@ajsadauskas@aus.social
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ajsadauskas

@ajsadauskas@aus.social

Australian urban planning, public transport, politics, retrocomputing, and tech nerd. Recovering journo. Cat parent. Part-time miserable grump.

Cities for people, not cars! Tech for people, not investors!

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ajsadauskas, to fuckcars
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What can you get to within a 15-minute walk of your house?

A recent YouGov survey asked Americans what they think they should be able to get to within a 15-minute walk of their house.

Of these choices, I can currently walk to all of them from my apartment, aside from a university (no biggie, I'm not currently studying, although there is a Tafe within walking distance), a hospital, and a sports arena.

How many can you get to with a 15 minute walk from your house?

@fuck_cars

ajsadauskas, (edited ) to tech
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What should I add to my '90s website?

So I'm currently toying around with NeoCities, and decided to trial it by building your classic mid '90s Geocities/Tripod/Angelfire pastiche website.

Some of the most important elements are already in place.

Tile background? Large font? Heading in bright pink with a shadow? Unusual colour choices? Random cat gifs? Under construction gif? Check! Check! Check!

In the true spirit of the '90s DIY web, some more pages (including the links page) are coming soon.

(I'm thinking of adding a page dedicated to either Britney or a nu-metal band.)

You can see the page so far here: https://that90ssite.neocities.org/

There are a few things that I want to add to make it complete, and I'm looking for suggestions.

The first, is to embed a midi file that plays automatically. Any suggestions on the best way of doing this?

Second, it's just not going to be complete without a guestbook.

Third, any webring suggestions?

Fourth, what's the best way of adding a java chat room in 2024?

Finally, anything else that really needs to be a part of a great '90s website?

UPDATE: Thanks for all the feedback! I've added more annoying GIFs, a guestbook, a links page, and a cyber cat hangout.

UPDATE 2: And added even more gifs, an amazing Amiga demo, and a ton of links.

@asklemmy

ajsadauskas, to TeslaMotors
@ajsadauskas@aus.social avatar

Elon lied about the monkeys — and he shouldn't be trusted to put his Neuralink chips in human brains.

"They are claiming they are going to put a safe device on the market, and that's why you should invest," Ryan Merkley at the Physicians Committee, told Wired. "And we see his lie as a way to whitewash what happened in these exploratory studies."

Really heartbreaking reading what happened to the monkeys.

People quite rightly think of Elizabeth Holmes as a fraud for making false medical claims about what the Theranos machines could do. So why aren't Elon's claims at Neuralink being held to the same level of scrutiny?

https://futurism.com/neoscope/terrible-things-monkeys-neuralink-implants

@technology

ajsadauskas, to startup
@ajsadauskas@aus.social avatar

Hi, we're a tech startup run by libertarian Silicon Valley tech bros.

We're not a newspaper, we're a content portal.
We're not a taxi service, we're a ride sharing app.
We're not a pay TV service, we're a streaming platform.
We're not a department store, we're an e-commerce marketplace.
We're not a financial services firm, we're crypto.
We're not a space agency, we're a group of visionaries who are totally going to Mars next year.
We're not a copywriting and graphic design agency, we're a large language model generative AI platform.

Oh sure, we compete against those established businesses. We basically provide the same goods and services.

But we're totally not those things. At least from a legal and PR standpoint.

And that means all the laws and regulations that have built up over the decades around those industries don't apply to us.

Things like consumer protections, privacy protections, minimum wage laws, local content requirements, safety regulations, environmental protections... They totally don't apply to us.

Even copyright laws — as long as we're talking about everyone else's intellectual property.

We're going to move fast and break things — and then externalise the costs of the things we break.

We've also raised several billion in VC funding, and we'll sell our products below cost — even give them away for free for a time — until we run our competition out of the market.

Once we have a near monopoly, we'll enshitify the hell out of our service and jack up prices.

You won't believe what you agreed to in our terms of service agreement.

We may also be secretly hoarding your personal information. We know who you are, we know where you work, we know where you live. But you can trust us.

By the time the regulators and the general public catch on to what we're doing, we will have well and truly moved on to our next grift.

