Meta announces major changes to content moderation polices
9 January 2025
Justine Calma, writing for The Verge:
Meta is essentially shifting responsibility to users to weed out lies on Facebook, Instagram, Threads, and WhatsApp, raising fears that it’ll be easier to spread misleading information about climate change, clean energy, public health risks, and communities often targeted with violence.
The policy revision seemed surprising initially, but less so as I read more. I wonder why they’ve decided to make these changes, at, of all times, now?
Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg also says he wants to allow more political discussion, although he refers to it as civic content, on the company’s platforms, while working to keep the communities friendly and positive. Does this mean political discourse, between people on opposing ends of the political spectrum, will be courteous and respectful?
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current affairs, politics, social media, social networks
Summer time forming La Nina possibly coming to Australia
8 January 2025
Tom Saunders writing for ABC News:
Your average La Niña forms in winter, peaks in late spring, then gradually weakens through summer. However, the current edition has not played by the rule book — for only the second time in 75 years, its onset has arrived in the middle of summer.
This is something I’ve been wondering about. Over the summer months especially, I keep a close eye on the ten-day weather forecast. I’m looking out for upcoming days where temperatures are expected to exceed thirty-degrees Celsius. This because we do not have air-conditioning in either of the places we stay at. So we plan we be elsewhere, where possible, on super warm days.
But, in scanning the ten day forecast for our part of the world, there is — as of when I write this — not a single day expected to reach thirty-degrees. The nearest is twenty-eight degrees. Weird, considering January is the warmest month of the year where we are. A surprise La Niña event, kind of, explains the generally lower temperatures.
To be clear though, La Niña, and El Niño weather events do not really influence temperature: they are more indicators of rainfall levels in the northern and eastern regions of Australia. Higher in the case of La Niña, lower for El Niño. But, higher rainfall usually means more cloud cover, which will in part moderate temperatures.
I’m all for not-so-warm summers. Temperatures in the high-twenties aren’t too bad. And providing the dewpoint level stays below twenty degrees, humidity levels aren’t too oppressive either. But I’m not so sure about the accompanying rains, which can result in extreme flooding in some areas.
A La Niña weather event is yet to be officially declared, while the Australian Bureau of Meteorology has moved away making such announcements (probably because people like me write blog posts like this), so we’ll have to wait and see. La Niña, and El Niño weather events however are one of sometimes several concurrent phenomena that influence weather across Australia, meaning certain sorts of weather cannot always be attributed to one particular event.
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Australia, climate, environment, weather
Rambles.NET, a webzine founded by Tom Knapp in 1999
6 January 2025
Rambles.NET is an online magazine founded by Tom Knapp in 1999, and still going strong over twenty-five later. Knapp himself continues to contribute. Rambles is another example of Indie Web in its original inception; I think a Facebook page is the only hint of social media present.
I had a crack at publishing a webzine way back in the day, something called channel static (Internet Archive link). Notice my ever-present use of lower case styling for proper website names.
Like all good webzines of the day (and today), Rambles published articles on a wide range of topics, including music, film, literature, pop culture, nature, history, science, religion, steampunk, and the supernatural. Check out the impressive list of past and present contributors.
In a way, I always considered disassociated to be more a webzine than anything else. Granted, only with one writer, and very much on and off in the twenty-five plus years this website has been online.
Rambles has no RSS feed that I can see, so you’ll have to read it the old fashion way: with a browser.
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history, IndieWeb, publishing, self publishing, writing
IndieWeb makes all of us property owners online
6 January 2025
American engineer and product manager Den Delimarsky offers another way of looking at the core IndieWeb tenets of owning your own website domain, and owning your own content. See yourself as a property owner, rather than a renter.
If any of your online presence is on social media channels, you’re leasing the space, you don’t own it. The property owner could give you your marching orders at any time.
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Australia, land of the most expensive passport in the world
2 January 2025
From yesterday, 1 January 2025, the price of a ten-year Australian passport rose to four-hundred-and-twelve Australian dollars. That’s the cost of thirty-five pints of Victoria Bitter at the local pub.
Happy New Year.
