@DavidDoesLemmy @Zagorath Here’s an article about a company named RedFlow, that has sold its fourth grid-scale long-duration zinc bromine flow battery to California:

https://reneweconomy.com.au/redflow-tapped-as-preferred-battery-provider-for-a-fourth-major-california-project/

Where’s RedFlow based? Brisbane.

An alternative to bromine flow batteries is grid-scale lithium.

And where is one of the world’s largest lithium minjng regions? Western Australia.

The Coalition’s policy is to ban any further investment in grid-scale batteries from RedFlow or with WA lithium, along with banning further investments in wind and solar.

Instead, it wants to hand roughly half a trillion dollars to largely foreign-owned multinationals to build nuclear power plants in Australia.

Assuming the Coalition can deliver 7 large-scale first-of-its-kind infrastructure projects on time and on budget in Australia, it will take 10 to 15 years to build them. In the meantime, Australia will continue burning coal and natural gas.

And all this for an energy source that costs substantially more per megawatt hour than renewables, coal, or gas.

@sunzu @dvdnet62 Oh come now. If there’s one thing Mozilla doesn’t need anyone’s help with, it’s shooting itself in the foot with its own gun.

Now excuse me, I have some Pocket articles to read on my Firefox OS phone…

@makeasnek On a broader note, I think possibly the best approach for decentralised, open-sourced web search might be an evolution on the SearXNG model.

At the top of the funnel, you have meta search engines that query and aggregate results from a number of smaller niche search engines.

The metasearch engines are open source, anyone with a spare server or a web hosting account can spin one up.

For some larger sites that are trustworthy, such as Wikipedia, the site’s own search engine might be what’s queried.

For the Fediverse and other similar federated networks, the query is fed through a trusted node on the network.

And then there’s a host of smaller niche search engines, which only crawl and index pages on a small number of websites vetted and curated by a human.

(Perhaps on a particular topic? Or a local library or university might curate a list of notable local websites?)

(Alternatively, it might be that a crawler for a web index like Curlie.org only crawls websites chosen by its topic moderators.)

In this manner, you could build a decent web search engine without needing the scale of Google or Microsoft.

@makeasnek @schizoidman YaCy is still around.

And https://searx.space/ is an open source metasearch search engine with many instances. (Try https://searx.be/ if you want to test it out.)

SearX/SearXNG allows you to aggregate results from a number of different search engines. You choose which ones, and they’re stored in your browser without setting up an account.

@sabreW4K3 Plume doesn’t appear to be active, unfortunately 🥺

There’s a notice on the official Join Plume website saying the former developers don’t have the time to maintain it anymore. Most of the former public instances now throw up errors of various kinds.

WriteFreely ( @writefreely ) is alive and well. I was seriously toying with the idea of setting up a blog through its main instance, which is called Write.as Professional. The sticking point for me was that the official on-platform monetisation tool (Coil) appears to be dead, and doesn’t support members-only posts (like Ghost).

Ghost, when federation goes live, looks like it will be the best option for my blog.

WordPress plus @pfefferle 's plugins is another great option, depending on what you want to use it for. (There’s no shortage of WP plugins!)

As for Lemmy, I could see a blogging-focussed front end being created for it, in the same way FediBB put a traditional message board front end on it, but one doesn’t appear to exist at present.

@Gurre @fuck_cars The road lobby’s big answer to the mess they’ve created with the Rozelle Interchange is to build a second road tunnel under Sydney Harbour.

Engineers at the inquiry into the Rozelle Interchange fiasco have already testified that will only create traffic jams elsewhere on the road network: https://aus.social/@ajsadauskas/112383313109173146

Just one more lane, bro!

@Baku @beeng Or Boronia.

Because when you say the name, you think of… Boronia.

@Ilandar Most major platforms are based in the US.

A DMCA request basically means the flagged content is taken down globally, not just for the US.

If the person who uploaded that content is not a US citizen, it still gets pulled.

@LostXOR @yogthos @NoIWontPickAName @technology There’s a few other steps they could potentially take.

The first would be to block any financial institution in the US, or that deals with the US, from sending any payments to or from ByteDance’s accounts.

They could also freeze any assets currently held by US financial institutions.

Second, if they can get Apple, Microsoft, and Google on board to help do their bidding, they could pull the ByteDance app from the Apple and Google Play app stores.

That includes removing it from any apps where it’s already installed. Globally.

They could also request that TikTok is removed from Google and Bing search results.

On top of this, they could do what you suggested, and ask ISPs and mobile carriers to block domains and IP addresses used by ByteDance.

And the US could apply diplomatic pressure on other countries to implement similar financial and ISP-level blocks and bans.

So, potentially, it’s also blocked in the UK, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Japan, and elsewhere.

@shirro @MHLoppy @australia The irony here is that the Digital Millennium Copyright Act is a piece of US legislation that is regularly used to take down content globally. Even when it’s posted by people who aren’t Americans.

@crispyflagstones @yogthos Someone is named @dansup who also created @pixelfed, the app is called Loops, you can follow his progress here: @loops

@shirro @tardigrada
Not just *would*, but *has*.

