The epistemology of software quality – Increment: Teams: Work-life balance and wellness impact us in a subtler way than technical practices do. It’s easy to point to a bug and say, “This couldn’t have happened in Rust.” It’s a lot harder to point to a bug and say, “This wouldn’t have happened if the programmer wasn’t stressed out and sleep-deprived.” There’s no feedback loop that pushes developers away from too much stress and too little sleep.
John Deere Promised Farmers It Would Make Tractors Easy to Repair. It Lied.: It is now three years later. The agreement is supposed to be in effect. No right to repair legislation has been passed. Deere, the dealers, and the manufacturers got what they wanted. And, yet, farmers are still struggling to get anything promised in the agreement. [...] Like cars, farm equipment is increasingly controlled by an elaborate and complex web of computer sensors. When one of these sensors notices an error, no matter how small or serious, it puts the machine into “limp mode.” This allows farmers to move the machine slowly but not operate it fully. When the problem is diagnosed and repaired, the error code is cleared and the machine can keep working. The problem is that farmers often don’t have access to the diagnostic software and repair tools they need to make the fix.
Australian coffee growers get innovative to encourage consumers to drink local - ABC News. A bit heavy handed to put it on consumers, since it's expensive and hard to find. Also when it can only supply about 0.5% of the market in Australia, the cost argument is not just about labour it's about economy of scale. But we should be growing that market all the same.
Bitcoin is a mouth hungry for fossil fuels – Ketan Joshi: The implication with much of the focus on Bitcoin's energy consumption is simply that it isn't worth it. It is hard to disagree, unless you are literally invested in it. There is absolutely no other industry that consumes this much power while only giving back to society sea-lioning men on Twitter. [...] If Bitcoin mining is consuming ‘stranded’ renewables, it is holding back a more efficient grid and slowing down fossil displacement. If it’s consuming ‘stranded’ fossil fuels, it’s creating greenhouse gas emissions, and causing climate change (which is real, you know). There is no worse time in history for an energy-hungry, low-benefit industry that has a specific thirst for fossil fuels, underneath layers of greenwashing. Tomorrow will be an even worse time, as will the day after.
The children of gods: how power works in Australia: It's often said that the eye-watering fees paid for places at some of Australia's elite non-government schools are an investment in a child's future social network, far more than in their academic future. ...
And when you have leaders drawn from a very narrow, privileged background, that has serious ramifications – both in terms of understanding of sexual consent and beyond.
...
Grattan’s chief executive, Danielle Wood, can cite innumerable examples, from childcare to superannuation to homelessness, where women are relatively disadvantaged.
Anger management: study suggests lack of fans has made players calmer | Football | The Guardian: On average, the study found that there were 19.5% fewer “emotional” incidents, such as arguments or altercations, in matches without fans. The results also showed a stark decline in interactions involving the referee. The lack of crowd also reduced the "home advantage" and changed how many goals were scored.
US police three times as likely to use force against leftwing protesters, data finds | US policing | The Guardian: The researchers found that the vast majority of the thousands of protests across the United States in the past year have been peaceful, and that most protests by both the left and the right were not met with any violent response by law enforcement. [...] The Guardian compared the percentage of all demonstrations organized by leftwing and rightwing groups that resulted in the use of force by law enforcement. For leftwing demonstrations, that was about 4.7% of protests, while for rightwing demonstrations, it was about 1.4%, meaning law enforcement was about three times more likely to use force against leftwing versus rightwing protests.
3D printed building that reached full certification in Germany (note - video sponsored by the builders, so you know, grain of salt with the big claim)
Cyberpunk 2077: how 2020's biggest video game launch turned into a shambles | Games | The Guardian: Cyberpunk 2077’s creators have issued a series of apologies and promises to make things right. It might seem impossible that a game this prominent, that’s been in development for this long, with such a lot of money behind it (game studio owners I’ve spoken to estimate that it cost more than £300m to make), could launch in such a state. It certainly points towards problems at CD Projekt, whose staff must surely be exhausted after months of overtime during the pandemic; the game had already been delayed twice since April to allow more time for improvement. Anyone who works in software can tell you how this tune goes. There was a deadline, it wasn't ready, they launched anyway.
Robin Williams's widow: 'There were so many misunderstandings about what had happened to him' | Film | The Guardian: After Williams died, it was widely reported that he had been suffering from depression, alcoholism, or both. To Schneider, this shows “how we as a culture don't have the vocabulary to discuss brain disease in the way we do about depression. Depression is a symptom of LBD and it's not about psychology – it's rooted in neurology. His brain was falling apart.”
Now in YouTube and Spotify flavours, noting each platform is missing a different track.
