@duncan_bayne@emacs.ch
@duncan_bayne@emacs.ch avatar

duncan_bayne

@duncan_bayne@emacs.ch

I'm a Melbourne-based husband, father of three, and principal engineer / engineering director. I live amongst the trees out in Belgrave; you can find me online at:

🚀 Gemini: gemini://duncan.bayne.id.au/
🦣 Mastodon: https://emacs.ch/
🌐 Web: https://duncan.bayne.id.au/
◯ sourcehut: https://git.sr.ht/~duncan-bayne/
🤢 LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/duncan-bayne/

This profile is from a federated server and may be incomplete. Browse more on the original instance.

decryption, to random
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deleted_by_author

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    duncan_bayne,
    @duncan_bayne@emacs.ch avatar

    @decryption Is the efficiency tested by a third party? Or just what's claimed by the manufacturer?

    duncan_bayne, to random
    @duncan_bayne@emacs.ch avatar

    Setting up a couple of old ProLiants I had lying around, to donate to Merribek Tech:

    https://www.merri-bek.tech/

    Blowing out the dust.
    With my IBM SK-8840 keyboard.

    CatherineFlick, to random
    @CatherineFlick@mastodon.me.uk avatar

    Happy Mother’s Day to all the mums (of all kinds) here! 💖💐

    duncan_bayne,
    @duncan_bayne@emacs.ch avatar

    @CatherineFlick I just had a heart attack! ... then realised you must not be Australian; we celebrate it later in the year 😅

    jonny, to random
    @jonny@neuromatch.social avatar

    What in the entire earth and more importantly why any of this

    duncan_bayne,
    @duncan_bayne@emacs.ch avatar

    @jonny That is still much less creepy than wide-scale facial recognition surveillance ... which apparently most people are just fine with 🤷‍♂️

    rustyshelf, to random
    @rustyshelf@mastodon.social avatar

    China: “Remove all VPNs”
    Apple: “Sure thing”

    China: “…and podcast apps”
    Apple: “Can do boss!”

    China: “…and also hand over all iCloud data for our citizens”
    Apple: “I mean why wouldn’t we? Here you go!”

    EU: “Allow alternate app stores, and do it fairly”
    Apple: “Ahhh hell no! This is so unfair you guys are bullies! Malware! Privacy! We have standards! Unlike you we care about our users!”

    duncan_bayne,
    @duncan_bayne@emacs.ch avatar

    @rustyshelf I mean, probably a large part of this is that they would behave the same way towards Chinese officials, except those folks have a way of murdering / disappearing / persecuting people who do that.

    jmcleod, to random
    @jmcleod@mastodon.au avatar

    Docklands? “A cohesive business and social ecosystem”? He must be living in a different Docklands. Docklands is the kind of failure you get when you let private capital mandate urban planning. It’s taken 25 years to reverse engineer Docklands to something that is still bad design.

    https://www.theage.com.au/politics/victoria/west-gate-tunnel-project-traffic-chaos-another-blow-for-docklands-20240227-p5f86m.html?btis

    duncan_bayne,
    @duncan_bayne@emacs.ch avatar

    @jmcleod I can't imagine a situation where I'd visit the Docklands for any reason other than

    (a) I was catching up with someone who had to be there due to work (or, worse, due to a return-to-office mandate), and

    (b) we didn't have the time to meet up somewhere else.

    decryption, to random
    @decryption@aus.social avatar

    deleted_by_author

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    duncan_bayne,
    @duncan_bayne@emacs.ch avatar

    @decryption Have you been reading the news again?

    decryption, to random
    @decryption@aus.social avatar

    deleted_by_author

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    duncan_bayne,
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    @decryption I've worked for companies where poor behaviour was tolerated on the platform because a significant chunk of revenue was generated by that behaviour.

    I wonder if that's the motivation here?

    kcarruthers, (edited ) to random
    @kcarruthers@mastodon.social avatar

    I’ve been re-reading all my history books about the Nazis. One thing that strikes me is how hard it was to fight back against Nazism from inside. The normative culture is so strong and everybody is just going along. Ordinary folks, with denouncing their neighbours to the Gestapo. The Gestapo was tiny only 32k. It was the ordinary people that were informing on their neighbours. Ordinary people enabled Nazism.

    duncan_bayne,
    @duncan_bayne@emacs.ch avatar

    @kcarruthers Solzhenitsyn put it well:

    "“At what exact point, then should one resist the communists? ... How we burned in the prison camps later thinking: what would things have been like if every security operative, when he went out at night to make an arrest, had been uncertain whether he would return alive and had to say good-bye to his family? Or if during periods of mass arrests people had simply not sat there in their lairs, paling with terror at every step on the staircase, but had understood they had nothing to lose and had boldly set up in the downstairs hall an ambush of half a dozen people with axes, hammers, pokers, or whatever else was at hand. ... The Organs [police] would very quickly have suffered a shortage of officers ... and notwithstanding all of Stalin’s thirst, the cursed machine would have ground to a halt.”

    duncan_bayne, to random
    @duncan_bayne@emacs.ch avatar

    Today I got to wondering - why doesn't Hamas end the war by surrendering?