As a comparison, the new price converts to a little over two-hundred-and-fifty dollars American, a little under two-hundred-and-fifty Euros, and about two-hundred British pounds. However, the hefty price tag is justified, according to a spokesperson for the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade, who notes that the Australian passport is “a high-quality travel document”:
“The Australian passport is respected internationally as a high-quality travel document. It has a high level of technological sophistication, backed by rigorous anti-fraud measures, which ensures its integrity,” the spokesperson said in a statement. “This is a key reason why Australian passport holders receive visa-free access to over 180 countries.”
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Storing digital data for one hundred years: how is this possible?
2 January 2025
Maxwell Neely-Cohen, writing for Harvard Law School’s Library Innovation Lab:
If you, right now, had the goal of digitally storing something for 100 years, how should you even begin to think about making that happen? How should the bits in your stewardship be stored with such a target in mind? How do our methods and platforms look when considered under the harsh unknowns of a century?
It’s a longer piece, which goes to show how deceptively simple the question is. But how about the RAMAC 305 system, a computer developed by IBM in the 1950’s? This was the first commercial computer to use a moving head hard disk drive, called a 350 storage unit. But the RAMAC 305 was just too big, and heavy, to have much commercial appeal, and production was discontinued.
However, the 350 was capable of storing data for the long term. The real long term. When one of the 350 storage units was restored in 2002, Joe Feng, who was part of the restoration team, said “the RAMAC data is thermodynamically stable for longer than the expected lifetime of the universe.”
I think it’s time to somehow bring back the 350 storage unit.
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Voting open for the 2024 Triple J Hottest 100 music poll
2 January 2025
The annual Hottest 100 countdown is part and parcel of the Australian music scene. Hosted by Australian indie radio station Triple J, since 1978, the poll gives listeners the chance to vote for their favourite music of the previous year.
The countdown itself takes place on Saturday 25 January 2025. I don’t always listen in on the day, in fact I’ve struggled to listen to much radio this last year, but the chart is great for new music discovery.
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Australian music, entertainment, music, radio
Gravastars and black holes, a weird cosmic double act
2 January 2025
The concept of gravastars (or gravitational vacuum stars) is a fascinating alternative to the idea of black holes, although if their presence were ever proved, they would not rule out the existence of black holes. Proposed by Pawel O. Mazur and Emil Mottola some twenty years ago, these objects are consistent with Albert Einstein’s general theory of relativity.
Gravastars, like black holes, form in the aftermath of some supernova explosions. They are relatively small, their size might be similar to London, capital of the United Kingdom.
In terms of appearance they are black, and a little like balloons, having an extremely thin shell, consisting of matter scientists do not yet understand. Their interior is filled with a vacuum, or dark energy, bustling to break out, but unable to do so. Gravastars sound like an incredible phenomena, but in a universe some think is devoid of dark energy, I wonder if they could actually be present.
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Albert Einstein, astronomy, physics, science
Favourite monospaced font for coding, do people have such a thing?
31 December 2024
Code is code, what difference does the font you choose in whatever app you use for coding possibly make? As long as the code works as intended, what does appearance have to do with it?
But the conversation I found on the topic — which in fact started months ago — actually relates to a writer’s favourite font for writing — as in copy, not code — which is kind of intriguing.
Intriguing, because I’ve never given the matter the slightest thought. Obviously on my website I have chosen a particular display font, but when it comes to drafting my posts, no, I pretty much use one of the fonts the app offers.
These fonts are certainly not monospaced fonts (for all their virtues), which is where the discussion seemed to later turn. I write all my posts, together with the necessary HTML tags, on a word processing app, and when ready, copy and paste the text into WordPress.
I know I’m missing something using this process, because I read about the way other people use (what sounds like) a number of apps, before their blog post drafts are fed into their blog publishing software. But when it comes to a favourite font for drafting, whatever that might be, there isn’t one.
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The ten best novels of the twenty-first century to date
31 December 2024
Literary writers at The Sydney Morning Herald canvassed critics, editors, and writers, including Jane Sullivan, David Free, Gyan Yankovich, and Beejay Silcox, to determine the best ten books of this century, or the last twenty-five years.
Producing such a small list from a relatively long time frame, will doubtless generate discussion.
Anyway, Praiseworthy by Alexis Wright (winner of both the Stellar, and Miles Franklin, literary awards in 2024), along with Conversations with Friends by Sally Rooney, My Brilliant Friend by Elena Ferrante, and Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro, are among notable — to me, that is — inclusions.
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