By the way, don't forget to check out our latest innovation. It's the Uber of toothpaste!

@technology

ajsadauskas, to climate
@ajsadauskas@aus.social avatar

Right now, could you prepare a slice of toast with zero embodied carbon emissions?

Since at least the 2000s, big polluters have tried to frame carbon emissions as an issue to be solved through the purchasing choices of individual consumers.

Solving climate change, we've been told, is not a matter of public policy or infrastructure. Instead, it's about convincing individual consumers to reduce their "carbon footprint" (a term coined by BP: https://amp.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2021/aug/23/big-oil-coined-carbon-footprints-to-blame-us-for-their-greed-keep-them-on-the-hook).

Yet, right now, millions of people couldn't prepare a slice of toast without causing carbon emissions, even if they wanted to.

In many low-density single-use-zoned suburbs, the only realistic option for getting to the store to get a loaf of bread is to drive. The power coming out of the mains includes energy from coal or gas.

But.

Even if they invested in solar panels, and an inverter, and a battery system, and only used an electric toaster, and baked the loaf themselves in an electric oven, and walked/cycled/drove an EV to the store to get flour and yeast, there are still embodied carbon emissions in that loaf of bread.

Just think about the diesel powered trucks used to transport the grains and packaging to the flour factory, the energy used to power the milling equipment, and the diesel fuel used to transport that flour to the store.

Basically, unless you go completely off grid and grow your own organic wheat, your zero emissions toast just ain't happening.

And that's for the most basic of food products!

Unless we get the infrastructure in place to move to a 100% renewables and storage grid, and use it to power fully electric freight rail and zero emissions passenger transport, pretty much all of our decarbonisation efforts are non-starters.

This is fundamentally an infrastructure and public policy problem, not a problem of individual consumer choice.

@green

ajsadauskas, (edited ) to tech
@ajsadauskas@aus.social avatar

The enforcement of copyright law is really simple.

If you were a kid who used Napster in the early 2000s to download the latest album by The Offspring or Destiny's Child, because you couldn't afford the CD, then you need to go to court! And potentially face criminal sanctions or punitive damages to the RIAA for each song you download, because you're an evil pirate! You wouldn't steal a car! Creators must be paid!

If you created educational videos on YouTube in the 2010s, and featured a video or audio clip, then even if it's fair use, and even if it's used to make a legitimate point, you're getting demonetised. That's assuming your videos don't disappear or get shadow banned or your account isn't shut entirely. Oh, and good luck finding your way through YouTube's convoluted DMCA process! All creators are equal in deserving pay, but some are more equal than others!

And if you're a corporation with a market capitalisation of US$1.5 trillion (Google/Alphabet) or US$2.3 billion (Microsoft), then you can freely use everyone's intellectual property to train your generative AI bots. Suddenly creators don't deserve to be paid a cent.

Apparently, an individual downloading a single file is like stealing a car. But a trillion-dollar corporation stealing every car is just good business.

@music @technology @music

ajsadauskas, to tech
@ajsadauskas@aus.social avatar

So Elon's a "visionary" who wants to turn X into a single website where you can do everything — kinda like Yahoo!

He wants his new MySpaceX portal to be a website...

Where you can message people: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yahoo!_Messenger

Where you can stream audio: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Broadcast.com

Where you can stream videos: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yahoo!_Screen

Where you can create social media posts: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yahoo!_360%C2%B0

Where you can manage your finances: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yahoo!_Finance

Where you can share photos: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yahoo!_Photos

Where you can earn money publishing content: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yahoo!_Publisher_Network

Where you can find a job: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yahoo!_HotJobs

Where you can buy and sell stuff: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yahoo!_Auctions

Yes, ladies and gentlemen, this truly is a vision for the future — if by "the future" you mean 1997.

#X @technology

ajsadauskas, (edited ) to tech
@ajsadauskas@aus.social avatar

My real worry with Google's voyage into enshittification (thanks to Cory Doctorow @pluralistic the term) is YouTube.

Through YT, for the past 15 years, the world has basically entrusted Google to be the custodian of pretty much our entire global video archive.