Background if you care:
Play Dead - Björk. I discovered that this track was a bonus track added to the Australian re-press of Debut. Despite it also being the third single released 'off the album', when I shared this on teh socialz a few people said they'd never heard it. It amazes me that this wasn't part of the original album, it fits so well. Though I like The Anchor Song, it's a challenging track to finish an album. Play Dead though... those soaring strings, big vocals and deceptively tricky drum line... what a finish. It's one of my Bjork favourites and I'm glad I got the allegedly obscure edition of Debut that included it.
Pneuma - TOOL. Tool turned out to be my only gig of the year, thanks to the covid lockdown. First time I had properly seen them live - despite seeing them at Alternative Nation in '95, I knew them but wasn't a fan yet so that didn't really count. It was a great gig :)
Catch 22 - Butterfingers. New album with an ecclectic mix, oddly this was the track I got stuck in my head the most (it was going to be this or Dem Billz for the mix tape).
(not in youtube playlist) The House - Mr.B The Gentleman Rhymer. Mr.B dropped perhaps the most-2020 album of 2020 with A Very Modern Existential Crisis. Songs of isolation, garden envy and the social minefield of Zoom calls.
Inside - Moby. Having my own modern existential crisis, stuck at home, I went back to a fair bit of older music. This one's almost meditative.
Skyhigh - Yan Cook. Yan Cook was both a new discovery and my most-listened artist of the year. Drawn in by some cool tutorial videos he's made about music production, I listened a live set mix and I just haven't enjoyed a mix as much as that in a long time. So this track stands in for a whole lot more.
The Business - Tiësto. Not sure how I ran into this one, think it was a YouTube or Spotify recommendation/autoplay. At a tiny 2:41 it feels like a sketch for a full track that got cut off early, but the goofy film clip (zombie breakup song? why not I guess) and weird vocals got stuck in my head so here it is.
Avenue - Paul Van Dyk. Another one from the vaults, turns out I'll never tire of Out There And Back (2000). I love the big sweeping lines of this track, but most of all the chirpy/bleepy bridge at around 4:15.
Get Smart - Melbourne Ska Orchestra. Another YouTube discovery. It's just fun. I mean, why NOT do a ska version of the Get Smart theme?
Sad but True - The Hu. I think we can all agree now that Metallica just wasn't Mongolian enough.
Mad Poet - Phunkey Rhythm Doctor aka Cari Lekebusch. Somewhere along the line I got into a big 90s techno kick. As in, the actual genre Techno and not just 'some people call all electronic music techno'. A lot of this stuff is tenuously hanging on thanks to perilously-copyright-infringing YouTube rips of obscure limited-press vinyl. Some stuff is in Spotify/iTunes/Bandcamp though. Also I figure 14-20min tracks don't work well in the middle of the mix tape. So this is another kind of 'stand in' track for a whole lot of other stuff.
(not in spotify playlist) Goth Night (2020 mix) - Cari Lekebusch, Krister Linder. Another Lekebusch track, although I didn't know it when I first picked these two so it stays in ;)
The Blame Game - HVOB. This is used heavily in the soundtrack for Pikes Peak: On The Edge. So this track got in my head alongside images of cars ripping up the mountain, and it all just works together. Plus it's a weird crossover style of electronic and guitar, so I actually thought it was parts of two different songs until I gave this a listen. When you hit the change at 2:30 you can probably see why.
The Mr.B album isn't on YouTube, but you can listen on Bandcamp and Spotify:
The Yan Cook mix - my reaction to this is a bit complicated. Somewhere between wanting to dance in a very dark room, and feeling like I'm wrapped up in a warm blanket.
Whole playlist of 90s techno:
Honourable mentions to Leo's cover of Walk Like An Egyptian...
...and to The Police, think I need to spend some more time on their back catalogue.
Where the bloody hell is it? Did Scott Morrison lie about the report that saved his bacon at Tourism Australia? - Michael West: Scott Morrison was sacked as managing director of Tourism Australia in 2006 with a year left to run on his contract. For 14 years the reason for the sacking has remained one of the best kept secrets in Parliament. Now, FoI documents accessed by Jommy Tee reveal the PM either lied about a critical probity report, or numerous government departments and agencies are so incompetent that all of them – together, coincidentally, jointly and severally – lost it.
NSW Police admit they 'incorrectly' let German nationals fly to Melbourne without quarantining - ABC News: Questions have been raised about how the two travellers were able to bypass New South Wales' hotel quarantine measures, and how they managed to board a Melbourne-bound domestic flight. NSW Police said the pair — identified as a 53-year-old woman and a 15-year-old boy — were initially directed to board a bus to hotel quarantine after being screened by NSW Health.
