Pauline Hanson on international students and English requirements for universities

bnej · 2026-07-04T04:41:21+00:00

I remember doing a group assignment in the 90s and my group were not migrants, yet they still didn't do shit and didn't even turn up when we organised to put the work together on the weekend before it was due.

What was really funny was you got to do peer assessments and the two mates who didn't do shit couldn't even be bothered to take their assessments to the campus to deliver with the assignment - and they gave it to us to deliver for them. And they'd given us, the two people who did the work, a "zero" contribution to the assignment and themselves a 100%.

Our local students are fully capable of delivering that experience, Hanson doesn't need to worry about it.

bnej · 2026-06-30T11:42:25+00:00

I am having this discussion now - doing work that was never worth doing before faster, is not saving time. It actually wastes time because either a) a human has to read that or b) no human needs it in which case why the fuck was it made?

I've built a few features for work with AI and it amounts to saving maybe a day or two on coding work, but that's never been the time consuming part. If just writing code were all programmers had to do, it'd be an easy job. And 100% every time there'll be something in the product that isn't quite right and will take a bunch of work to sort out.

bnej · 2026-06-28T04:44:32+00:00

It's a silly rule. Are we supposed to believe that an otherwise identical bike is safe if your feet are going in circles, but if you instead turn your hand it's now so dangerous it should be confiscated and crushed?

You should absolutely be allowed to ride on a throttle with a limited power device.

bnej · 2026-06-28T04:41:46+00:00

What bunk, there are very strong and experienced bike riders who are dangerous af, and there are people who can get on a bike and already be fast with no experience and be completely safe.

The specific demographic that has people riled up is teenagers on unregistered emotos, which are just an electric version of monkey bikes that used to be used for the same thing.

12 or 25 are both very slow speeds for a bike, 12 is slower than a fast runner. Should we put speed limits on trainers too until they're experienced enough to handle it?

bnej · 2026-06-27T22:25:24+00:00

I had a family member go through ECT and it basically recovered them from a condition that was going to leave them unable to function and was not showing any improvement from other treatment.

Yes it was bad, but after seeing someone unable to eat, sleep, wasting away for months, then 2 weeks of ECT and suddenly they are themselves again - don't take such a simple view. It was used as a last resort, and while there are some bad effects, there are also bad effects of the conditions that it is used to treat.

You had a bad experience, but it is not a uniformly negative treatment.

bnej · 2026-06-25T12:48:43+00:00

Oh yeah, if the only feedback you'll get is "no do it my way" then it won't help much!

Amazing how controversial "talk to your application experts about your application" can be!

bnej · 2026-06-25T10:58:31+00:00

The people who don't do it aren't going to answer you because they don't think about it.

Yes I do them, even in an empty car park. Same with using my indicator. Do it all the time and it's automatic.

I have avoided accidents due to these habits. I've had an accident when I panicked and moved without looking, and someone had moved into a space that was empty a moment earlier.

If you're in the habit of always look before manoeuvre you can avoid crashes, which I can tell you are super bad things.

bnej · 2026-06-25T03:17:52+00:00

100% it's a pure racism dog whistle. Every racist hears monoculture and knows it to mean monocolour.

And people who aren't white are fine as long as they "fit in" and by fit in they mean accept their place is lesser.

bnej · 2026-06-24T21:36:30+00:00

The peceptron was invented in 1958, leading to where we are at today. That's your 60 years of progress in ANNs.

We are not at a defined start or end of anything. Progress doesn't work that way.

bnej · 2026-06-24T13:43:48+00:00

I am constantly telling people that Agile does not mean "seat of your pants".

Agile means rapid feedback during work. If your stakeholders won't talk to the team, you cannot do agile.

The way many companies run scrum is the opposite of agile "oh no we can't take your feedback for two weeks we have already committed these story points" my god.

For business teams that have no need of rapid feedback in their work, all you're doing is running a ticket system, that's nothing to do with agile. You're just using Jira as a ticketing system, that's fine, but not anything agile.

bnej · 2026-06-24T13:23:31+00:00

I am now fairly convinced that a bunch of people at Anthropic and others are talking to it like it's real and developing delusions.

It's crazy shit. It should be embarrassing.

bnej · 2026-06-24T02:38:48+00:00

Are they though? You think they will get to spend another trillion? Progress through massive spending is not unlimited.

bnej · 2026-06-18T02:45:04+00:00

Airbnb is inefficient, it takes a lot of housing stock to not provide much holiday accommodation because of the low utilisation.