There's countless hours of archived footage — news reports, political speeches, historical events, documentaries, indie films, academic lectures, conference presentations, rare recordings, concert footage, obscure music — where the best or only copy is now held by Google through YouTube.

So what happens if maintaining that archival footage becomes unprofitable?

@technology

ajsadauskas, (edited ) to tech
@ajsadauskas@aus.social avatar

So Google is now preventing people from removing location data from photos taken with Pixel phones.

Remember when Google's corporate motto was "don't be evil?"

Obviously, accurate location data on photos is more useful to a data mining operation like Google.

From Google: "Important: You can only update or remove estimated locations. If the location of a photo or video was automatically added by your camera, you can't edit or remove the location."

It's enshitification in action.

Source: https://support.google.com/photos/answer/6153599?hl=en&sjid=8103501961576262529-AP

@technology @pluralistic

ajsadauskas, (edited ) to tech
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In an age of LLMs, is it time to reconsider human-edited web directories?

Back in the early-to-mid '90s, one of the main ways of finding anything on the web was to browse through a web directory.

These directories generally had a list of categories on their front page. News/Sport/Entertainment/Arts/Technology/Fashion/etc.

Each of those categories had subcategories, and sub-subcategories that you clicked through until you got to a list of websites. These lists were maintained by actual humans.

Typically, these directories also had a limited web search that would crawl through the pages of websites listed in the directory.

Lycos, Excite, and of course Yahoo all offered web directories of this sort.

(EDIT: I initially also mentioned AltaVista. It did offer a web directory by the late '90s, but this was something it tacked on much later.)

By the late '90s, the standard narrative goes, the web got too big to index websites manually.

Google promised the world its algorithms would weed out the spam automatically.

And for a time, it worked.

But then SEO and SEM became a multi-billion-dollar industry. The spambots proliferated. Google itself began promoting its own content and advertisers above search results.

And now with LLMs, the industrial-scale spamming of the web is likely to grow exponentially.

My question is, if a lot of the web is turning to crap, do we even want to search the entire web anymore?

Do we really want to search every single website on the web?

Or just those that aren't filled with LLM-generated SEO spam?

Or just those that don't feature 200 tracking scripts, and passive-aggressive privacy warnings, and paywalls, and popovers, and newsletters, and increasingly obnoxious banner ads, and dark patterns to prevent you cancelling your "free trial" subscription?

At some point, does it become more desirable to go back to search engines that only crawl pages on human-curated lists of trustworthy, quality websites?

And is it time to begin considering what a modern version of those early web directories might look like?

@degoogle

ajsadauskas, (edited ) to climate
@ajsadauskas@aus.social avatar

If you care about the planet, please make sure you sit down before you start reading this post about ExxonMobil.

So.

The CEO of ExxonMobil just said this in an interview: "We’ve waited too long to open the aperture on the solution sets in terms of what we need, as a society, to start reducing emissions."

https://fortune.com/2024/02/27/exxon-ceo-darren-woods-interview-pay-the-price-for-net-zero/

Who's the most influential voice on climate change? Who's to blame for inaction on climate change?

According to the CEO of ExxonMobil, it's environmental activists.

No, really:

"Frankly, society, and the activist—the dominant voice in this discussion—has tried to exclude the industry that has the most capacity and the highest potential for helping with some of the technologies."

Oh, and the CEO of ExxonMobil also apparently thinks consumers are to blame for climate inaction:

"Today we have opportunities to make fuels with lower carbon, but people aren’t willing to spend the money to do that."

Gets better.

He thinks unnamed 'people who generate emissions' should pay for it. (Rather than, say, major transnational oil companies.)

"People who are generating the emissions need to be aware of [it] and pay the price. That’s ultimately how you solve the problem."

https://fortune.com/2024/02/27/exxon-ceo-darren-woods-interview-pay-the-price-for-net-zero/

Worth including a quick reminder here that Exxon-Mobil made a US$36 billion profit in 2023: https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/exxon-beats-estimates-ends-2023-with-36-billion-profit-2024-02-02/#:~:text=HOUSTON%2C%20Feb%202%20(Reuters),higher%20oil%20and%20gas%20production.

