vk6flab

So .. the US Congress can just summon a citizen from a different country .. and the citizen is compelled to .. do what exactly?

In other news, Aussie Influencer discovers that the UK has an even stricter social media ban..

I've been washing clothes for many decades and although I was also taught to turn some clothes inside out, I've never noticed any difference if I didn't and these days I'll often wash with them oriented normally, mainly because that's how I prefer to hang them in the cupboard or fold them into drawers and turning them when wet or after taking them off the line or out of the drier makes the whole process even more tedious than it already is.

Repeat after me .. AI is Assumed Intelligence, there is no reasoning, no semantic anything, it's statistics the whole way down. An LLM does not "understand", it does not "think", nor does it have "concepts".

It's autocorrect on steroids, one "token" at a time, a perfect example of "sufficiently advanced technology indistinguishable from magic".

If it's feeding you something you don't like or disagree with, take it up with the billionaire charlatans destroying the global economy and our environment whilst running the crawlers gobbling up every website they can hit.

It means your coffee pod machine just came online and the coffee is currently spewing from the spout .. probably.

In Australia:

https://reebelo.com.au/

I wonder what the criteria are to define what an artist is, or what requirements are needed to qualify for such assistance.

Here it's a shopping chain I rarely go to. The vouchers don't work on the self checkout and the checkout staff isn't trained on their use, requiring the store manager to intervene if the balance is negative, it's an absolute shitshow.

I'm fairly certain that it's self regulated, so there's no oversight and the politicians can point at it and show off how much they're doing for the environment.

Also, trolleys at the bottle return require a coin to unlock them, but there's no money in the facility. I've not had physical money on me for at least a decade.

We did this in Australia.

The return stations are pretty much run by one supermarket chain who do their damnedest to make it hard to get paid in actual money, giving you either a store credit voucher with an expiry date, or requiring that you provide substantial personal details and they'll deposit the amount in your bank account.

We stopped collecting bottles.

It's likely not about tennis, unless the CEO is a dick, it's about an excuse to meet you and evaluate how you are as a human being.

Unless there's a specific dress code requirement, I'd arrive in comfortable clothes, smart casual, clean and with a smile on my face.

When you're asked about your lack of racket I'd point out that not only have you never played, you didn't think it would be prudent to spend money on gear you know nothing about.

Remember, this is about people, not about hitting a tennis ball.

The comments here seem to be missing a salient point.

In order to determine if a user is under 16, you need to determine that for every single user .. including you!

This means that your personal data will be harvested in order to determine if you are over 16 or not.

From memory they use Cisco.

In 2023, apparently Optus attempted to blame them for the default values on the hardware (IIRC the size of the routing table), which several people pointed out was blatantly absurd. Apparently Optus also didn't follow up with a welfare check of each of the failed calls in their network. Apparently they had to physically visit each affected router across the entire network. They were fined. I'm not aware of any other penalties.

Now, in 2025, it appears that Optus didn't follow their own processes, ignored several early customer reports about emergency calls not working, didn't inform the communications minister, under reported the impact, didn't inform customers and didn't make any announcements until it was fixed.

In 2023 I couldn't help but wonder if the staff at Optus had ever heard of testing. Today it seems obvious .. to me .. that they don't.

Disclaimer: Note that whilst I'm an ICT professional, I don't have any direct knowledge of the internals of these incidents and I'm relying on memory of reports and commentary and Wikipedia, I have also never played with Cisco routers, so YMMV. I also note that I haven't been an Optus customer for about a decade, and my own experience with their ICT systems as a customer over fifteen years or so has been .. let's call it "suboptimal".