was there was no internet. (I don't think those laptops even had Trumpet Winsock installed?)

@GossiTheDog@cyberplace.social And we're still at the point in the hype cycle where they're basically giving the tokens away free or well below cost. A bit like when Uber Eats and Doordash and the like first launched, and deliveries cost $2. Before all the extra service fees. Eventually, Wall Street *will* want a return.

@hugg @carnage4life And how are the Lisbon taxi drivers going to feel about America (and its fucking around) going forward? America will find out.

@hclay8592@mastodon.social @MichaelTBacon@social.coop @davidgerard@circumstances.run Oh for sure. My point is it will be the wage-earning class that deals with the mess, while the billionaire owners of capital, whose shitfuckery caused it, who will be bailed out.

@decryption@aus.social @BenLeverAU@aus.social @jamesh@aus.social Sydney was generally better at putting shopping centres next to train stations than Melbourne. Aside from the Northern Beaches and the Eastern Suburbs, and the car dependent suburbs on the TWay from Liverpool to Parra you can *generally* get to most shopping centres by train. As in, you can either walk directly from the train station (QVB, Westfield Sydney, Westfield Parra, Castle Towers) or they're no more than maybe five to 10 minutes walk. Melbourne has a couple of good ones (Melbourne Central, Box Hill Central) or nearly good ones (Eastland, Epping, Watergardens, The Glen). But then many more big monstrosities like Chadstone and Northland and Forest Hill Chase and Werribee Plaza and Knox City that totally depend on cars.

@maudenificent@aus.social @joannejacobs@aus.social He also authorised the Yes campaign during the Voice to Parliament referendum to use that song: https://nit.com.au/03-09-2023/7499/youre-the-voice-farnhams-not-gonna-sit-in-silence He, along with Jimmy Barnes, has explicitly said he doesn't want his songs used by anti-immigration groups: https://www.smh.com.au/entertainment/music/john-farnham-disgusted-by-reclaim-australias-use-of-youre-the-voice-20150722-gii2ba.html One of Farnham's last performances before his health issues was with Mitch Tambo, where Tambo sang You're the Voice in Language: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L225JeAWS44 Way back in the '90s, Farnham wrote a song called The Time has Come, which is basically about Land Rights: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=as-26k5zMZ4 And here's '80s mullet Farnsie calling Apartheid in South Africa an abomination, while introducing a song that also acknowledges Martin Luther King: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DjSiWAwvWGU (I would point out that Farnham is himself an immigrant, but sadly that one seems to mean little these days.) So yes. While John Farnham is not an explicitly political artist, he has made his views on this stuff known over the years. Repeatedly. And he's clearly not on Team Pauline.

@kauer@aus.social ""not responding" is not  the same as "refusing" or "declining". If you are going to summarise a story to add your own take, at least don't do it with straw men." Here's the BlueSky post this article appears to be based off: https://bsky.app/profile/elkmovie.bsky.social/post/3mscqsxfulk26 "I’m on a small-ship Alaska cruise with my son; our boat rescued a stranded vessel last night and apparently we did that after the Coast Guard radioed Mark Zuckerberg’s yacht - which was closer - and they repeatedly refused to respond. (There was near unanimous booing when the captain announced this)" Note the phrase "refused to respond". "I've no time for Zuckerberg or Meta or people with multi-million-dollar yachts generally, but accuracy in reporting and quoting of reports is important, and this is the umpteenth post that says the yacht "refused" or "declined" to help." Maybe it's because the original BlueSky post this is all based off used the phrase "refused to respond"? In which case, if the claim Zuck's boat refused to respond to a call for help, then it's accurate to report that the claim is that his yacht yacht "refused" or "declined" to help. "It did neither. It just did not respond. Which may be just as bad in effect, but also could have reasons." Whether by malice or by negligence, it's a shitty thing to have happened. And it's the latest in the string of shitty things Zuckerberg has done by malice or by negligence.

@emmadavidson@aus.social @shlee@aus.social Not an ACT resident so I can't sign the petition, but I'm all for trams to Tuggeranong. Let's turn Kambah into Trambah! ✊ (Okay, that last one was a bit awful. I'll see myself out! 😆)

@keira_reckons@aus.social @joannaholman@aus.social By any chance, was it a nonprofit or fundraising sector industry training event? If so, I have stories...