Not gross revenue.

Profit.

So, remind me again. Who knew about climate change before most of the public?

"Exxon was aware of climate change, as early as 1977, 11 years before it became a public issue... This knowledge did not prevent the company (now ExxonMobil and the world’s largest oil and gas company) from spending decades refusing to publicly acknowledge climate change and even promoting climate misinformation."

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/exxon-knew-about-climate-change-almost-40-years-ago/

And just who, exactly, stood in the way reducing emissions all these years?

"ExxonMobil executives privately sought to undermine climate science even after the oil and gas giant publicly acknowledged the link between fossil fuel emissions and climate change, according to previously unreported documents...

"The new revelations are based on previously unreported documents subpoenaed by New York’s attorney general as part of an investigation into the company announced in 2015. They add to a slew of documents that record a decades-long misinformation campaign waged by Exxon, which are cited in a growing number of state and municipal lawsuits against big oil."

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2023/sep/14/exxonmobil-documents-wall-street-journal-climate-science

@fuck_cars

ajsadauskas, (edited ) to politics
@ajsadauskas@aus.social avatar

Recycling in the US (and many Western countries, for that matter) is a sham. It always was.

In reality, most of the plastic placed in recycling bins were never turned into new products.

Now China has stopped taking that waste, the myth of near infinite consumption without the guilt of waste has been exposed for the lie that it always was.

That's not to say that we shouldn't aim for a sustainable circular economy. Of course we should.

But we'll need much bigger changes to make it happen.

"For decades, we were sending the bulk of our recycling to China—tons and tons of it, sent over on ships... But last year, the country restricted imports of certain recyclables... Waste-management companies are telling [municipalities] there is no longer a market for their recycling.

"These municipalities have two choices: pay much higher rates to get rid of recycling, or throw it all away.

"Most are choosing the latter.

"When [its kerbside recycling] program launched, Franklin [in New Hampshire] could break even on recycling by selling it for $6 a ton. Now the transfer station is charging the town $125 a ton to recycle, or $68 a ton to incinerate.

"This end of recycling comes at a time when the US is creating more waste than ever. In 2015, the most recent year for which national data are available, America generated 262.4 million tons of waste, up 4.5% from 2010 and 60% from 1985."

https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2019/03/china-has-stopped-accepting-our-trash/584131/

@green

ajsadauskas, to TeslaMotors
@ajsadauskas@aus.social avatar

Elon's "extremely hardcore" toxic work culture means people are forced to take Adderall without a prescription to meet their workload. Just ask SpaceX employees.

"Some SpaceX workers resorted to taking Adderall to keep up with the pace of work at the company's launch facility, and others found themselves falling asleep in the bathroom during long workweeks, a recent Reuters investigation found.

"Travis Carson, a former SpaceX worker at the company's facility in Brownsville, Texas, told Reuters some workers took Adderall — a stimulant designed to help people with ADHD improve their focus and concentration levels — without a prescription to keep up with the pace of work."

Source: https://www.businessinsider.com/spacex-workers-took-adderall-slept-bathroom-iv-treatments-deadlines-report-2023-11

What a nightmare!

#X @technology

ajsadauskas, (edited ) to technology
@ajsadauskas@aus.social avatar

Are agile scrums an outdated idea?

Here's a video on YouTube making the case for why agile was an innovative methodology when it was first introduced 20 years ago.

However, he argues these days, daily scrums are a waste of time, and many organisations would be better off automating their reporting processes, giving teams more autonomy, and letting people get on with their work:

https://youtu.be/KJ5u_Kui1sU?si=M_VLET7v0wCP4gHq

A few of my thoughts.

First, it's worth noting that many organisations that claim to be "agile" aren't, and many that claim to use agile processes don't.