Here’s the “free speech absolutist” Elon Musk, in his own words, in 2023:

“The rules in India for what can appear on social media are quite strict, and we can’t go beyond the laws of a country … If we have a choice of either our people go to prison or we comply with the laws, we will comply with the laws.”

https://edition.cnn.com/2023/05/29/tech/elon-musk-twitter-government-takedown/index.html

@skribe @danbeeston @Salvo The other option would be to set up an official gov.au Mastodon instance, and give each government department, agency, and Parliamentarian an official account.

People can then have their choice of instance, whether that’s community run or private (e.g. Threads).

In the longer term, there might be scope for some other government institutions — particularly universities — to set up their own instances as well.

@Ilandar @quoll You mean like the US government’s Digital Millennium Copyright Act?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_Millennium_Copyright_Act

@quicken @tardigrada Really great point.

If Albo really wanted to send a message to Musk, here’s how he could do it:

1. Ask all federal Labor MPs to stop posting on X, and start posting on Mastodon.

2. Order all federal government departments and agencies to stop posting on X, and start posting on Mastodon.

3. Bribe the states to do the same.

"Hi Queensland, guess what? We just found a billion dollars under the couch for a shiny new Olympic stadium. Hi Tasmania, likewise for your new AFL stadium. And look Victoria, here’s a few billion for the airport rail link — we’ll cover the cost difference to put the airport station underground.

“But only if you direct all your MPs, departments, and agencies to switch to Mastodon.”

@Naich @ardi60 Totally agree.

I mean, Windows is just such a weird proprietary distro.

It doesn’t use the latest Linux kernel, or even a mainstream POSIX-compliant alternative like BSD. Instead, you have a strange CP/M-like monolithic kernel — I think they used to call it DOS — that’s been extended to behave more like VAX and MP/M.

It also doesn’t use either X11 or Wayland as a display manager. Instead, you have an incredibly unintuitive overblown WINE-like subsystem handling the display.

Because it doesn’t natively use Wayland or X11, you are limited in the desktop environments that you can use. There’s really limited support for KDE, despite the best efforts of volunteers.

Instead, there’s a buggy and error-prone proprietary window manager that ships with it by default. A bit like how Canonical tried to make Unity the default desktop for Ubuntu.

And confusingly, they’ve named that window manager Windows as well!

That window manager lacks many of the features an everyday Gnome or KDE user would expect out of the box.

It also doesn’t ship with a standard package manager, and most of the packages ship as x86 binaries, so installing software works differently to how an everyday Linux user would expect.

There’s also only one company maintaining all of these projects. It insists on closed source, and it has a long history of abandoning its projects.

And sure, if you’re a nerd who’s into alternative operating systems, toying with Windows can be fun.

But if your grandpa is used to Linux, frankly he’ll be utterly bamboozled by the Windows experience.

I’m sorry to be glib, because Windows does have some nice ideas.

But.

Windows on the desktop just isn’t ready for your average, everyday Linux user.

#Linux #Windows #PC

@motopazzo @pelespirit Google controls Android.

If that company had its act together, Hangouts would now basically be WhatsApp plus Slack combined.

Except deeply integrated into all of Google’s Apps.

The silver lining for consumers is we dodged a duopoly on messaging apps (Hangouts plus iMessage) because Google was too incompetent to pull it off.

@zerakith To be clear here, I am talking primarily here about corporate or organisational level here.

By net versus gross, I mean the difference between continuing to pollute, but “offsetting” that pollution, versus getting their gross pollution as close to zero as possible.

There’s many orgs and businesses out there claiming to have a plan to reach, or have reached, net zero (or net negative).

And in many cases, what they’re talking about is basically their direct emissions (scope one) and offsite energy (scope two). Not their supply chain (scope three).

And what they really mean is that they’ll continue to pollute, and just buy the cheapest carbon offsets available. In many cases, those cheapest available offsets are of dubious value.

That all sounds great in a press release.

But what’s a lot better is to continually measure and reduce gross emissions across scope one, two, and three, getting them as low as possible.

At a global system-wide level, I would argue we would be in a far better position if we had more businesses, organisations, and governments looking to achieve gross zero than net zero.

@ramble81 @BrikoX In Australia, if you work full time, your employer is required to deposit 11% of your income into a retirement savings account, known as a superannuation (or “super”) account.

Most people use a member-owned industry super fund, but you can also opt for a super account from a for-profit private financial institution (but the fees can tend to be higher).

In most cases, you can access the money in your super account once you turn 65 (but there are some conditions where you can get early access).

The Australian government also offers a (government provided) aged pension, but it’s quite low.

@mcSlibinas @etbe Worth noting that in the six months after Apple releases the thinnest, best iPhone ever each year, it would receive several million two-year-old iPhones as trade-ins.

So you could theoretically reflash several million units of nearly identical hardware with embedded Linux (or QNX), remove the batteries (and screens?).

You would then have several million near-identical motherboards ready for second life embedded in appliances or sensors.