As others have stated, we explicitly don’t have free speech in Australia.

We also don’t have any laws requiring political campaigns to be truthful. And as we saw, the day after the vote was done. All the leaders of the “No” campaign flat out abandoned indigenous people and explicitly said they wouldn’t be fronting a new referendum for recognition in the constitution without the voice. A promise they made repeatedly.

The leader of the opposition who spearheaded the no campaign has been called a fascist by his peers. And once commented that if elected he would do away with parliament and elections if he could.

It doesn’t matter. 63% support among indigenous folks is still a landslide.

You’re not arguing in good faith though. Accusing someone of racism like that. So you can go fuck yourself for all I care.

80% indigenous support polled prior to the campaigns starting. After a relentless campaign of misinformation courtesy of Murdoch. The actual number that voted yes was 63%.

In regional Aus, there is a popular, free-to-air, 24/7 Murdoch-run news outlet, Sky News Australia, not to be confused with Sky News. It is right of Fox News, closer to OAN.

Over 63% of indigenous people voted in favour of the voice.

You are repeating propoganda.

Australia is way more racist than the US. And more right-wing.

The US just doesn’t have compulsory voting, which means a minority of nutjobs can dictate politics. And even then, Trump lost.

Australia has compulsory voting and voted this way lol.

US is going through a labour organising revolution right now. While unions are left in the cold and experience dwindling power in Aus, even with the Labor party in power.

Yeah, folks are super reasonable compared to other social media sites, for the most part. The occassional nutter isn’t propped up by some PR company bot net to drive engagement so they just end up downvoted into oblivion.

It’s refreshing.

We have a family premium plan and I still got this message. Guess I’ll cancel YouTube Premium now…

I get most of the content I want via patreon anyway now.

A big problem in Aus is the industry culture. They don’t care about using technology to improve results. They only care about cutting costs, even if the final product doesn’t meet the previous standard.

And we’ve seen that with VFX across the globe, the overall quality dropped drastically. Because studios play silly buggers to weasel out of paying VFX companies what they are due.

From what I hear, even DNEG is in trouble, and were even before the strike.

It’s a race to the bottom it seems.

My honest hope for the film industry is likely the same as yours. That we have smaller productions with access to better post due to improvements in AI-driven compositing software and so on.

But it’s likely that a role that was earning $$$ before is devalued significantly. And while I’m an unabashed anti-capitalist, I think a lot of folks misunderstand what this sudden downward pressure on income can do. Cost of living increasing while wages shrink is an awful combination

I’m 35, left a six figure job, folding my company and starting an electrician’s apprenticeship. To give you an idea around what my views about AI are. And of course this is as an Australian. We have a garbage white collar work culture anyway.

I think there will be a net improvement. But I worry that others will fail to adapt quickly. Too many are writing off AI as this thing that already came and went, but the tools have just landed, and we don’t yet have workflows that correctly implement and leverage these yet.

There was a smallish VFX group here that was attached to a volume screen company. They employed something like 20 people I think? So pretty small.

But the volume screen employed a guy who could do an adequate enough job with generative tools instead and the company folded. The larger VFX company they partner with had 200 employees, they recently cut to 50.

In my field, a team leader in 2018 could earn about 180,000 AUD P/A. Now those jobs are advertised for 130,000 AUD, because new models can do ~80% of the analysis with human accuracy.

AI is already folding companies and cutting jobs. It’s not in the news maybe, but as industries shift to compete with smaller firms leveraging AI it will cascade.

I had/have my own company, we were attached to Metropolis which unfortunately folded. I think that had a role to play in the job cuts as well. Luckily for me I wasn’t overleveraged, but I am packing up and changing careers for sure.

In Australia we are currently voting on a constitutional amendment. It would create an advisory body that represents first nations people. It’s super basic, doesn’t really cover how it will work, because they can’t really even work on that until the amendment passes.

But presumably it will allow them to directly advise government, rather than through the spiderweb of community leaders, NGOs and whatnot that exist now, and provide some structure for Aboriginal representation in parliament

The sheer amount of disinformation circulating is staggering. I was lucky enough to really avoid most of the drama, until I went and had a look this past week finally.

What interested me, was rather than the usual short posts and snarky racist comments, of which plenty exist. These long diatribes were dominant, on places like Reddit and Facebook.

Then it struck me, they all sound like they were written by the same person. Not just a little, if you had removed the names and pictures of the users, I would have flat out assumed it was the same person.

We have opened Pandora’s Box. We don’t need “AGI” or whatever, this is plenty enough to do us in.

The issue is that ads on YouTube used to be fairly innocuous. Now I get batshit conspiracies pushed, non-stop Aussie gambling ads and so on.

Where I was once happy to sit through some food ads, or some tourism ads to support the platform. I’m not happy being blasted with non-stop, low-quality propoganda.

Granted the $22 family plan for me and my wife has worked well. We both use youtube music extensively as well. It’s the only streaming service I pay for, the only other subscription I have is for a VPN.

Yeah I managed to solve that for some games by installing the proton EAC plugin. Squad works for instance.

But games introducing kernel-level DRM I wouldn’t install on my Windows machine anyway. I guess the person I replied to potentially doesn’t know how to deploy a new operating system. So they might not care about all that anywho.

But calling everyone else dumb because they don’t know how to do something is ridiculous.

These days it’s more “which games don’t work on linux?” Rather than “which games work on linux?”

Every light adds to light pollution though and makes it more difficult for earth-based astronomy. And that’s excluding events where satilites pass through observations.

Extremely annoying, but inevitable I guess.

Indie Devs haven’t even begun to fully leverage all the new tools offered by recent Blender / Unreal / Godot.

And AAA studios are too big to leverage them effectively.

I think we’re going to see continuing leaps forward in workflow and tools, allowing smaller teams to make whatever they want at any scale. We’re kind of already there honestly, it just about applying it all meaningfully.

Is there a joke in the comic anywhere? This is just an average morning in consulting.

I mean things can get way worse. Look at Canada and Australia. No sign of a crash in either yet, prices just keep climbing. Homeless encampments and the like were alien to us up until recently. The median Aussie household income is ~$65,000. Homes start at about $600,000 and at that price a lot of them are teardowns, you’d be spending at least $200,000 in repairs.

Banks want 20% down.

It is scary, definitely.

I rent a nice house, I’m lucky. I’ve also not had a holiday in over a decade…

Yeah you put it really well.

I generally feel the same way about all Bethesda games. I’ll return after some DLC and Mods have been released.

There is some pretty cringe writing and stylistic choices this time around. Space cowboys and Freestar were conceptualized by a child and the PG pirate brigade are embarassing.

There are some bones for a pretty great empire building mod though. Can’t wait to see a sim-settlements type mod for Starfield.

We’re past the point where we can stop it wholesale.

We already have aquifers barely holding on, we’ve lost major sources of fresh water already.

I’m all for climate action, but we also need to starting developing technologies for living in the bed we’ve made.

Folks keep talking about climate change like it’s some future event. You are living through it right now.

Devices like this are a lifeline for communities in developing nations. Who are the first and worst affected by water shortages and salt water intrusions into their fresh water sources.