Just as a refresher, here's the key values and principles from the agile manifesto: http://agilemanifesto.org/

  1. Individuals and interactions over processes and tools
  2. Working software over comprehensive documentation
  3. Customer collaboration over contract negotiation
  4. Responding to change over following a plan
  • Our highest priority is to satisfy the customer through early and continuous delivery of valuable software.
  • Welcome changing requirements, even late in development. Agile processes harness change for the customer's competitive advantage.
  • Deliver working software frequently, from a couple of weeks to a couple of months, with a preference to the shorter timescale.
  • Business people and developers must work together daily throughout the project.
  • Build projects around motivated individuals. Give them the environment and support they need, and trust them to get the job done.
  • The most efficient and effective method of conveying information to and within a development team is face-to-face conversation.
  • Working software is the primary measure of progress.
  • Agile processes promote sustainable development. The sponsors, developers, and users should be able to maintain a constant pace indefinitely.
  • Continuous attention to technical excellence and good design enhances agility.
  • Simplicity--the art of maximizing the amount of work not done--is essential.
  • The best architectures, requirements, and designs emerge from self-organizing teams.
  • At regular intervals, the team reflects on how to become more effective, then tunes and adjusts its behavior accordingly.

Your workplace isn't agile if your team is micromanaged from above; if you have a kanban board filled with planning, documentation, and reporting tasks; if your organisation is driven by processes and procedures; if you don't have autonomous cross-functional teams.

Yet in many "agile" organisations, I've noticed that the basic principles of agile are ignored, and what you have is micromanagement through scrums and kanban boards.

And especially outside software development teams, agile tends to just be a hollow buzzword. (I once met a manager at a conference who talked up how agile his business was, and didn't believe me when I said agile was originally a software development methodology — one he revealed he wasn't following the principles of.)

#agile @technology #technology #scrum #tech #Dev

ajsadauskas, to ai
@ajsadauskas@aus.social avatar

In five years time, some CTO will review the mysterious outage or technical debt in their organisation.

They will unearth a mess of poorly written, poorly -documented, barely-functioning code their staff don't understand.

They will conclude that they did not actually save money by replacing human developers with LLMs.

@technology

ajsadauskas, to twitter
@ajsadauskas@aus.social avatar

Prominent "free-speech absolutist" threatens to sue Jewish anti-hate group because it engaged in free speech he didn't like.

"Elon Musk has threatened to sue the Anti-Defamation League after accusing the civil rights group that campaigns against antisemitism and bigotry of trying to “kill” his X social media platform.

"The owner of X, formerly known as Twitter, said the ADL was trying to shut down his company by 'falsely accusing it and me of being antisemitic'."

If your list of enemies includes the ADL, then there's a more-than-reasonable chance that you're an anti-semite.

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2023/sep/05/elon-musk-sue-adl-x-twitter

@technology

ajsadauskas, to car
@ajsadauskas@aus.social avatar

Concerned about microplastics? Research shows one of the biggest sources is car tyres

A lot of the emphasis on reducing microplastics has focussed on things like plastic bags, clothing, and food packaging.

But there's a growing body of research that shows one of the biggest culprits by far is car tyres.

It's increasingly clear that we simply cannot solve the issue of microplastics in the environment while still using tyres — even with electric-powered cars.

"Tyre wear stands out as a major source of microplastic pollution. Globally, each person is responsible for around 1kg of microplastic pollution from tyre wear released into the environment on average each year – with even higher rates observed in developed nations.

"It is estimated that between 8% and 40% of these particles find their way into surface waters such as the sea, rivers and lakes through runoff from road surfaces, wastewater discharge or even through airborne transport.

"However, tyre wear microplastics have been largely overlooked as a microplastic pollutant. Their dark colour makes them difficult to detect, so these particles can’t be identified using the traditional spectroscopy methods used to identify other more colourful plastic polymers."

https://theconversation.com/check-your-tyres-you-might-be-adding-unnecessary-microplastics-to-the-environment-205612#:~:text=Tyre%20wear%20stands%20out%20as,rates%20observed%20in%20developed%20nations.

"Microplastic pollution has polluted the entire planet, from Arctic snow and Alpine soils to the deepest oceans. The particles can harbour toxic chemicals and harmful microbes and are known to harm some marine creatures. People are also known to consume them via food and water, and to breathe them, But the impact on human health is not yet known.