@maccruiskeen@social.linux.pizza @david_chisnall@infosec.exchange @TheBreadmonkey@beige.party Amazon Aldo reportedly has over $225 billion in short- and long-term debt, up from $150 billion a year earlier. So previously debt roughly matched cash and short-term investments. Debt now significantly exceeds cash and short-term investments. Analysts think there'll also be an equity sale *on top of* this debt: "As of 31 March, Amazon’s total short- and long-term debt, including lease payments, exceeded $225 billion. A year earlier, that figure was closer to $150 billion. ... "The company has said it plans to spend approximately $200 billion in capital expenditure in 2026, mainly on new data centres and chips. Q1 spending alone hit $43.2 billion, the highest among Big Tech. CreditSights also flagged Amazon as a candidate for a future equity sale, following Alphabet’s $84.75 billion offering last week." https://thenextweb.com/news/amazon-17-5-billion-loan-citigroup-ai-spending

Mark Zuckerberg's $300 million yacht repeatedly refused to assist a small boat in distress, despite multiple requests from the coastguard. Instead, he reportedly left it to a cruise ship that was further away to perform the rescue: https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026/aug/09/zuckerberg-superyacht-boat-alaska And this story perfectly encapsulates who Zuckerberg and the other Silicon Valley billionaire tech bros are on a very fundamental level. This is the very core of who Zuckerberg is. A man who is often best placed to help. Who has the means to help. Who chooses not to, because where's the benefit to him?

In a previous job, the head of our department wanted to impress on the C-level executive he reported to that he was a fantastic manager. (My reporting line went CEO, the C-level executive, this department head, team manager, me.) He decided the best way to do this was to produce a monthly report for his boss. So one day the department head held a meeting with all the team managers who reported into him (including my boss). Data-driven decision-making was the future, he announced. He tasked all of them with producing a monthly highlights report for their teams. He would select the top highlights from those reports for his report to the C-level executive. Naturally, my boss, and everyone at that same team manager level, wanted to show the department head that they were a great manager. So all the team managers tasked all their reports (at my level) with producing a monthly report of their own. All the key highlights and stats from everyone's month had to be documented. Reporting became a critical task. For at least a couple of days each month, all nonessential tasks had to be paused for reporting. So imagine: A few dozen staff at my level each producing a personal report over a couple of days each month. Those personal reports were compiled into team reports by the team managers over a couple days each month. This was followed by countless meetings with the department head, where each team manager pled their case for their team's achievements being included in the report to the C-level executive. Eventually, the best highlights from those team reports were culled into the department head's monthly report to the C-level executive. Anyway, one day the C-level executive called everyone into a Teams meeting. He announced he was leaving the organisation. At the very end, there was a Q&A. Someone asked him about the reports. He said he never read any of them. #corporations #corporate #business #management #leadership #capitalism

Ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls, children of all ages, it's all true! It's now basically inevitable that we'll have AGI superintelligence by the end of 2024. And there's a 10% chance this AGI superintelligence, which will basically be LLM software running on physical hardware that fills a massive data centre with the energy and water use of a small European country, will cause humans to go extinct by 2030. And by extinct, I don't mean as a result of climate change from the fossil fuel air pollution we're using to fuel it. Please don't think about that stuff! No, I mean by, erm... Things like hacking the power grid and such... Which would also presumably cause it to cease existing... Which wouldn't exactly be superintelligent. But... y'know... details! How will we ever stop it?! I mean, it's not like we live in a world where less intelligent creatures and even inanimate objects kill off more intelligent creatures every day. It's not like we live in a world where virii and microbes and bricks can kill off more intelligent creatures. Brains beat brawn every time! Put a statistician in a fight with an MMA champion and clearly the maths professor is going to win, right? And if that doesn't sound true when it's phrased like that, then you need to just shush for a moment and pretend that it does. And if one of our LLMs in a massive hyperscale AI data centre somehow magically became sentient, it's not like we could just shut off the water. Or the electricity. Or stop delivering massive quantities of gas and oil to the onsite gas turbines. Or just find the nearest Telstra pit and put a bloody shovel through the fibre optic cables that connect it to the outside world. So we need to immediately figure out ways to stop this happening! What's that? You say we could prevent this happening by just not building the massive AI data centres? You say we could tax the rich so they don't have the money to build massive AI data centres? No! We absolutely must not do that under any circumstances! See, our position is really quite straightforward. We're claiming our product poses an existential risk to humanity that justifies urgent action to mitigate the risk, but also simultaneously we don't want you to think it /genuinely/ poses an existential risk to humanity that /actually/ justifies urgent action that would be guaranteed mitigate the risk, such as not building massive AI data centres, or by not providing access to the ginormous quantities of water and land and energy and capital that our product which is causing this supposed threat depends on. So why say it? Mostly, because if we say things like: "We can make a product that could make massive monopolistic short-term profits in a few years, but there's a 10% chance it kills everyone alive, give us money to build it," then the Silicon Valley VCs and Wall Street bankers will throw literal billions our way. Whereas if we were to say: "We can make a product that solves a genuine problem and we have a sustainable business model for it that will deliver stable long-term returns," then they won't. Because under American capitalism, "a chance it kills every person" is seen to be a worthwhile risk to take in exchange for short-term profits. I really hope that clarifies our argument. #AI #LLM #DataCenter #DataCentre #GenAI #tech #Anthropic #OpenAI #Google #Microsoft #Gemini #Copilot #Claude #AGI #capitalism #aimarketing #BigTech #tech