Fraser Island fire worsens as QFES increase warning level to 'leave immediately' for Happy Valley village - ABC News: The blaze was sparked by an illegal campfire seven weeks ago and has blackened roughly half of Fraser Island. ... More than 80,000 hectares of land have been burnt so far and as of Wednesday last week 1,000,000 litres of water had been used in aerial firefighting efforts. The fact we can't put out an early season fire on Fraser in seven weeks does not bode well.
'Fox News sucks!': Trump supporters decry channel as it declares Biden wins | Media | The Guardian: Trump supporters across the United States increasingly say they no longer trust Fox News, the Rupert Murdoch-owned TV network that has acted as one of the president's staunchest allies in past years. [...] Others said they felt Fox was “turning on” the president and said that they believed several Fox reporters had gone “full lefty”. Riiiight.
Tom Morello's endless eyeroll at Trump dipshits missing the point of Rage songs rolls on: the incongruity of watching a pair of dipshits dance around in Blue Lives Matter kit while lyrics like “Some of those that work forces are the same that burn crosses” blare in the background really is a perfect encapsulation of this particular moment in American history—rolling eyes, lurching stomachs, and all. They really, REALLY, haven't listened to all the lyrics.
NSW Government bought land for three times its value for light rail project - ABC News: A joint investigation by 7.30 and The Sydney Morning Herald into the Government's purchase of the highly contaminated land can reveal it came after an urgent "out of session" meeting of senior government officials, which resulted in the reversal of earlier plans to get the landowner to pay to remediate the site or seek compulsory acquisition of the property.
Productivity Commission report into effect of mental illness reveals $220 billion annual cost to economy - ABC News: The commission's recommendations extend beyond just the health system and into schools, workplaces and the housing and justice sectors. It suggests its recommended changes could save governments as much as $20 billion a year, if they invested up to $4.2 billion a year. Of course, being a Morrison announcement, no actual funding was committed and no actual action taken. They just announced the report.
Are you suffering from 'COVID brain'? You're not alone: It's called brain fog – or, as some have colloquially nicknamed it, 'COVID brain' – and, thanks to the largely unprecedented levels of stress so many of us are experiencing right now, it's popping up everywhere.
Too much candy: Man dies from eating bags of black licorice: The problem is glycyrrhizic acid, found in black licorice and in many other foods and dietary supplements containing licorice root extract. It can cause dangerously low potassium and imbalances in other minerals called electrolytes.
Activists Turn Facial Recognition Tools Against the Police - The New York Times: Law enforcement has used facial recognition to identify criminals, using photos from government databases or, through a company called Clearview AI, from the public internet. But now activists around the world are turning the process around and developing tools that can unmask law enforcement in cases of misconduct.
Sydney's Martin Place metro station caverns officially complete - ABC News: "I think it's amazing to think anyone walking up and down Martin Place would be completely clueless as to the caverns that are below their feet. Some 23 metres below ground," NSW Transport Minister Andrew Constance said. "Hardly anyone's noticed." As someone who works at Martin Place I can say this is complete and utter bullshit, the noise was colossal and relentless. We fucking noticed.
Sydney businessman given travel permit to pick up a luxury yacht: A Sydney businessman with connections to the Morrison government was granted an exemption from the travel ban to pick up a new luxury yacht in Europe. ... Official grounds for an exemption to the travel ban include urgent personal business, compassionate reasons, travel for critical business or industry, travel in the public interest, and the provision of humanitarian or medical aid.
Burning bush, melting Arctic, a deadly virus: nobody said the end times would be boring | Australia news | The Guardian: Sometimes your luck just runs out, and a hard truth of human nature is that we really only care about what's close. White Australia was a lucky country for so long, because the gift of distance was history's lack of interest in our affairs. But that absence of concern for a tiny outpost, removed from the centre of things, can just as easily turn to indifference and genuine disdain when fate turn against us. From afar it was possible to see with the cold objectivity of foreigners just how unflattering a picture we made for any who cared to look. An immensely privileged dominion occupied by a small number of deeply selfish people, suddenly confronted with the consequences of inaction. For a few months there you could finally see the world accelerating towards the existential discontinuity of irreversible, devastating climate change. No more projections. No theories. No modelling or arcane math. The future had arrived. It was not evenly distributed. It had exploded into the real on the eastern edge of the Australian continent. Meanwhile, sitting on a beach in Hawaii was our doughy, aggressively know-nothing prime minister, infamous for carrying a big lump of coal on to the floor of parliament and fondling the same with the puckish joy of a man-sized Billy Bunter in possession of a large, unexpected jam donut. To the beach he went, while his land and his people hurtled towards the burning pit.