"“Roads are a very significant source of microplastics to remote areas, including the oceans,” said Andreas Stohl, from the Norwegian Institute for Air Research, who led the research. He said an average tyre loses 4kg during its lifetime. “It’s such a huge amount of plastic compared to, say, clothes,” whose fibres are commonly found in rivers, Stohl said. “You will not lose kilograms of plastic from your clothing.”"

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2020/jul/14/car-tyres-are-major-source-of-ocean-microplastics-study

"Microplastics are of increasing concern in the environment [1, 2]. Tire wear is estimated to be one of the largest sources of microplastics entering the aquatic environment [3,4,5,6,7]. The mechanical abrasion of car tires by the road surface forms tire wear particles (TWP) [8] and/or tire and road wear particles (TRWP), consisting of a complex mixture of rubber, with both embedded asphalt and minerals from the pavement [9]."

https://microplastics.springeropen.com/articles/10.1186/s43591-021-00008-w

@fuck_cars

ajsadauskas, to bluesky
@ajsadauskas@aus.social avatar

With BlueSky moving towards finally opening up federation, I'm interested in how people feel about it?

Would you be open to the idea of Mastodon, Lemmy, Pixelfed, and other Fediverse platforms adopting the AT protocol in order to federate with it?

If those technical hurdles could be overcome, would you support your instance federating with BlueSky?

Does the same go for other commercially-owned platforms, such as Threads and Tumblr?

@fediverse

ajsadauskas, to delhi
@ajsadauskas@aus.social avatar

Whoopsie! Sydney's road planners just discovered induced demand is a thing, after opening a new motorway.

For those outside Sydney, the New South Wales state government recently opened a new spaghetti intersection just west of Sydney's Central Business District.

It was supposed to solve traffic. Instead, it's turned into a giant car park:

"For the third straight day, motorists and bus passengers endured bumper-to-bumper traffic on the City West Link and Victoria Road. A trip from Haberfield to the Anzac Bridge on the City West Link averaged an agonising 44 minutes in the morning peak on Wednesday.

"Several months ago, Transport for NSW’s modelling had suggested traffic from the interchange would add only five to 10 minutes to trips on Victoria Road through Drummoyne and over the Iron Cove Bridge during morning peaks.

"Those travel delays have now blown out."

So what do motorists say when their shiny new road that was supposed to solve traffic instead turns into a massive traffic jam?

'Dude! Just one more lane!'

From the article:

"[Roads Minister John] Graham and his Transport boss Josh Murray appear reluctant to do what many motorists reckon is the obvious solution.

"That is, add lanes or make changes at the pinch-points that are causing the pain. A three-lane to one merge point from Victoria Road onto the Anzac Bridge, along with two lanes merging into one on the City West Link, are proving to be painful bottlenecks."

https://www.smh.com.au/national/nsw/how-planners-got-rozelle-traffic-modelling-horribly-wrong-20231129-p5ensa.html

@fuck_cars @sydneytrains @urbanism

ajsadauskas, to twitter
@ajsadauskas@aus.social avatar

Called it. Elon's doing exactly what I thought he would do: https://aus.social/@ajsadauskas/109979152813584947

Twitter is dead.

There is no point in trying to hold on to what Twitter used to be. What Twitter used to be no longer exists.

It died the moment Elon walked in the building.

Anything posted there since then has been free content on his everything app and potential crypto scam, X: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2023/jul/23/twitter-elon-musk-says-he-wants-to-change-companys-bird-logo

@technology

ajsadauskas, (edited ) to australia
@ajsadauskas@aus.social avatar

Australia is bigger than some people overseas imagine.

So here's a quick comparison of Australian states to their US counterparts.

Tasmania is Australia's smallest state, with a total area of 68,401 square kilometres.

That's bigger than West Virginia, Maryland, Ha​waii, Massachusetts, Vermont, New Hampshire, New Jersey, Connecticut, Delaware, or Rhode Island.

Australia's second smallest state is Victoria, at 227, 444km2.