@joannaholman@aus.social @keira_reckons@aus.social Wait. Running technique? How's that an investment? Full disclosure. In a previous life, I worked for a couple of professional associations that ran courses and industry conferences. And some of our collateral included phrases like "invest in your career". And in that context, it's a bit icky, but you can sort of justify doing a course, learning a skill, and then getting a higher paying job as being an "investment" of sorts. But... Running?

@acb@mastodon.social Thanks for sharing! Today I learnt one Sydney Harbour equals 357 Melbourne Cricket Grounds, and 238,000 Olympic Swimming pools. But I'm still not sure how much of the Harbour and its catchment is included? 🤔

@MsDropbear42@blahaj.zone @ada@blahaj.zone I think the one you're thinking of is @_followback Follow @_followback, then follow @< hashtag you're interested in >@tags.pub (eg @cats for #cats ) and you'll get a relay of all the posts using that hashtag across the Fediverse.

@rainynight65@aus.social @bastardsheep@aus.social @pdcawley@mendeddrum.org The big difference in the days of DOS and Windows 3.1 was that the internet wasn't really a thing back then. (At best, it was email, Usenet, gophers, and FTP over dial-up.) An order of magnitude less scope for harm than an internet-enabled laptop today.

@InsurgoFormica@aus.social @DropBear@theblower.au If there's people who want to work but can't find productive work, then that's a misallocation of resources. And there's an argument to be made that we need a total overhaul of our skills, training, and higher education systems. The free market approach we've pursued since the Dawkins Review in the '80s, with student loans from the government, hasn't worked. Yes! The two things are connected! Having skills shortages /and/ unemployment is something that shouldn't happen. Again, that's a misallocation of resources.

@floridamarx@mastodon.social I've imagined something similar, but going a step further. Imagine that tenant-owned housing cooperatives are the norm. So you rent a house or an apartment from a housing co-op. By virtue of being a tenant, you're also a co-owner. Now let's take it a step further. The apartments come fully furnished. So when you first move out of home, you don't need to buy a couch, and a TV, and a fridge, and a washing machine. A bit like a hotel, that stuff will be there when you move in. If you move house, you don't need a removalist. You just leave your old furniture and appliances for the next person. They'll be set up at the new place when you move in. If you decide you don't like your couch, you can swap it for a different one. Perhaps communal building amenities, like a games room with pool tables or office facilities like printers and photocopiers, could be standard? Perhaps you could have a library of stuff at each building? Or perhaps you could have the co-ops provide various digital services for residents, like emails and a Fediverse instance? Let's go a step further. These co-ops could be members of a "co-op of co-ops". So you might have 100 housing co-ops operate a furniture manufacturing and repair workshop. And perhaps an appliance manufacturing factory? And these co-ops could be members of co-ops further up the chain of production. So the furniture workshops might be a member of a co-op of co-ops that operates a sawmill, which in turn is a member of a co-op of co-ops timber plantation? Likewise, with the libraries. You could have libraries that are themselves members of libraries. So say you're a member of a local library that carries musical instruments. It might have the regular stuff, like pianos, guitars, keyboards, drums, violins, etc. But say you really wanted to borrow a harpsichord. Specifically a harpsichord. Your local library doesn't have one normally. But your library is a member of a "library of libraries" for musical instruments. That library of libraries might have a harpsichord, which they lend to your library, which they lend to you. Now let's combine the two ideas. Let's suppose the libraries (and libraries or libraries) are members of co-ops of co-ops. So the music instrument library is a member of a co-op of co-ops that manufactures musical instruments, which is a member of our co-op of co-ops sawmill from earlier, which is a member of our co-op of co-ops timber plantation. Through federation, you could basically have a democratic library/sharing economy that operates all the stages of production right back to primary production. That's a whole economy reoriented around borrowing stuff, repairing stuff as needed, only using resources to manufacture more when needed, while giving everyone access to stuff as obscure as a harpsichord any time they want...

