If you are wondering why the US government is upset about this, here is a brief list of companies below that have headquartered in Ireland because they are a bit of a tax haven. So I consider this to be a quite astute move by the Irish government to place pressure upon the US government via its corporate overlords.

Apple: Historically used notorious loopholes to lower its effective tax rate to under 2%. Following a landmark European Court of Justice ruling, the company was ordered to pay back $14 billion (€13 billion) in unlawful tax benefits to the Irish state.

Microsoft: Routinely routes astronomical sums through Irish subsidiaries. One of its main Irish entities notoriously posted £220 billion in profit in a single year while paying zero corporate tax via loophole setups.

Google (Alphabet) and Meta (Facebook): Both long utilized complex accounting strategies like the "Double Irish" to transfer intellectual property (IP) and globally generated revenues into the Irish jurisdiction.

Medtronic: A major U.S. medical device firm that legally moved its corporate headquarters to Ireland via a $48 billion tax inversion acquisition.

Allergan: A pharmaceutical giant that executed a similar $66 billion corporate inversion to establish its tax base in Ireland.

Other Tech & Biotech Leaders: Major corporations like Pfizer, Oracle, Dell, Airbnb, and LinkedIn maintain substantial operations and book vast non-U.S. revenues through Ireland.

"I call the big one 'bitey'."

poorly planned

Have you been living under a rock? This messaging about the AusAlert test has been going on for a solid two months, on television, on radio, in printed media, and all over the internet.

The alert system utilises existing software in nearly every modern smartphone and it is used in plenty of countries around the world.

Japan uses it for earthquake alerts before the actual earthquake arrives.

States in the US use it for missing kid alerts - when they've just been noticed missing, right in that critical timeframe where they are easiest to find.

South Korea uses it for alerting when their North Korean neighbours are getting a bit antsy, and for other, less emergency-ish uses. When I was in South Korea during covid the local government would loudly broadcast daily infection numbers as an emergency alert, so I went into my phone's settings and turned it off

Of course, the Australian government won't mention how to turn it off because they want people to be aware of these alerts. But for people with hidden phones it's very important information to know, and I dislike that no mention of the ability to silence it has been made in media.

In Android, it's under Settings -> Safety and Emergency -> Wireless Emergency Alerts. You can turn off numerous sub-categories of emergency alerts in there.

In iPhone, it's in Settings -> Notifications -> Government Alerts/Enhanced Safety Alerts -> Again, you can turn off any categories you deem irrelevant.

English definitely needs more clues for pronunciation. Plenty of homographs could have been cleared up with diacritics. Wind/Wind, Bow/Bow, Sewer/Sewer, etc.

I actually have been using claude to go through all my old projects and review from a security perspective.

It flags a heap of things that I never considered, mainly because a lot of my projects were ad-hoc solutions to various issues that were written in a hurry and never intended to be visible to the general internet. But it also has been suggesting architectural and robustness changes that have some value, as a lot of stuff I wrote grew organically and weren't structured particularly well for future growth.

He's using a "thorn" cuz he's so tistic and awesome.

The poster's stance is that one day they hope to see thorns in AI generated text.

This is probably quite difficult to actually happen, as LLMs will see the characters as a spelling mistake compared to their general corpus of text and correct them.

In the meantime it makes their posts difficult to parse and irritates other readers, so surely this can be considered a win for everyone in the fight against AI. /s

NASA didn't think the surface of Mars where they landed the rover would be so hard and rocky, basically.

They need all-purpose wheels that can traverse sand/gravel/bedrock, and to go through sand they need to have a large surface area to distribute the weight and stop it from getting stuck.

But when you drive over bedrock sprinkled with the occasional bit of gravel, the point contact pressure of the gravel is high enough to break through the parts of the wheel designed to sit on sand, in the same kind of way that you treading on a little bit of Lego hurts, you're putting your whole body weight on a very small object.

Then you add in the fact that they need to be as light as possible, and also need to withstand -60 to -80 degree C temperatures and a lot of UV (so rubber/nylon/plastic wheels are out) and you end up with the compromise wheel that they have that can be easily damaged.

Consider only exposing a VPN service, like Wireguard.

Then when you are away from home, it's one tap / click to be back on your LAN again.

Seems like a quick way to get all your research and assets forcefully absorbed into a shadowy government department.

"Hey Steve , it's lunch time, we're going out to that hot wings place, wanna come?"

"Sure let me just set this job up.... ok. Let's get out of here!"

1.5 hours later....

"Right , I'll just check and see where it's up t... oh no. Nonononononono. Nononononononononononoonono!"

Bring back the CES.

Privatisation of a service that is a hard requirement for the dole means that there is no need for those providers to provide quality outcomes for the people forced to use their services.

Edit: oh, there are "requirements" in place for these companies to get their money. This just means that it's an endless game of effort minimalisation for employment companies so they can extract maximum profit (See also: the current Aged Care debacle). Nationalise the jobs system, let's keep that money in-house for a better outcome.

I want someone to bring it up in the political sphere just to see what Senator Pauline Hanson says about it.

If she approves of it, she loses the backing of billionaires, if she disapproves it, she loses the backing of the Aussie Battlers cookers.

Which one, which one.....