    In the course of answering that question I found this WaPo article:

    https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2023/11/15/hamas-surrender-palestinian-lives/

    ... that asks the same question.

    "Some questions are naive. But some naive questions are clarifying in their naivete. As an example of the latter: Why doesn’t Hamas surrender?

    And, relatedly, why aren’t more people demanding that Hamas surrender?

    ...

    To put the burden on Israel to end the war is to forget that there was an agreed-upon cease-fire between the Jewish state and Hamas before Oct. 7. The party that violated the cease-fire — in the most flagrant, provocative way possible — was Hamas. Having started this war, Hamas should end it.

    ...

    The essence of the matter is: Hamas does not surrender because it believes, fervently, that Israel has no right to exist and that armed “resistance” to it, even at the terrible human cost currently being paid by both Israelis and Palestinians, is justified."

    CatherineFlick, to random
    @CatherineFlick@mastodon.me.uk avatar

    "Sora serves as a foundation for models that can understand and simulate the real world, a capability we believe will be an important milestone for achieving AGI." I can't believe they're still claiming that generative models can "understand" the world. They can't understand anything. They are just a fancy statistical model for correctness probability against previous known good outputs. You don't get AGI from that. You can't get AGI from that. Irresponsible claims.

    https://openai.com/sora

    duncan_bayne,
    @duncan_bayne@emacs.ch avatar

    @CatherineFlick Re. getting AGI from spicy autocomplete - no, you can't. But I'd bet that many of the VCs waving cash around at anything with AI in the name don't understand that.

    There's going to be another "AI Winter" when folks realise how much of a scam this was (e.g. 1.5 human supervisors per "autonomous" Cruise car).

    I fear it'll impact the genuinely interesting, constructive, uses for generative AI.

    duncan_bayne,
    @duncan_bayne@emacs.ch avatar

    @CatherineFlick Is it my imagination or are many of the same people involved?

    duncan_bayne, to random
    @duncan_bayne@emacs.ch avatar

    Years ago I wrote a text adventure (a.k.a. interactive fiction), called Witching Isle 1. I intended to follow up with at least one sequel but it hasn't happened yet.

    Anyhow, you can now play it online, here:

    https://iplayif.com/?story=https%3A%2F%2Fwitching-isle.s3.ap-southeast-2.amazonaws.com%2Fwitching.z5

    Source code (it's written in Inform) is here:

    https://git.sr.ht/~duncan-bayne/witchingisle1/

    jonikorpi, to random
    @jonikorpi@mastodon.gamedev.place avatar

    Liberal use of content warnings here has been gnawing at me. Using them for jokes, collapsing long posts, hiding hypothetically annoying topics etc. trains readers to compulsively expand them. As soon as attention lapses their muscle memory’s gonna take over.

    Joke? expand
    Megathread? expand
    Superbowl? expand
    Dismemberment? expand— wait aaagh fuck!

    This is the same effect as with macOS/iOS’s copious permission dialogs. If you try to confirm everything, you’ll confirm nothing.

    duncan_bayne,
    @duncan_bayne@emacs.ch avatar

    @jonikorpi I've seen this with childhood education, too.

    Teachers[1]: "The alfoil boxes have dangerous cutting edges on them. Children, please get your parents to tear you some alfoil."

    Me: "The welder is dangerous. Please don't use it without adult supervision."

    We aren't meaning the same thing when we say "dangerous".

    [1] Yes this really did happen, at a "science" open night for children nine years old.

    duncan_bayne, to random
    @duncan_bayne@emacs.ch avatar

    Waiting for the power to come back after the storms ... my expectation is "days" at this point. 500k Victorians without power last I checked.

    One generator for "tech", the other for the fridge+freezer.
    Large tree branch down.

    codinghorror, to random

    What's your biggest guilty pleasure band? It's gotta be borderline shameful. I have quite a few, but I'll go with Styx to start.. 😂

    duncan_bayne,
    @duncan_bayne@emacs.ch avatar

    @codinghorror Jazz Against the Machine ( e.g. https://poetsclubrecords.bandcamp.com/album/come-as-you-are )

    decryption, to random
    @decryption@aus.social avatar

    Issue 2021 of The Sizzle just left my mail server!

