Environment minister Angus Taylor has confirmed that the federal government will not do a damn thing to incentivise electric car adoption in Australia. Despite being one of the key technologies the government wants to use to reduce Australia's greenhouse gas emissions, the government reckons any subsidies would be too expensive and give a poor return on investment per tonne of CO2 reduced. As is usual for this government, they fucked the numbers up. Did they really think they unconvered a secret flaw when countries like the USA, UK and the entire EU decided years ago that EV incentives are great bang for buck in reducing CO2 emissions? Fucking idiots.
Two Google engineers have quit in protest of Google's sacking of AI ethics researcher Timnit Gebru and diversity recruiter April Christina Curley. David Baker quit because "we (Google) cannot say we believe in making a more understanding, informed world, and then ignore how our products amplify biases" - which he reckons is displayed by firing two people for speaking the truth. Vinesh Kannan left because the firings of Timnit and April "crossed a personal red line I wrote down when I started the job". It really doesn't reflect well on Google when well paid, highly skilled people decide to leave one of the most influential global businesses because when they look at how the sausage is made, it scares them.
Those poor bastards in Iran have had the secure chat app Signal blocked by their government. To help people communicate freely, the Signal folks have set up a really easy TLS proxy docker container that you can install on your VPS/home server/whatever that'll allow Iranians to use Signal. You just need a server that can talk on port 80 & 443 and a domain name of some sort. Totally unrelated, but still deep in nerd territory, is RPiPlay - an "open-source implementation of an AirPlay mirroring server for the Raspberry Pi" that'll even run on a Pi Zero (though a Pi B+ is smoother). Looks pretty easy to install too if you're handy with the command line. I'll be giving both of these a crack this weekend.
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