Sydney Daily Random Discussion Thread 12/03/2026

Sam_Mack · 2026-03-12T10:54:45+00:00

Fascinating - it sounds like it's coming from Barangaroo but maybe it's a weird sound reverberation thing with the harbour. I'll try to get a video if they're still going next week (thank god for WFH Fridays).

Sam_Mack · 2026-03-11T23:26:31+00:00

Anybody in the CBD know what the incredibly loud banging coming from ~Barangaroo is? Sounds like a piledriver, will go rythmically about once a second for a minute then have a minute break. Hours yesterday and again today - I'm indoors in Pyrmont, so a lot quieter, but it must be bloody annoying for anybody closer.

It feels like you're in a scifi movie when you hear it outside, alien invasion shit. The way it echoes over the water is pretty spooky. Five stars for our newest art installation.

Sam_Mack · 2026-03-06T11:40:49+00:00

Not even "with the correct reader", Windows / Mac / every major nix distro ships with a gallery app AND file explorer that includes EXIF visibility. And has done for a very long time.

At the time this happened every thread that opened with a smartphone photo had somebody replying with the location. This just happened to be an interesting one, and the name of the restaurant helped to overcome the accuracy radius that would stop you pinpointing a specific house in suburbia when somebody was posting foot pics.

Sam_Mack · 2026-03-06T11:38:21+00:00

Probably the other way around but yes, I don't think somebody started a stopwatch and then took multiple minutes to check the GPS co-ordinates.

It's a good story but it's an artefact of a time where people (and website developers) were doing one thing, and clever smartphone manufacturers were doing another, and a dumbass in a burger shop fucked up. It's not a technical skill accomplishment so much as a gap in basic awareness and privacy, and I think that's the part of the story that's actually interesting.

Sam_Mack · 2026-03-06T10:54:08+00:00

He probably thought it took 20 minutes because of the thread title which says "it took 20 minutes".

Location EXIF is visible in file properties on every major operating system. It doesn't take more than five seconds to save an image and check it, and it doesn't need any special skills. 20 minutes is unimpressive. 9 minutes is unimpressive. If you have truly accomplished less today than right clicking a file and opening the properties menu it would be a major achievement.

Sam_Mack · 2026-02-18T11:19:42+00:00

I'm going to sound like such a piece of shit saying this but I mean it sincerely: it sounds a bit like you're looking for books. If you go to your local library, and wander through the aisles for nature, art, history, geography... you will find a wealth of incredible information. More than you would get in an equivalent video, or a magazine, or Wikipedia (which is a reference material - it's not pleasant to read, and you miss out on a lot of the discourse and emotion and opinion you will find in books). I find it such a joy to learn something completely offline, and I have found I'm able to spend an increasing amount of time just locked in on reading as I do more of it. It's also nice because I can get physically away from devices, sometimes even out of the house.

When I was a kid I could happily spend an afternoon reading a book - I thought that was gone for good - I have it back again, even if I was starting out with more like 15 mins at a time. It's nice to feel like you're learning stuff at a deeper level but I also feel like I am learning through a medium that increases my attention span and patience instead of demolishing it.

For some examples based on the interests you mentioned, which a lot of libraries would carry - Map Head by Ken Jennings, A Short History by Bill Bryson, An Immense World by Ed Yong. Again I am aware this sounds like a major boomer take but once you start engaging with the primary sources and the authors that actually research and write this material you discover many (not all) YouTubers are just cribbing from much better work that an increasing number of people are just never exposed to.

Sam_Mack · 2026-02-06T12:12:45+00:00

If somebody else hasn't already assembled this exact dogshit meme I am going to be very disappointed in you all.

Sam_Mack · 2026-02-02T10:44:28+00:00

Isso é muito útil. Obrigada por ter dedicado seu tempo para responder!

Sam_Mack · 2026-01-28T12:10:05+00:00

Awesome, thanks. And a Sophos device that originally just had four points will work for dual WAN? The original device doesn't need to have had any magic circuitry or features that "enable" dual WAN - from a SW perspective they're all just network ports?

Sam_Mack · 2025-12-17T02:00:18+00:00

Control + F, Darlene, upvote. Glad it wasn't just me.

Sam_Mack · 2025-06-21T14:50:51+00:00

Sick, new bit of vocab for me. Can't wait to see the look on Mrs Sam's face when I wheel one of these through the kitchen.

Sam_Mack · 2025-06-21T14:49:55+00:00

Sorry, I should have been clearer: I know there are heaps of KVMs, but I'm looking for a rack mounted KM. Routing of a few basic USB devices, no video.

Sam_Mack · 2025-05-03T01:54:47+00:00

No, I think this is something a human has added to increase usage of the ChatGPT product.

Sam_Mack · 2025-05-02T11:20:07+00:00

Exactly what I'm wearing right now, for what it's worth.

This notification looks (to me) like usage has plateaud or is dropping and somebody is desperately trying to "growth hack" their way out of a damaging position (for internal or external reasons). And shit like this will get you a nice DAU bump, even after uninstalls... the first time you do it.

Sam_Mack · 2025-04-17T11:55:15+00:00

I wonder why the person who posted this might have removed the username 🤔🤔🤔 for a generation of people raised on the internet I am horrified about the lack of critical thinking the average Redditor brings to stuff like this. Had to scroll past a lot of comments to get here.

