• 42 Posts
  • 986 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: July 4th, 2023

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  • What would be the point? Reddit doesn’t make any content. They’re just a platform. If they go ahead and paywall subs, those subs are going to have a tiny potential subscriber base. Therefore, they will be less attractive to post to (smaller audience, fewer upvotes etc).

    About the only place I can maybe see it working is AskHistorians. And you pay the Historians to answer the questions. Which would of course reduce the amount Reddit takes from the paywall. Doesn’t seem worth it, to me.

    Even then, I think the Historians would rather reply in a new free sub with wider readership than take $20 for putting in three hours of work responding to something. They do it because they’re passionate. Not for money.


  • I was a mad Opera user about 25 years ago, it was the best browser by miles at the time. One feature it had was mouse gestures. Mouse gestures and uBlock origin are the only two extensions I can’t love without, but these lists never mention them so I feel like the only one who uses them.

    It’s hard to explain how cool and quick it is to be able to control your browser with the mouse. Open/close tabs, navigate tabs, back/forward etc. It doesn’t sound useful, I’m usually a mad keyboard shortcut fiend. But with web browsing in particular, your hand is already on the mouse, scrolling.

    The specific extension I use is Gesturefy, I encourage people to install it and give mouse gestures a go.


  • This works for us:
    Step one: Keep your instance civil. No tolerance for horrible people (racists/bigots etc).
    Step two: Maintain a vibrant local set of communities free from nastiness.
    Step three: Let your users engage with the noise of the fediverse as much or as little as they desire.

    We don’t bother with telling our users who or what they can access, and don’t immediately ban visitors based on their home instance. Will that scale to millions of users? Probably not. But that’s a problem for future Nath - maybe.




  • It’s interesting how the article is all about struggling retail businesses in the CBD and how this is about that. The closest the announcement comes to being about productivity is: “The more our experience of work is shared, the more united we become. This means being physically present in our organisations”.

    The case hasn’t been made that experience of work is improved by being in the office, however.

    This is all very fascinating, sitting in WA. We never really had the months of lockdowns you all had, and we never had the normalisation of everyone working from home. A bit of it, yes - but 100% remote work is relatively rare compared to other places on this side of the country.

    For the record, the pandemic also devastated loads of businesses over here also. Some previously vibrant places like the cappuccino strip in Fremantle are sad shadows of what they once were. I don’t know that this is going to be a magic bullet to somehow save retail.




  • Nobody celebrates killing Turkish people. Quite the opposite, in fact. Australians have immense respect for the Turks. We recognise that neither the Anzacs nor the Turks had any direct quarrel with one another. We had no desire to conquer what is now Turkey, and the Turks weren’t really defending their homes. It was a stupid conflict that neither of us wanted to be at. Anzacs were there because they were sent there by the British. The Turks were there because they were sent by the Ottomans. The British were just trying to get through the Dardanelles and Bosporus so they could reach the Black Sea. The Ottomans were on the German side of WWI and wanted to stop that from happening. At the end of the day, that sums up the whole reason everyone was on that peninsular.

    If you want to look into it, you’ll find that Mustafa Atatürk holds a very special place in Australia’s history. He has a personal memorial right next to the Australian War Memorial in Canberra, looking down Anzac avenue of war memorials that point to Parliament House. Depending on the direction you take of the memorials, he is either the first or last memorial. Either way, you are sure to remember him. Short of putting him on our money, we couldn’t really honour him closer. I know that over the last decade, President Erdoğan has been shifting Turkish perspective on Atatürk and the Gallipoli campaign, but no shifts are happening in Australia.

    All the celebration of Anzac spirit you see is because this war in particular changed our nation. Until this point, our ancestors thought of themselves as British. Afterwards, they were Australians and New Zealanders. The cultural shift took a few decades, and didn’t really finish until WWII (some would argue it is still shifting). The Anzac story has never been about killing Turks.


  • We had a period when I was a kid where the ANZAC stuff really started to wane as the WWI veterans were dying out. Somewhere along the line there was a movement to rekindle the ANZAC stuff and really stress that while it had its roots in WWI, it was about soldiers who died in all conflicts for their country.

    Any town that was around in 1918 is going to have a war memorial. I’ve worked at a place that was over 100 years old and they had a shield on a wall remembering the staff who went to WWI. If you really want to find a town that doesn’t have a war memorial, you’ll be looking for a new settlement, Probably some place that didn’t exist before the 1950’s. I honestly can’t think of any.

    That said, it’s really easy to avoid all the military stuff if it doesn’t work for you. Most town’s war memorials will only really come into relevance once a year and then go back to just being a feature of the place the other 364 days. A landmark maybe near a kids play ground. Just because every place has one, doesn’t mean you are under any obligation to pay it any attention.