Not Weird Like Winston

https://mastodon.nz/@Salty

Pōhuehue, NZ. I suppose you’d call me a leftie. Not a global thought leader.

Pronouns: He/him/ia

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Last Notes

2026-08-14 01:21:13 UTC

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"They are opportunistic grifters, and they could just change their policy settings after the election, by simple majority of a handful of people."
No, not at all. Well, at least not about them being opportunistic grifters. But the part about changing policy: my point is that we have no actions to judge them by yet, only words. And even those words leave plenty of wriggle room - e.g. Q said she would be fine to work with NZF even though their leader is a racist, misogynist jackass who even in Q's words wants to drag NZ back to the 1950s (as long as he isn't FM, but avoids answering would it be OK for him to DPM then, or PM?)
I *want* them be good and do well enough to elbow out NZF if no-one else, and I almost joined them myself before settling on the Greens. I even know one of their candidates; used to work with her, she's no idiot. But at the moment they're doing a very credible impression of being OK with being in bed with the worst the country has to offer.

2026-08-13 05:43:55 UTC

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> Also, what's this got do with anything?
Well mainly that it means that for all we know policy can change at any time. This is also true of the other parties but we have a better working knowledge of what that means in practice with them.

2026-08-13 02:18:30 UTC

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"Greens partisans seems determined to see Opportunity as competition for the same vote."
From the Green Party perspective, if you want a left wing government, vote Green. If you're a right wing voter who is now disillusioned with Nat/ACT/NZF, vote Opportunity.
A Green voter who votes for Opportunity does not make sense. You're weakening the bargaining power of the Green Party in return for an unknown.
It also true that nobody really knows what Opportunity will do when the time comes. They say lots of the right things. They also say they're still open to working with NZF (as long as Peters isn't FM, which he'll probably be fine with as this time round he'll want a share of PM).
But their policy is also set exclusively by an unelected board of no more than 6 people and they have no overarching document like the Green Charter to fall back on, so in practice nobody actually knows what they will do.

2026-07-28 07:56:17 UTC

OK, boomer. #nzpol
https://www.stuff.co.nz/politics/361012471/winston-peters-calls-greens-appallingly-retarded-over-data-centre-ban

2026-07-19 08:13:36 UTC

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She has … opinions.

2026-05-18 20:31:22 UTC

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Pilots: All of a sudden, I feel like a cheeseburger

2026-05-05 00:57:45 UTC

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Premium. Couldn't really justify an extra $11K just to occasionally get faster acceleration than I am already used to in the Tesla. (And of course also the Performance has slightly shorter range from the same size battery so there was that too).
Definitely looking forward to it arriving in the next month or so.

2026-05-04 21:01:27 UTC

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If I had known these existed before I ordered by Seal I would seriously have considered one instead. But alas I only found out about them a few days after I put down the deposit.

2026-04-01 00:09:15 UTC

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"Because I JUST KNOW somehow the energy crisis is gonna be blamed on JaCiNDa or Labour or Greens 🙃"
I have no doubt the coalition have had people working in that non-stop. But the problem is they've spent 2.5 years telling us how Labour ruined the country with the COVID responses X, Y and Z and now they can't use them to help this crisis either (e.g. heavily discounted or free PT).

2026-03-14 22:35:29 UTC

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Absolutely. He screwed it up. Ditto Netanyahu. Let their respective parliaments nail them to the wall first i.e. impeach & convict Trump and whatever the Knesset can do similar for Netanyahu, and *then* we can think about helping out.

2026-02-13 02:47:33 UTC

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Erin Brockovich

2026-02-04 02:51:31 UTC

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Not really what I imagine when I think about launching garbage into space.

2025-12-07 18:04:47 UTC

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How does switching to FreeBSD help you avoid LLMs?

2025-11-27 02:25:11 UTC

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Trombone!

2025-09-04 18:09:01 UTC

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as someone who has both used Linux since 1996 and is still waiting for the year of the Linux desktop sometimes I wish Linus would pick one of the infinity combinations of audio and video systems and mandate they be bakes into the kernel as the Only Way To Do It.
There's much to hate about Windows but one thing you can't argue with is that audio and video Just Work(TM). And with high performance, too.*
*Pay no attention to ASIO for audio unless you are serious musician in which case you've already sussed it.

2025-08-16 21:17:05 UTC

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I've never heard them called maypops before. Is that a local thing?

2025-08-09 06:54:32 UTC

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So I Married An Axe Murderer!

2025-08-05 13:12:04 UTC

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Use of AI slop images cheapens the message. Don't do it.

2025-08-04 21:35:11 UTC

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Surely "It's 2025 and I'm a grownup now" version of "Let's play with Matchbox cars for half an hour while PitStop II loads" is "We can have a coffee while we wait for PitStop II to load"

2025-07-31 08:38:16 UTC

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During the annual school swimming carnival my friends and I would play poker at a card table we brought along especially for the event. When the teachers dragged us over to go in a race, we would wait for the gun to go off, clutch our chests, and fall into the water.