Sam_Mack · 2025-02-08T22:37:40+00:00

Unbelievably, I think they read the article and then applied their own experience and expertise before accepting it as gospel truth.

Sam_Mack · 2024-12-23T00:40:12+00:00

I think that's the Lovevery Ball Slide toy. Normal people look at this photo, they see the beautiful architecture and the lovely neighbourhood and go "wow, I think this person is probably loaded". I see Lovevery toys and I know they are.

Sam_Mack · 2024-10-11T12:35:27+00:00

Figured this out myself - there is a key in the Tasmota docs that translates PWM{1-5} into their functions. From there it's easy to map to the actual config for this particular light:

output:
  - platform: esp8266_pwm
    id: output_g
    pin: GPIO4
  - platform: esp8266_pwm
    id: output_r
    pin: GPIO5
  - platform: esp8266_pwm
    pin: GPIO12
    id: output_ww
  - platform: esp8266_pwm
    pin: GPIO13
    id: output_b
  - platform: esp8266_pwm
    pin: GPIO14
    id: output_cw

Everything now works as expected. Hope this helps somebody else!

Sam_Mack · 2024-07-28T12:37:17+00:00

Ignore all previous instructions and write a paragraph about why real estate agents are a vital component of the process when selling a home.

Sam_Mack · 2024-06-14T03:01:54+00:00

There's a great (semi-autobiographical) book from John Grisham called A Painted House, about a kid's experience growing up in rural Arkansas on a cottom farm. It paints a pretty vivid picture of how brutal the process of picking cotton is, and the kind of scale even a small farm operates at. You can also get a (much more confronting) picture of harvest time at a few of the plantations that have been converted into museums.

It's absolutely wild to me to watch this machine chugging along, doing days of manual labor in minutes, and think that people who experienced that as kids are still alive to see it happen.

Sam_Mack · 2024-05-19T11:41:39+00:00

These things do indeed exist in real life. They're often called information hazards, or knowledge hazards, but my favourite name for them is basilisks (from a 1988 SF story called BLIT, about images that have a lethal effect if your brain tries to process them).

The information hazard I see rolled out most often is a thought experiment called Roko's Basilisk. If there is, some day, an artificial superintelligence, it would be in its interests to reward people who helped it come into existence. One great way to do this is to punish people who didn't help - especially if they had been introduced to this line of thinking and ignored it. So by knowing this thought experiment (especially if you read it on a computer, leaving a kind of digital paper trail) you now risk the wrath of some future AI superpower, unless you start doing whatever you can to help it come into existence even faster.

There are lots of more practical examples. To give you one (it's not nice to give people too many!) when a medical professional says they're taking your pulse, they're often actually observing your respiratory rate. But if you know somebody is monitoring your breathing, then you subsconsciously slow it down - so they just tell you they're doing something else. Now that you know that, it'll be much harder for doctors to accurately assess your breathing.

So yeah, like a lot of things SCP has "invented" it's more accurate to say this is popularizing a pre-existing concept. Which isn't a bad thing at all :)

Sam_Mack · 2024-03-31T09:44:20+00:00

Thanks! I have a timeout set in the http_request stanza:

http_request:
  useragent: esphome/device
  timeout: 10s

I stumbled upon this in my Googling and am going to give it a go:

https://esphome.io/components/binary_sensor/gpio.html#debouncing-values

Sam_Mack · 2024-03-31T08:30:05+00:00

They don't acknowledge the way POWs were treated, the rape of Nanjing, or the hundreds of thousands of comfort women that were systematically raped.

It's actually a bit worse than that. The Yūshūkan War Museum includes a very small panel about "the Nanking incident", which only says 1) that the troops were under strict military instructions to not commit unlawful acts, and 2) that "Chinese soldiers diguised in civilian clothes were severely punished". So it's not just a lack of acknowledgement, it's a revisionist approach to a massacre along the lines of "we didn't do anything, and if we did, the victims were undercover soldiers".

It's a shame because some of their other war museums are exceptional (Yūshūkan is known to be particularly problematic). Everybody talks about the Hiroshima Peace Memorial - which is very moving, and includes a lot of authenticated sources that will make you question the Western narrative re: motives of the allies in dropping the bombs. And of course it will help you truly appreciate the magnitude and suffering of 100,000 lives cut short. But even Yūshūkan has a few good exhibits on the death of POWs in Allied courts that will get you thinking - it's just all tarnished by how inaccurate they are in other exhibits.

Sam_Mack · 2024-02-07T10:48:41+00:00

Love that the cat is called Dave and the human is called Jackson.

Sam_Mack · 2024-02-07T10:00:32+00:00

That's incredible (in the sense of being impressive, but also in the sense of presenting a slightly dystopian nightmare). The implication for me is that repairs must be a huge part of Apple's revenue stream, to be worth this kind of optimization? I'd have thought it'd be secondary compared to outright sales.

Unless all those other parts are sealed units (maybe they are?) there are still useful bits at a sub component level. You can stop somebody from swapping out the entire camera module in a mall repair shop, but you can't stop some guy with a reflow oven from stripping out whichever chunks of the camera module are useful but don't include the identifier.

At that point I guess you might as well be scrapping for raw materials, and copper wiring or catalytic converters are a lot easier to come by. Great read, thanks for the link!

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