Anyone that's traveled overseas lately is aware of the shitshow that is the Digital Passenger Declaration - a craptastic app designed to replace the paper slips you'd fill in on the plane when returning to Australia. Crikey has a good article explaining the app's "glitches, poor design and (lack of) redundancy". The DPD is so bad that after $60m and years of work, the government is indefinitely scrapping it as of the 6th of July. Home Affairs minister Clare O'Neil said the app "needs a lot more work" and reverting back to paper slips will speed things up at Australia's airports.
Google is going to "start automatically deleting visits to abortion clinics, domestic violence shelters, weight loss clinics, and other potentially sensitive locations from users' location histories in the coming weeks". As more and more people are aware of how data like this can be demanded by law enforcement and used against them thanks to unjust laws passed by fanatics, even Google is realising that the best way to avoid being put in a situation where they have to hand over data on someone morally innocent (i.e: getting an abortion) is not to have the data in the first place. Fucking finally.
Victoria has outlined how it plans to stop sucking at the natural gas teat in the Gas Substitution Roadmap. Victoria was once blessed with loads of cheap natural gas and forced all homes to connect to the gas pipe network. That's finally going away! You're now allowed to build a gas-free home with heat pumps and induction cooktops - something that until now was a pain in the arse with most builders. The state government said they're also working on incentives to replace gas appliances in existing homes. Here's a PDF of Victoria's Gas Substitution Roadmap.
Heads up to anyone looking to buy one of the new 13-inch M2-based MacBook Pros, they kinda suck. The biggest problem is in the base model with 256GB of storage. Instead of 2x 128GB chips, Apple configured this unit with a single 256GB chip. This results in much slower read speeds as the reading isn't happening in parallel. Things get even worse if you've only got 8GB of RAM as you're relying on the speedy SSD to pick up the slack and that SSD isn't so speedy now. The chassis also struggles with dissipating the heat coming off the M2 SoC under load and throttles so hard that at full load an M1 chip is probably going to be faster.
📻 I Quit Girls - Japandroids
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