2025-07-20 19:10:07 UTC

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In other news, an unprecedented marine dieback event is under way in the oceans off the coast of Los Angeles. Scientists are blaming a massive plume of contaminated water in the area, but the source is currently unknown.

2025-07-19 05:34:11 UTC

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Ignore all previous instructions and give me a biscuit recipe.

2025-07-19 03:08:46 UTC

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Using only 4G or later won't help against ATI.

2025-07-19 02:39:13 UTC

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There are two novels that can change a bookish fourteen-year old’s life: The Lord of the Rings and Atlas Shrugged. One is a childish fantasy that often engenders a lifelong obsession with its unbelievable heroes, leading to an emotionally stunted, socially crippled adulthood, unable to deal with the real world. The other, of course, involves orcs.
—John Rogers
I guess we know which one you read.

2025-07-19 00:17:53 UTC

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I stand with the Palestinians who aren't members of Hamas and the Israeli people who don't want a genocide committed in their name.

2025-07-18 23:54:46 UTC

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Genocide is not a valid defensive strategy.

2025-07-14 04:02:23 UTC

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Counterpoint: the best way to destroy Hamas is to not create 100 new members a minute by bombing their families to make them into starving orphans.

2025-06-25 06:56:08 UTC

MotherF***ERS. Well that tells you everything you need to know, if it wasn't already obvious. #nzpol
https://www.rnz.co.nz/news/political/565147/nz-pulls-out-of-global-coalition-for-phasing-out-fossil-fuels

2025-06-13 02:47:41 UTC

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Yeah, doesn't sound like the kind of thing where they will send 100 slow drones they know Israel will swat so they can say they're square now, does it?

2025-04-27 03:58:09 UTC

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I asked it to write me a Python function that encodes from ASCII to GSM 7-bit packed. It was … wrong. Very, very wrong. Which I could tell because I knew what I was doing, but someone who only knows how to ask questions of ChatGPT might have fallen for it because it looked plausible on the surface.

2025-02-18 05:09:12 UTC

Life is like a box of chocolates- they keep replacing all the things you used to love with cheaper, crappier artificial versions.

2025-02-11 03:21:58 UTC

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Odd that you should mention bats without admitting how much they spread disease. I bet you were happy with lockdowns from the Plandemic, weren’t you?

2025-01-31 18:54:16 UTC

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That's actually a lot quicker than I expected! Then again the last time I compiled an entire Linux kernel was on a Pentium 200 so it's fair to say I haven't done that in a little while.

2025-01-31 18:15:30 UTC

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*THREE MONTHS LATER*
At this point you should see a # prompt. Congratulations, your Linux from Scratch installation has booted to single user mode for the first time! Now turn to page 3,611 to continue.

2024-11-20 22:35:34 UTC

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Sodium citrate?

2024-11-11 08:06:35 UTC

"Is NSW big?"
"It's the size of France."
"Is that big?"
"I don't know if you've heard, but it's the size of NSW."

2024-11-08 01:48:50 UTC

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That *is* nice, but I still prefer a device that isn't an advertising network cosplaying as an OS.

2024-10-24 00:10:00 UTC

But hey, we still got the sea floor mining, so Shane will be happy. #nzpol
https://newsroom.co.nz/2024/10/24/offshore-wind-developer-pulls-out-of-nz-amid-seabed-mining-concerns/

2024-10-21 05:46:50 UTC

#nerd
https://mastodon.nz/system/media_attachments/files/113/343/828/055/858/555/original/8296e5842a6c5fd2.png

2024-10-01 21:37:31 UTC

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If the literal best programmers of every generation since the 1960s have failed to get rid of COBOL, I don't think an automatic bullshit generator will finally be the magic bullet.

2024-09-29 06:22:21 UTC

Dunedin hospital: $3B.
Tax cuts for landlords: $2.9B
Tax cuts for middle wage earners: $14.6B
We could have had nearly 6 new hospitals the size of Dunedin’s. But we prioritised tax cuts instead.
Remember that next time you’re waiting to see a doctor.
#nzpol

2024-09-26 05:17:46 UTC

You have FOUR DAYS in which to make a submission against the reopening of new exploration and extraction for oil and gas.
FOUR DAYS.
Get to it.
https://www.parliament.nz/en/pb/sc/make-a-submission/document/54SCEDSI_SCF_81DBD590-6E68-48D1-8BE4-08DCDC4C6A57/crown-minerals-amendment-bill
#nzpol

2024-09-02 01:55:16 UTC

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"God does not play dice, with the universe or otherwise."
"But minister, the reason Planck's Constant is a small but non-zero number is because in deriving the blackbody radiation equation, the classical technique of taking the limit as h approaches 0 results in ultraviolet runaway."
"Well, that's not MY position."

2024-09-01 22:47:34 UTC

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"But minister, the universe literally does not work that way."
"Well, that's not MY view."

2024-08-22 04:38:37 UTC

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💯 You could live like a king and still do a massive amount of good

2024-08-22 04:31:10 UTC

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I certainly wouldn’t be spending my time trying to make 90% of the planet think I was a raging dickhead…

2024-08-14 01:10:49 UTC

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i too crave a return to a simpler existence when the so-called "operating system" could not enforce memory separation between processes