• 10 Posts
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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 10th, 2023

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  • Is that including the r/Australia main sub? I didn’t go there very often because, well, it’s just going to parochial at best but it was somewhere I’d see the occasional top post now and then. I probably first ever visited it and spent any time there around 2013 and it was weird man. It was so hardcore right-wing and overly political that it was impossible to browse it functionally, if I actually waded in on anything explicitly political in nature it was a nightmare. I also even had weirdly innocuous stuff I said just straight up deleted by mods, I’d never up until that point had interaction with any reddit mods so that felt just crazy. That was an abiding and striking memory of the place that I found very odd indeed and weirdly out of step with the experience of reddit in general. One gets used to their bubble and Reddit had always felt like 20-30 something year old male liberal-ish tech enthusiasts so when you accidentally step in to a mixture of a Liberal voter retirees and the One Nation fan club it’s disconcerting. It meant that I was even less likely to ever really see or actively seek anything from that corner of Reddit.

    A few years later I returned there, I can’t remember when this would have been but I guess maybe 2018-ish? And then it’d gone a lot more normal. It’s a general forum and there for interaction so I try not to describe and analyse exclusively through the lenses of 2 dimensional political leanings but it’s useful here and I think it was accurate to say, it’d settled on a mainstreamish slightly left of centre type of crowd for most posts where politics featured. This was noted by the occasional disgruntled conservative who disliked having to be in relative minority, but nowhere near the vitriole of before. I always wondered if there’d been a cleaning of house or something, and how that managed to happen if so. I also always wondered where the previous majority of One Nation admirers had scurried off to. Having also quit Reddit a year ago, obviously I’ve not been back and between 2018 and last year I wouldn’t have been in r/australia a great deal anyway, but if it’s gone full Murdoch as your describing I wonder what weird forces were at work to bring it back to its former repellant mix of visitors and moderation policies.











  • It was brand new at the time come to think of it, it wasn’t released until 2008 so this more likely happened in 2009. The timing and the dramatic difference from stock to jailbroken is just too striking to have been a coincidence, although you might be alleviating some 15-16 year old guilt, that perhaps it triggered something. Still very worrying that a new and very expensive phone was triggered in to dysfunction from the process but maybe it was unlucky defective model. I definitely think that while it was jailbroken the problems were as a result of the OS but maybe the Cydia apps or something else were particularly draining and then that fast draining cycle triggered something else physically.




  • At least it’s broadly kind of informative in description of some of the categories before the ‘continued’ section. That may seem a low bar but I guess efforts to educate on this topic have set such a drastically low bar in decades past that it’s encouraging to see it lifted slightly off the floor. The categorisation scheme takes a bit of a nosedive when they get to marijuana which for some reason has its own category, also for all the drugs and categories they describe they make the mistake of failing to describe the effects that make people want to use the drugs in the first place. I can see why they might be hesitant to do that, you don’t want to actively encourage people to use the drugs, but I remember when getting similar lessons on the topic thinking that it was an obvious omission because it’s hardly like people took the drugs, repeatedly, because of how much they enjoyed the “impairment” especially as I has my own first hand experience running directly counter to it. The failure to address the positive sensations taking such drugs produces that have caused people throughout all of human history to seek drugs out, damages the credibility of the information since it clearly sought to discourage at the cost of objectivity.







  • Yes, but in the context of the comment to which I’m replying, I say scare quotes because the commenter has interpreted editorial intent behind the choice of how and where the punctuation has been used beyond simply establishing that the word is a direct quote.

    While I kind of disagree with what that intent is, hence my reply to them, I agree with the original commenter that there is reason to believe the quotation marks served more purpose in that headline than simple punctuation. As a quote, it’s an odd choice, given it’s a single word long, conveys nothing that the sentence without the marks couldn’t have said and used to complete a sentence that is otherwise entirely constructed by the author.

    I and the person to which I replied have interpreted this choice as a form of editorial commentary upon the reasoning behind the policy being discussed in the article. In the original commenter’s case they’re taking it to mean that the article’s author thinks the premise of iphones having security problems is so absurd that the people claiming such must be crazy (which the commenter obviously does not agree with). I don’t take from it such an extreme implication, although I do read some kind of implied commentary and given that this security concern has nuance to it that a headline would struggle to convey, I have suggested perhaps that that punctuation is serving to subvert or undermine the supposed security concern in some way. When that writing technique is employed, the punctuation is referred to as scare quotes.

    Or you know, we’re just reading tea leaves and it’s just a one word quote, but there’s the rationale for you at least so you know why I chose that term specifically.


  • I don’t know too much about the relative security chops of different smartphones, however in terms of what’s actually in this article it seems reasonable for the government department to consider the iphone a security issue within the context where it presents this particular problem and for the reason why it presents that problem for them. However, it does also seem like the very reason this is a security concern in this more narrow context is arguably a better security option in almost every other context so I wonder if that’s what they were getting at with the scare quotes.

    In the case of defence personnel entering secure locations they say the iphone represents a threat because it doesn’t allow 3rd party apps to control inherent functions of the device, so the defence force cannot use an app they developed which would presumably do things like disable all voice recording abilities so they can be sure that people walking around secure locations aren’t unknowingly or deliberately transmitting or recording conversations and sensitive information. I can see why this would be a problem for them, however if you don’t work in defence and are an average consumer, the fact that random 3rd party developers can not do exactly what such an app would be designed to prevent sounds like a more secure way to operate. In that scenario, apps are incapable of controlling inherent functions of the phone unless they’re developed by Apple. Obviously this leaves the door just as open for untrustworthy behaviour from Apple themselves, but if you’ve chosen to trust them, you can at least be sure that no one else is controlling your device in ways you wouldn’t want, unless the device is somehow hacked but in that case, well it really doesn’t matter which phone it is because somehow it’s security has been circumvented and at that point all bets are off.



  • I’m sure to make their point the authors chose some of the more egregious examples as stills for this article but godamn that really does look like shit. What were they thinking? It doesn’t even sound like a cost saving measure if the original negatives exist. The purported reasoning around it not being about the condition of the negatives but instead an opoortunity to improve on the original doesn’t make sense because you’d at the very least want to start with the original negs before “improving” the film and this phrasing makes it sound like they didn’t and considering the still in this article, it looks like they didn’t either. The way they describe the use of the technology maybe could be a net positive at some point, but this sure doesn’t seem to be an example of that. Did they just not have access to the negs or something? Was there some bizarre licensing arrangement that prevented them from doing this the traditional way? This looks so much more like an elaborate working around an obstacle rather than an even better than ideal value add kind of move. Like, if somehow all prints and copies of the film in existence disappeared except an old VHS this would be an admirable and impressive way to get to from that to a UHD release, but as a first choice option it seems like madness. It seems pointless to do this now until the tech is literally a superior result to a new remaster from the original film.


  • I think there has to be at least little more to this than that. There’s some complicated implications taking this to logical extremes, what of the adult industry for example? But really, it’s hardly a stretch to say the whole theme around which these cafes operate is degrading. Typically cafe work doesn’t require a worker to behave or be encouraged to be objectified in this way and in a normal cafe context, most of the whole maid cafe schtick would be considered pretty inappropriate.