Although I agree that other forms of transport should be considered, I genuinely can’t figure out how either a conveyor belt or autonomous carts could be better than a freight train. Both for battling decreasing manpower and for intercity freight transport.

I think both proposed ideas are better for short-distance transport, with conveyor belts better for a single direction of movement in indoor (or as the article mentions, tunnel) conditions (must be kept clear of debris in order to run, more so than track which only needs to be cleared before the next train) and autonomous carts better for transporting small packages between many origins and destinations (eg. a warehouse or maybe delivery service).

Conveyor belts might also require much more maintenance, as moving parts would be all along the length of the belt.

I think this is a false dichotomy and an over-simplistic view of the game industry. Remember, there are far more indie games than AAA, so of course they’re going to earn less, there are more to choose from. Plus, if an indie game does too well, it often stops being indie. Most of the money for AAA games is from the same few people paying thousands of dollars in many small purchases too.

Anecdotally, most people’s favourite games are, or at least started off as indie games. However, most people’s least favourite are going to be indie as well. I think the thing with indie games is that they vary a lot, often exploring things that many publishers simply aren’t willing to. This allows them to find and fill a niche perfectly that a publisher can never fill. The main thing is that people see this and start making their own indie games, leading to market saturation pretty quickly.

Plus, the vast majority of people still don’t have 4K monitors. It may be the future, but you seem to think that’s where we are now when we just aren’t.

I quite like many games with “poor” graphics. Perhaps not exclusively, but you’re seriously missing out if you only go for realistic-looking or detailed games. Give a few of those indie games a try, you might be surprised.

Edit: Oh, and terminal games are cool! Usually not very performant though.

They’ve been working on GIMP 3.0 for over a decade, which has non-destructive editing, as well as an upgrade to the UI toolkit (although actual UI changes are still to-do). They don’t want it to be this way, development has just been insanely slow. Mostly due to lack of developers and donations, although that has been changing recently.

They planned to have GIMP 3.0 out by May, but with so many delays it might be a few months yet.

I think that’s more what the people excited about AI think it it is, many of the people who fear it don’t really fear its intelligence as much as how it’s abused. Personally, I don’t even like the machine learning algorithms in social media, despite them being a thing for a long time now.

I thought some Wayland compositors already supported 10 bit per channel colour?

I think it should be clarified that GIMP’s structure isn’t able to make use of donations to GIMP as a single entity. Edit: or at least wasn’t, I hear they can now.

I agree that Krita is more promising though, I switched to Krita years ago and have never looked back.

From what I understand, GIMP fell behind because it refused corporate donations while Krita accepted them. This lead to GIMP reducing in scope as the 1-3 part-time* developers (at least when I last really looked into it) realised they’d never catch up, leading to people donating less as they weren’t satisfied with GIMP’s simultaneous underpromising and underdelivering. Meanwhile Krita managed to receive enough money to hire a team of full time developers for several years, leading to better software, to more donations. It’s like the poverty trap, but with software.

• Edit: part-time isn’t the right word, more like casual

I also forgot: houses became more expensive during the majority of the pandemic, while borders were closed. There was a short period with a fall, but only because they shot up sharply in the beginning.

I don’t buy the idea that immigration is the cause of the housing crisis, any more than young Australians buying their first home. I’m not even sure if it’s the investors either. They all may be sources of demand pressure, but I think there’s a sort of blockage in Australia’s housing market, and I would pin the blame of high housing costs on that blockage.

We live in an economy that assumes that the basic ideas of supply and demand lead to capital investment into production, leading to more supply. In housing, the way it’s expected to react to increased immigration is as follows:

1. Increased immigration leads to increased demand for housing.
2. Demand for housing leads to higher house prices.
3. Higher house prices lead to higher demand for construction.
4. Higher demand for construction results in more profits for construction companies selling houses.
5. Construction companies reinvest more of their profits into making houses, increasing supply of houses.
6. Increased supply causes housing prices to drop back to where they were before immigration rates increased. I takes a few years, but it’s supposed to be “self-adjusting”, always restoring prices back to a theoretical “ideal”, not counting inflation.

Except as we all know, it doesn’t do that, at least with housing. In particular, I think steps 3, 4 and 5 don’t follow in the modern Australian market. I think the key to solving the housing crisis, short of the government building it all themselves, is to figure out why 3, 4 and 5 don’t follow, and to change things so that they do.

It might look like decreasing immigration would at least alleviate demand pressure, but that’s just kicking the can down the road. There isn’t enough housing supply for demand caused by our natural birth rate, and so we’re accumulating demand pressure anyway. I view it as a distraction from discussing real solutions, that allow housing prices to not just increase more slowly, but fall.

I guess we just have different perspectives on how things currently are then, I view it as already the case that structural discrimination is at play, and that it’s very embedded into Australian government and society.

A referendum isn’t needed to consult with people.

While that does seem to be mostly correct, I think it’s also complicated. As I’m sure many people have said, previous consultative bodies have been abolished several times, and could only consult with the executive branch. This constitutional change will also enable representations be made to the legislative branch.

Could they have just tried to do so without a constitutional change? Probably. Yet they aren’t without reason for putting it in the constitution either.

And people shouldn’t be included/excluded from consultation just because of their race/culture/heritage.

People are right now, but perhaps not in ways explicitly stated by law. If we were a new country with a clean slate I might think this voice wouldn’t be necessary. Not only do we have a history of excluding people based on race, but I can see in the community that we still do so, and that will continue unless put a stop to.

I understand the unease of putting a specifically indigenous voice in there, but from what I understand even if parliament gives it the most power possible, it will still be less powerful than a traditional lobby group, only able to table discussions and research. Discussions I think should have happened decades ago.

It’s not a perfect solution, I don’t think I’ve met anybody who truly thinks that. But my opinion is that it would provide overall more help than harm, especially considering that I think the government’s inability to listen is structural, and not just individual fault.

I believe that any time the government is going to introduce or change laws, they should consult with the people those laws will affect. Regardless of the race or culture of those people.

This is the entire reason why this is being debated. The government has a horrendous track record of ignoring indigenous people on matters that affect them. Even to this day, and it appears to be a structural issue. Let us not forget what the Australian government has done in the name of “helping” them, resulting in the Stolen Generations, among other things.

Imagines is probably a better word, not all fiction is fantasy.

As far as I know, you seed videos you watch.

No, Odysee/LBRY operates on blockchain/crypto. It aims to be decentralised, and in that sense it’s bit like federation, but it’s completely different.

Even if it quickly fell off, I think approximately 70-80% of current Mastodon users came from Twitter, and a big reason for people leaving (after poor onboarding experience) was the small size of the Fediverse. There just weren’t enough people in the Fediverse for the network effect to take hold. With each influx of users I expect to see a slightly higher proportion to stay, although I don’t see this influx (from Reddit) as being particularly large in the first place.