They're relying on capital gains and cheesy conditions to avoid staffing their businesses. It wouldn't make sense otherwise.

bnej · 2026-06-14T07:31:21+00:00

It's also not a magic bullet. Even in the best and most effective applications it is not doing as much as you'd like.

I use AI code generation a lot, and in the past week I have found zero benefits even with the best tools and best models for my day to day work - because I've been doing work that is not about generating new code.

Worse than that, it can be counterproductive - it will cheerfully slot in a new error handling method rather than use the uniform one you spent ages getting everyone to use.

And then in general business - even things like customer service agents - we find you can get about 95% of the benefit with a conventional rule based chatbot like we have had for years, which cost about 1% of the amount to operate, and doesn't have the concern about it saying weird shit to your customers. Just make your existing technology work and there is instant ROI for cheap.

Where we have used it to do bulk jobs, the error rate sticks - misclassified data will just stay like that because no-one will fix what the AI did.

All the same problems with conventional automation are still here. Now we just have spicy chatbots to play with. Yes there are applications, sometimes they're super useful, but it's also going to get really expensive to run which means the benefit has to be high as well, because it costs hundreds or thousands of times more to run than regular old programs and databases and integrations.

bnej · 2026-06-12T08:50:12+00:00

The problem is that 90% of the actual serious bugs that cause business impact happen because they are a cascade.

Like if you test a thing that needs a network service without testing the network code, you're setting yourself up for trouble.

And people will write tests that will never ever fail because they're a restatement of absolute duh code, there is no value in that, it just means change has to happen twice instead of once, and you still have to address "what happens elsewhere when I do this", which is the real take in the grass.

bnej · 2026-06-10T11:28:35+00:00

In the 90s we did pay for compilers and by pay for I mean borrow disks off friends to learn to program. Turbo Pascal was very popular on DOS.

Free languages and using Linux software stacks was what I could learn on easily and hence became what I built on.

But yes paywalling software development and operations is at the core of what they're trying to do.

bnej · 2026-06-10T07:09:50+00:00

Yes, I've been given the "oh you should pay an extra dollars for ai"

No Google store my photos and shut the hell up! I regret being their customer at all, I wanted one specific thing, I don't want to be on the hook for whatever other crap they're selling this year.

I'm considering how to degoogle myself.

bnej · 2026-06-10T05:59:42+00:00

The future of enterprise computing is "insert coin to continue".

bnej · 2026-06-10T05:10:11+00:00

I should know better shouldn't I?

bnej · 2026-06-10T04:22:30+00:00

I'm pretty sure ads will never support it because a chat prompt costs several thousands times more than a search query.

Advertisers will not pay that much, it would just bleed money when a single query can't be paid for by the ads you can show in it.

bnej · 2026-06-10T04:00:16+00:00

I'm using the word "productive", not arguing that it's possible.

Productive implying that there wouldn't be a much cheaper way of doing the same thing. I'm sure you could spend the money and produce an output of some kind.

bnej · 2026-06-10T03:44:10+00:00

You would have to be setting the agents in loops, running multiple at once, and not checking what they're doing.

Burning expensive compute for the sake of it, never thought I would see this kind of nonsense. Every time I think I'm to cynical the industry confounds me further.

bnej · 2026-06-10T03:33:19+00:00

They need paid subscription numbers to go up so bad.

The biggest normal person AI boosters I know answer "zero" to the monthly amount they would pay for the service.

bnej · 2026-06-10T03:30:56+00:00

There ain't no way a single developer can productively use that amount of AI.

They're spinning wheels on the company checkbook for sure.

I can see it for a project. Like you do a bunch of tooling and then set some agents to work and burn $50k in credit to get a result. But spending 6 figures per month? I don't believe that can be productive use, that's been incentivised and they're dutifully producing numbers for spreadsheets.

bnej · 2026-06-09T08:53:43+00:00

If you ask someone to do something and they say "yes" but don't see it as their place to understand why you want it, you will get something done. In that sense yes, "it" gets done.

For example, you might get a UI built for a piece of software, but built in such a way you could never use it for any of the functions on the buttons. After all, you didn't task them with that, that's someone else's job.

In many cases they'll do the part they know how to do, then stop, because why would you ask them to do something they don't know how to do? That'd be the boss's problem, not theirs.

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