Is Plastic Recycling A Lie? Oil Companies Touted Recycling To Sell More Plastic : NPR: Industry documents from this time show that just a couple of years earlier, starting in 1989, oil and plastics executives began a quiet campaign to lobby almost 40 states to mandate that the symbol appear on all plastic — even if there was no way to economically recycle it. Some environmentalists also supported the symbol, thinking it would help separate plastic. Smith said what it did was make all plastic look recyclable.
Killer whales launch 'orchestrated' attacks on sailing boats | Marine life | The Guardian: The Spanish maritime authorities warned vessels to “keep a distance”. But reports from sailors around the strait throughout July and August suggest this may be difficult – at least one pod appears to be pursuing boats in behaviour that scientists agree is “highly unusual” and “concerning”. It is too early to understand what is going on, but it might indicate stress in a population that is endangered.
Microsoft's underwater data centre resurfaces after two years - BBC News: When the container was hauled off the seabed around half a mile offshore after being placed there in May 2018, just eight out of the 855 servers on board had failed.
[...]
The team is speculating that the greater reliability may be connected to the fact that there were no humans on board, and that nitrogen rather than oxygen was pumped into the capsule.
COVID-19 Melbourne: Big lie about lockdown under Daniel Andrews: There is far too much talk about how disgruntled the people of Melbourne have become after months of monotony. There is far too much focus on the few who try to bend the rules with a breach of curfew, a refusal to mask up, a cheeky drive to a mate's place. And there is far too much legitimacy afforded to the few hundred protesters who clash with police in scenes that are then shared around the country and make headlines around the world. What is left is a notion that Victorians are impatient, unwilling participants in a plan to keep themselves safe from a deadly virus. It is an unfair characterisation of what the majority of Victorians are doing, and have done, since they were thrust back into lockdown for a second time. The truth is that millions of Victorians are doing the right thing.
E-cigarettes to become available as prescription-only items in Australia from June 2021 | Smoking | The Guardian: The Therapeutic Goods Administration (TGA) announced its interim decision to reclassify nicotine as a prescription-only medication, meaning nicotine for use in e-cigarettes, and e-juice containing nicotine, would become prescription-only from June 2021.
The changes would also effect heat-not-burn tobacco products, chewing tobacco, snuff and other novel nicotine products. ... E-cigarettes are not proven as a first-line treatment for smoking cessation. According to the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, there is some evidence that young people may be attracted to the products, and may go on to use tobacco products.
COVIDSafe has been downloaded by millions, but yet to identify contacts (and authorities say that's a good thing) - ABC News: While more than 6 million Australians have downloaded it, this is still short of the 40 per cent of the population target first discussed as part of the Government's plans to ease lockdown restrictions. That goal has since fallen by the wayside. Acting Secretary for Health Caroline Edwards told a Senate committee investigating the COVID-19 pandemic response in May that there was no download target at all. Adding "lied about the download target" to the list of things the government lied about regarding the app.
Edit - since this one was published, the app was used to locate two contacts. Manual tracing found several hundred in the same incident, but hey at least it wasn't zero for the app.
No timeline for when $25k HomeBuilder scheme will be up and running - ABC News: The Federal Government launched the HomeBuilder scheme on June 4, but just over three weeks later it is still not operational and there is no start date in sight. Each state and territory is responsible for administering the scheme and, according to Treasury, a national partnership agreement is still being negotiated. Yep, they announced a scheme that can't go ahead yet.
How Many Hot Dogs Can Someone Eat In 10 Minutes? - The New York Times: Despite using the same hot dogs and buns for 40 years, the Nathan's contest has seen performance among elite competitors rise by about 700 percent. “No other sport comes close to that when records are measured in a 100-plus year span,” Dr. Smoliga said.
Donald Trump suggests delay to 2020 US presidential election - BBC News: Mr Trump appears to be doing everything in his power to undermine the credibility of November's vote, in which a record number of Americans are predicted to rely on mail-in voting to avoid the risk of exposure to the coronavirus. He's repeatedly made false and misleading claims about the reliability of the mail balloting and suggested broad conspiracy theories. Critics warn that he could be laying the groundwork for contesting the results - although the purpose may be simply to give him a scapegoat if he loses. His tweet could also be an attempt to divert attention away from the truly dismal second-quarter economic numbers just released.
James Murdoch's resignation is the result of News Corp's increasing shift to the right – not just on climate: James left London for New York and his promised promotion in the company. But his reputation was in tatters, even with other members of the family. His public persona at this time consisted of neo-liberal politics and corporate ruthlessness, with his actions untroubled by ethical considerations.
Yet, now, this corporate and family loyalist has resigned from his last official position with the company. James has long seen the urgency of combating global warming. As early as 2006, largely at his urging, Rupert also embraced the issue. Rupert soon retreated from the cause, but James's commitment continued.
Rupert's conversion had surprisingly little impact on the company's journalism.