“TV ads from betting agencies will be capped at three per hour, between 6am and 8:30pm, and banned completely from any live sports broadcasts during those hours”

I read that as even after 8:30pm, they’re still banned during live sports broadcasts. So none of this half-time odds update or whatever.

In many non-US countries, we consider the second-order effects due to having inviolable public safety nets. People who are their own victims due to vice are still afforded care because they’re still humans and citizens. That’s why we try to dissuade falling into those vices in the first place.

However, vices all come with negative aspects and it’s on us to discuss what the right overall balance is. IMO, when it comes to sports gambling advertisement, it’s way too freely available and normalised.

I’d also like to see a dramatic reduction of pokies (there’s an ABCA article from 2020 that I can’t currently find covering how much money Aussies saved by not being able to play them during lockdown, it’s staggering), but simultaneously fear for the mass closure of sports clubs and other third space venues if it were to happen. It’s a balancing act.

But at least for pokies, they’re deliberately walled away from the restaurant areas, etc. With TV ads, any easily-influenced kid watching their sporting heroes is exposed to this. It’s normalised along watching the sport itself. It’s no surprise there’s a direct conduit from that to young adults having gambling problems.

The deluge of gambling ads on TV during Friday night footy is absolutely appalling. There’s a very robust conduit for normalising sports gambling through advertisements around the broadcasts and it’s clearly influencing young adults. I’ve noticed a dramatic uptick in how common it is compared to when I was that age.

Sorry to be the one to ruin your concept of time.

It translates PDFs for me and gives me a good enough text dump in the console to understand what I’m being told to do. If the PDF is simple enough (a letter, for example). It doesn’t give me a structured English recreation of the PDF.

I’ll give it credit that it’s probably underpinning improved translation in e.g. google translate when I dump a paragraph of English and then copy the Chinese into an email. But that’s not really in the same ballpark.

The only other professional interaction I’ve had with it was when a colleague saw an industry-slang term and asked AI what it meant. The answer, predictably, was incredibly wrong but to his completely naive eyes seemed plausible enough to put in an email. As in, it was a term relating to a metallurgical phenomena observed by a fault and AI found an unrelated industry widget that contained the same term and suggested it was due to the use of said widget.

I don’t even really see the telltale AI writing signs of people using it to summarise documents or whatnot. Nor could I think how I could take what I do and use it to do it faster or more efficiently. So I don’t even think it’s being used to ingest and summarise stuff either.

In my experience, it’s far less useful outside of that. To the point where if AI disappeared tomorrow, it’d make approximately 0 difference to my overall life. I simply don’t find it useful, neither in my professional life nor my personal.

The only repeated use case I’ve found is throwing a PDF at it and asking it to translate the PDF. To its credit, it’s able to now OCR handwriting prior to translating which is nice.

It still doesn’t make a translated PDF. Yes, I know PDF is a shitty proprietary mess of undocumented functions. I don’t care - this is the vaunted AI, it’s apparently eating the entire jobs of programmers. Have it go create and A/B test an entire clean room implementation of the PDF format then.

Now it may be an underlying shim in a feature pipeline with which i interact but thats chasms apart from this “AI is about to eat all of our jobs”. It’s a tuned feature, such as improved translation, in that instance.

My experience from very sporadic use and observation of my colleagues is that, outside of tech, AI is much more of a “go and find the info, summarise it and give me the results” layer to the internet. It’s a slightly more convenient search engine. That’s it.

Maybe this will allow you to change it from a OneDrive folder to somewhere else?

We squeezed some track condition monitoring hardware into some locos but it was single-driver operations locations and we cannibalised some of the room that would have otherwise been occupied by the second driver.

I did find the Waitrose one and it was going to be my next buy, but my local didn't have it and I never got around to ordering it before Sainsburys came back in stock. Interesting that it's now cheaper, maybe I'll check again...

Doubly frustrating since mine is a small, single-drawer dishwasher, so pods are even worse since I can't break them down. It leads to me having way too much detergent in the dishwasher and I end up with residue on the dishes.

Prior to this, pre-Covid I used to use shadowsocks hosted on a DO droplet. Shadowsocks with obfs, or a newer equivalent (v2ray w/ vmess or vless protocol) and obfs (reality seems to be the current hotness) will probably work within Indonesia given their blocking will be way less sophisticated than China. The difference here is that it’s a proxy, not a VPN, but it makes it a lot easier to obfuscate its true nature than a VPN which stands out because obfuscation isn’t in its design.

Hosting on big public VPSs can be double edged. On one hand, blocking DO or AWS is huge collateral. On the other, it’s an obvious VPN endpoint and can help identify the type of traffic as something to block.

If you have access to reddit, r/dumbclub (believe it or not) has some relatively current info but it’s pretty poor signal to noise. Scratch around there for some leads though.

Note that this stuff is all brittle as hell to set up and I usually have a nightmarish time duct-taping it all together. That’s why I’m overjoyed my WireGuard tunnel has worked whenever I’ve visited for a year now.

One other left-field option, depending on your cost appetite, is a roaming SIM. Roaming by design tunnels all data back to your own ISP before routing out so even in China roaming SIMs aren’t blocked. It’s a very handy backup if you need a clear link to ssh into a box to set up the above, for example.

I call this the load-bearing 'just' - as in, 'oh, why don't you just...'

If I catch myself saying or writing that word, I kick myself and think about why I'm doing it. Usually I stop and reapproach my input.