@vampiress@eigenmagic.net Love your new avatar. What sort of film are you making?

@Gurre@mastodon.nu @junesim63@mstdn.social @GeofCox@climatejustice.social Of course they do. The oldest trick in the boss' playbook is to set one section of the working class against another. And they've learnt that a significant section of the white working class is deeply racist and transphobic. They will gladly accept immigrants as a scapegoat for the problems caused by neoliberal capitalism. And they will gladly pay more taxes (including tariffs) and sell out their own economic interests in exchange for violence racial minorities and trans people. Which is why the bear right has never been a movement of the working class. It's a movement of the billionaires. That's why Australia's local far-right franchisee, Pauline Hanson, is receiving gifts of aircraft and overseas holidays from a billionaire mining heiress like Gina Rinehart: https://www.nine.com.au/australia-news/one-nation-leader-pauline-hanson-and-gina-rinehart-pictured-poolside-at-luxury-sicilian-hotel-20260716-p60frp.html

@RandamuMaki@mstdn.social @ketan@climatejustice.social Genuine question: Is anyone aware of any major oil or gas companies or petrostates that have made any major investments into AI? They seem to be a major beneficiary of this AI boom...

@jamesh@aus.social @decryption@aus.social I think the other factor, especially with the Geelong example, is that the town centres were built for motorists rather than train travellers. You'll notice they were built on the Princes Hwy, near where land was reserved for the Geelong Bypass. This was for the convenience of motorists, rather than train travellers.

Awful news. A company that was going to buy Australia's only manganese smelter out of administration has dropped out. Manganese is essential for hardening steel. Unless a deal is done *by Monday*, the plant will be closed and liquidated. https://www.abc.net.au/news/2026-06-12/tas-liberty-bell-bay-consortium-falls-over/106790624 #auspol

@MsDropbear42@infosec.space Thankk youuu 😊 And yes, it's written out of a sense of bemusement about the spin coming out of big AI that's being uncritically amplified through the media.

Transport for NSW is rolling out a shiny new trip planner: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KwNoK4MoCX0 The URL is https://transportnsw.info/trip-planner Anyone had a chance to use it yet? If so, any thoughts? #Sydney #train #bus #publictransport #nsw #Australia

Just for scale and perspective, here's how the size of the Gaza Strip compares with major Australian metro areas. Sydney: Cronulla to Narrabeen. Western Sydney: Castle Hill to Campbelltown. (You can comfortably fit one Gaza in Western Sydney, a second from the southern suburbs to the Northern Beaches, and still have plenty of room to spare.) Melbourne: Werribee and Tarneit to Epping and Campbellfield. Canberra: Roughly the same area. Gold Coast: Roughly the same area. Brisbane: Brisbane Airport to near Ipswich. Adelaide: Port Adelaide to Morphett Vale. Perth: Joondalup to Fremantle. #Gaza #Palestine #auspol #australia #politics #news #Sydney #WesternSydney #Melbourne #Adelaide #Perth #GoldCoast #Canberra

@MsDropbear42@infosec.space @ajsadauskas A fashionable fancy chook with flair! 😂🦚

@jolla@techhub.social Anyone looking for a Commodore-branded 2000s-style flip phone running a Linux-based mobile operating system? (See post above.) #askFedi