    Today's headlines:

    • TVs sold in Australia will need to come preloaded with iView, SBS On Demand, 7plus, 9Now and 10 Play

    • Gmail's strict email server policies are in effect now

    • Apple Vision Pro hot takes and random info from around the internet

    • Indulge me in this rant about lack of free access to Australian Standards

    And the following stuff is on sale thanks to Ozbargain:

    • Cheap AirPods, USB-C OLED monitor, UniFi Express, EV charging cable, ASUS gaming laptop, Ultimate Him gift cards, Halo Master Chief Collection

    If you aren't a subscriber, you missed out on today's issue - don't make that mistake again! Visit https://thesizzle.com.au to sign up for Australia's best tech email newsletter.

    duncan_bayne,
    @duncan_bayne@emacs.ch avatar

    @decryption I wonder if Government regulation might have jumped the shark at the point where it's dictating what apps TV manufacturers preinstall?

    Or maybe that's just an easier target than requiring TV manufacturers obtain informed consent before tracking their customers?

    duncan_bayne,
    @duncan_bayne@emacs.ch avatar

    @decryption Ahhhh there we go, that explains it. "Can't trust the plebs to make their own choices or they might not choose us!"

    simon_brooke, to random
    @simon_brooke@mastodon.scot avatar

    I'm going to have to replace my eight year old MacBook; it's beyond the point I can afford to keep repairing it. I really want the next one to be the last laptop I ever buy: we cannot afford to keep generating e-waste.

    My current thought is a @frameworkcomputer, mainly for repairability. Does anyone have alternative suggestions for a very long life laptop? Low power consumption is also desirable, UN*X/Linux of some kind required.

    duncan_bayne,
    @duncan_bayne@emacs.ch avatar

    @simon_brooke @frameworkcomputer We just bought a Framework 13 Ryzen for my wife to use as a Linux Mint daily driver.

    It's a great system, and I'm very tempted to abandon my usual plan of refurbished ThinkPads when it's time to replace my W540.

    duncan_bayne,
    @duncan_bayne@emacs.ch avatar

    @simon_brooke @frameworkcomputer Very happy to answer any specific questions, if you have any.

    duncan_bayne,
    @duncan_bayne@emacs.ch avatar

    @simon_brooke @frameworkcomputer Yup, especially when gaming. I'm hoping that subsequent updates will help.

    agreenberg, to random

    We fully expect to receive a takedown demand for this story. We also think the stakes of this anti-censorship battle are too high not to publish it anyway.

    https://www.wired.com/story/appin-training-centers-lawsuits-censorship/

    duncan_bayne,
    @duncan_bayne@emacs.ch avatar

    @agreenberg The power of the Streisand Effect 😜​

    (Relatedly: it strikes me as amusing that most people I know can't name a single Streisand song, but do know about the Streisand Effect ...)

    duncan_bayne, to random
    @duncan_bayne@emacs.ch avatar

    @codinghorror Rand would have agreed with him 😜​

    "Above all, do not join the wrong ideological groups or movements ... [for example] the “libertarian” hippies, who subordinate reason to whims, and substitute anarchism for capitalism."

    I'm not American but I understand the term there is "stigginit" ... doing the irrational just because authority figures are (for once, admittedly) advocating the rational.

    In Australia there was a significant intersection between the anti-maskers, the anti-vaxxers, political racists, and generally all flavours of woo.

    Years ago in New Zealand, where I was a literal card carrying member of the LibertariaNZ, we had a few allies who supported us essentially because they (correctly) believed that a minimal state would give them the opportunity to pursue their own irrational goals (religious, in particular).

    I try to avoid the Libertarian monicker these days because of the sheer number of crazies attracted to it.

    duncan_bayne, to random
    @duncan_bayne@emacs.ch avatar

    Happy Australia Day 🇦🇺​

    "There are so many reasons to celebrate Australia as one of the few countries that the world’s displaced persons seek to flee to. That is the ultimate measure of a nation’s success, and this thought should be pondered by the “leaders” of the many countries from which people flee."

    ― Ron Manners ( quoted in http://pc.blogspot.com/2024/01/a-rum-reason-to-raise-glass-on.html )

    duncan_bayne,
    @duncan_bayne@emacs.ch avatar

    @yeti Yup 😭​ Sadly only a minority of Australians are in favour of open borders. So you wind up with travesties like Nauru.

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