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  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 fro...

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  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: Brisba...

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  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...

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  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

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  @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 shortage...

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  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 Rive...

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  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 journal...

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  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...

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  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

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

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  Here's how Shell shifts billions in profits from its Australian oil and gas business through a shell company in Singapore: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0mV_1J69Bno #Auspol #oil #gas

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  @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...

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  Here's a little thought experiment. Just imagine we made a machine. A little one. So small it fits in your pocket. And what this machine will do is show you a thing. Words, or pictures, or videos. At any time, you can make it show you different words, pictures, or videos. What the machine will do is monitor your reaction to the thing it shows you. If you react, it will show you more of that thing. Any reaction. Good. Bad. Happy. Sad. Angry. Concerned. You get more of that thing. Con...

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  Hi there rich people of Sydney's wealthy Eastern Suburbs and Lower North Shore. As your fashionable selves are no doubt aware, recently some white hipsters from a trendsetting publication discovered Burwood and deemed it worthy of hipster gentrification. I mean, decided it's the "coolest neighbourhood in Australia". Now, we know in your mental maps that Sydney ends somewhere around Newtown. And that one time you did go out Olympic Park or the Enmore Theatre, you felt uncomfor...

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  Sharath from Building Beautifully has put up a video about arguably Australia's biggest urban planning success story of the past 40 years. That's the emergence of Parramatta as one of Australia's great cities: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ifGwIJo7OWo And with good reason. There's a lot that Parra has done right. Instead of just building apartments or office towers, it's built both. It's built enough new apartments close to public transport to keep house prices leve...

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  A question for any non-Aussies reading this: How many Australian cities can you name off the top of your head, and which ones? What do you know about them? #askFedi #Fediverse #questions #Australia #travel

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  UPDATE: A massive thanks to everyone who helped out with this ☺️ As a result, my little single-user instance has made contact with 11,274 other instances across the Fedi 😲 So no further boosts needed, really appreciate everyone who helped out 😁 ORIGINAL POST: I've got a quick favour to ask. If you're reading this post on Mastodon (or the Fediverse), please click boost. How come? I recently moved across to my own self-hosted single-user server (using GoToSocial.org). For a bunch of re...

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  Over 40 years, we were collectively told to give tax cuts to rich people. And we were told that if we did that, wealth would trickle down and everyone would be better off. Over 40 years, pretty much everything got cut to fund these tax cuts. Schools. Hospitals. Public housing. Public transport. Universities. Roads projects. Mental health services. Welfare payments. People literally went homeless or starved, so rich people could get tax cuts. Because the wealth would trickle down. Eventuall...

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  Columnist: I'm standing up for what I believe in! Protecting women's sport! And I'll keep standing up for it, no matter how much those snowflakes try to silence me and my right to free speech! Citizen: That's fantastic! You know, female athletes have to put up with so much vicious misogyny and abuse, especially on social media. Some men really can be snowflakes when it comes to women's sport. Columnist: No! I'm raising the big issue in women's sport, and I'm bei...

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  Just imagine a country that allowed multinationals to export billions of dollars of natural gas tax free. This country had a housing shortage, and had deliberately spent the past 30 or 40 years underfunding and privatising public housing. It had also spent billions on automated systems that wrongfully kicked thousands of welfare recipients off their entitlements, justified by the claim that one or two people could rort the system otherwise. It also severely restricted access to mental health...

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  The enshittification for revenue is beginning in earnest at ChatGPT, I see: "Our ads pilot is focused on supporting broader access to ChatGPT while preserving consumer trust, usefulness, and user control. Guided by our ads principles⁠, the early results are encouraging. We’re seeing no impact on consumer trust metrics, low dismissal rates of ads, and ongoing improvements in the relevance of ads as we learn from feedback. These positive signals support moving into the next phase of our pilo...

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  A popular TikTok channel featuring an "Aboriginal man" presenting animal facts has been exposed as an AI forgery. AI is Iggy Azalea on an industrial scale: "The self-described “Bush Legend” on TikTok, Facebook and Instagram is growing in popularity. "These short and sharp videos feature an Aboriginal man – sometimes painted up in ochre, other times in an all khaki outfit – as he introduces different native animals and facts about them. ... "But the Bush Legend isn’t r...