I know most call it AEST, but there are some who call it EST.

I hear timezone names can also be a slight issue at times, some Australians call the eastern time zone EST. Leap years aren’t so bad at times either though. Kind of agree with the rest of it, much of the complexity is from historical dates.

I’d argue not every job will always be 9-5, so you still get people having to explain working hours with non-UTC timezones anyway, whereas all timezone conversions are eliminated if everyone uses UTC.

“OpenBSD made a secure fork of X?” Depends on what you consider secure I guess. X has some fundamental design issues.

One particularly memorable one is that lock screens in X are run on top of your userspace. If they crash, you get to use your computer again. No matter how many patches are applied to X lock screens, a new bug appears every few years that has to be patched. It fails insecurely, and as such will always be insecure as long as the lock screen could feasibly crash.

If your answer is “lock screens don’t matter,” security is not a top priority for you, and that’s okay. There are other reasons you may wish to use X. Please understand however that some people may find it important, and may choose to use Wayland as a result.

I can’t remember which, but some applications just show as the xorg icon when running under xorg.

I quite like many games with “poor” graphics. Perhaps not exclusively, but you’re seriously missing out if you only go for realistic-looking or detailed games. Give a few of those indie games a try, you might be surprised.

Edit: Oh, and terminal games are cool! Usually not very performant though.

They’ve been working on GIMP 3.0 for over a decade, which has non-destructive editing, as well as an upgrade to the UI toolkit (although actual UI changes are still to-do). They don’t want it to be this way, development has just been insanely slow. Mostly due to lack of developers and donations, although that has been changing recently.

They planned to have GIMP 3.0 out by May, but with so many delays it might be a few months yet.

I think that’s more what the people excited about AI think it it is, many of the people who fear it don’t really fear its intelligence as much as how it’s abused. Personally, I don’t even like the machine learning algorithms in social media, despite them being a thing for a long time now.

I thought some Wayland compositors already supported 10 bit per channel colour?

I think it should be clarified that GIMP’s structure isn’t able to make use of donations to GIMP as a single entity. Edit: or at least wasn’t, I hear they can now.

I agree that Krita is more promising though, I switched to Krita years ago and have never looked back.

From what I understand, GIMP fell behind because it refused corporate donations while Krita accepted them. This lead to GIMP reducing in scope as the 1-3 part-time* developers (at least when I last really looked into it) realised they’d never catch up, leading to people donating less as they weren’t satisfied with GIMP’s simultaneous underpromising and underdelivering. Meanwhile Krita managed to receive enough money to hire a team of full time developers for several years, leading to better software, to more donations. It’s like the poverty trap, but with software.

• Edit: part-time isn’t the right word, more like casual

I also forgot: houses became more expensive during the majority of the pandemic, while borders were closed. There was a short period with a fall, but only because they shot up sharply in the beginning.

I don’t buy the idea that immigration is the cause of the housing crisis, any more than young Australians buying their first home. I’m not even sure if it’s the investors either. They all may be sources of demand pressure, but I think there’s a sort of blockage in Australia’s housing market, and I would pin the blame of high housing costs on that blockage.

We live in an economy that assumes that the basic ideas of supply and demand lead to capital investment into production, leading to more supply. In housing, the way it’s expected to react to increased immigration is as follows:

1. Increased immigration leads to increased demand for housing.
2. Demand for housing leads to higher house prices.
3. Higher house prices lead to higher demand for construction.
4. Higher demand for construction results in more profits for construction companies selling houses.
5. Construction companies reinvest more of their profits into making houses, increasing supply of houses.
6. Increased supply causes housing prices to drop back to where they were before immigration rates increased. I takes a few years, but it’s supposed to be “self-adjusting”, always restoring prices back to a theoretical “ideal”, not counting inflation.

Except as we all know, it doesn’t do that, at least with housing. In particular, I think steps 3, 4 and 5 don’t follow in the modern Australian market. I think the key to solving the housing crisis, short of the government building it all themselves, is to figure out why 3, 4 and 5 don’t follow, and to change things so that they do.

It might look like decreasing immigration would at least alleviate demand pressure, but that’s just kicking the can down the road. There isn’t enough housing supply for demand caused by our natural birth rate, and so we’re accumulating demand pressure anyway. I view it as a distraction from discussing real solutions, that allow housing prices to not just increase more slowly, but fall.

Imagines is probably a better word, not all fiction is fantasy.

As far as I know, you seed videos you watch.

No, Odysee/LBRY operates on blockchain/crypto. It aims to be decentralised, and in that sense it’s bit like federation, but it’s completely different.

Even if it quickly fell off, I think approximately 70-80% of current Mastodon users came from Twitter, and a big reason for people leaving (after poor onboarding experience) was the small size of the Fediverse. There just weren’t enough people in the Fediverse for the network effect to take hold. With each influx of users I expect to see a slightly higher proportion to stay, although I don’t see this influx (from Reddit) as being particularly large in the first place.