It's larger than Minnesota, Utah, Idaho, Kansas, Nebraska, South Dakota, Washington, North Dakota, Oklahoma, Missouri, Wisconsin, Georgia, Illinois, Iowa, New York, North Carolina, Arkansas, Alabama, Louisiana, Mississippi, Ohio, Virginia, Tennessee, Kentucky, Maine, Florida, or Pennsylvania.

Fun fact: Victoria is larger in area than Indiana and South Carolina combined.

Now on to the ones that might surprise you.

You know how Texans love talking up how big Texas is?

New South Wales is bigger than Texas.

And by quite a margin. NSW is 801, 150 sq km compared to 696,241 sq km for Texas.

South Australia is bigger than Texas, and Michigan. Combined.

SA is 984, 321 sq km.

Texas (696,241 km2) plus Michigan (250,493 sq km) is just 946, 734 sq km.

Queensland is bigger than Alaska.

Queensland is 1,729,742 sq km, compared to 1,717,854 sq km for Alaska.

That also means Queensland is bigger than Texas and California. Combined.

Texas (696,241 km2) plus California (423,968 km2) is 1,120,209 sq km.

You can add in Michigan too (250,493 sq km) and it's still only 1,370,702 sq km.

That's right kids. Texas, California, and Michigan combined are 359,040 sq km smaller than Queensland.

That leaves Western Australia. It's 2,527,013 square kilometres.

How big is that? Well, the combined area of Texas and Alaska is 2,414,095 sq km, so pretty bloody big.

Source: https://www.ga.gov.au/scientific-topics/national-location-information/dimensions/area-of-australia-states-and-territories

@australia

ajsadauskas, to TeslaMotors
@ajsadauskas@aus.social avatar

Whoopsies! "Free speech absolutist" "accidentally" suspends the accounts of journalists who are critical of him, and people whose political views he disagrees with.

He seems to have quite the habit of firing or banning people he disagrees with, doesn't he?

Via Gizmodo:

"X, the platform formerly known as Twitter, purged an unknown number of prominent accounts over the last 24 hours with little to no explanation, and then restored the accounts minutes after this article was published.

"The list includes popular accounts belonging to journalists, writers, and podcasters. Among them are Ken Klippenstein of the Intercept, writer and podcaster Rob Rousseau, Texas Observer correspondent Steven Monacelli, the account for TrueAnon, a left-wing politics and news podcast, and a number of others.

"One thing the accounts have in common is recent criticisms of the Israeli government.

...

"Musk, who calls himself a “free speech absolutist” has previously said no one should be banned from X unless they break the law.

"Update, 1:12 p.m.: Shortly after this article was published, Musk responded to a question about the issue from far-right influencer Jackson Hinkle. Musk promised to investigate, and the accounts went back up soon after. Musk later blamed the “mistake” on X’s spam algorithms. The Hamas account is still suspended."

Source: https://gizmodo.com/elon-musk-x-twitter-journalists-banning-spree-1851151593

#X @technology

ajsadauskas, to opensource
@ajsadauskas@aus.social avatar

I'm thinking seriously about getting Google out of my life, and trying NextCloud.

Looking to get a personal account through a managed provider.

Does anyone have any experience with it?

How does it compare to ownCloud?

Any hosts I should look at or avoid?

Any apps I should get for it, or avoid?

Any issues I should be aware of before I switch?

@asklemmy

ajsadauskas, to music
@ajsadauskas@aus.social avatar

So who's your favourite band or artist? What's your favourite song or album?

I'm keen to hear both who you're currently listening to, as well as your all-time favourites and guilty pleasures.

What do you like about them? How did you get into their music? And significant stories or memories?

@music @music

ajsadauskas, to cars
@ajsadauskas@aus.social avatar

The toll road scam: A government-made monopoly you pay for.

Here's a funny-because-it's-true take on Transurban and the poor tax it imposes, from Punter's Politics:

https://youtu.be/FlKBakPAtiw?si=G39_0GcJzSB0SSA8

#cars #roads #fuckcars @fuck_cars #tolls #tollroads #memes #funny #urbanism #UrbanPlanning #auspol #vicpol #nswpol

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