Now at @aj@gts.sadauskas.id.au @ ajsadauskas @aus.social

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3 yr. ago

@DavidDoesLemmy @Zagorath Here's an article about a company named RedFlow, that has sold its fourth grid-scale long-duration zinc bromine flow battery to California:

https://reneweconomy.com.au/redflow-tapped-as-preferred-battery-provider-for-a-fourth-major-california-project/

Where's RedFlow based? Brisbane.

An alternative to bromine flow batteries is grid-scale lithium.

And where is one of the world's largest lithium minjng regions? Western Australia.

The Coalition's policy is to ban any further investment in grid-scale batteries from RedFlow or with WA lithium, along with banning further investments in wind and solar.

Instead, it wants to hand roughly half a trillion dollars to largely foreign-owned multinationals to build nuclear power plants in Australia.

Assuming the Coalition can deliver 7 large-scale first-of-its-kind infrastructure projects on time and on budget in Australia, it will take 10 to 15 years to build them. In the meantime, Australia will continue burning coal and natural gas.

And all this for an energy source that costs substantially more per megawatt hour than renewables, coal, or gas.

@sunzu @dvdnet62 Oh come now. If there's one thing Mozilla doesn't need anyone's help with, it's shooting itself in the foot with its own gun.

Now excuse me, I have some Pocket articles to read on my Firefox OS phone...

@makeasnek On a broader note, I think possibly the best approach for decentralised, open-sourced web search might be an evolution on the SearXNG model.

At the top of the funnel, you have meta search engines that query and aggregate results from a number of smaller niche search engines.

The metasearch engines are open source, anyone with a spare server or a web hosting account can spin one up.

For some larger sites that are trustworthy, such as Wikipedia, the site's own search engine might be what's queried.

For the Fediverse and other similar federated networks, the query is fed through a trusted node on the network.

And then there's a host of smaller niche search engines, which only crawl and index pages on a small number of websites vetted and curated by a human.

(Perhaps on a particular topic? Or a local library or university might curate a list of notable local websites?)

(Alternatively, it might be that a crawler for a web index like Curlie.org only crawls websites chosen by its topic moderators.)

In this manner, you could build a decent web search engine without needing the scale of Google or Microsoft.

@makeasnek @schizoidman YaCy is still around.

And https://searx.space/ is an open source metasearch search engine with many instances. (Try https://searx.be/ if you want to test it out.)

SearX/SearXNG allows you to aggregate results from a number of different search engines. You choose which ones, and they're stored in your browser without setting up an account.

@sabreW4K3 Plume doesn't appear to be active, unfortunately 🥺

There's a notice on the official Join Plume website saying the former developers don't have the time to maintain it anymore. Most of the former public instances now throw up errors of various kinds.

WriteFreely ( @writefreely ) is alive and well. I was seriously toying with the idea of setting up a blog through its main instance, which is called Write.as Professional. The sticking point for me was that the official on-platform monetisation tool (Coil) appears to be dead, and doesn't support members-only posts (like Ghost).

Ghost, when federation goes live, looks like it will be the best option for my blog.

WordPress plus @pfefferle 's plugins is another great option, depending on what you want to use it for. (There's no shortage of WP plugins!)

As for Lemmy, I could see a blogging-focussed front end being created for it, in the same way FediBB put a traditional message board front end on it, but one doesn't appear to exist at present.

@trk @TassieTosser Knox City Council in outer-eastern Melbourne did exactly this: https://www.knox.vic.gov.au/whats-happening/news/keeping-your-cats-safe-and-secured .

The council did it because some of its suburbs (The Basin, Ferntree Gully, Upper Ferntree Gully, parts of Boronia, Lysterfield) border national parks and the Dandenong Ranges.

Younger cats can adapt to living indoors.

But the challenge was with older cats, who are used to roaming around.

The happy medium would be to phase it in over five to 10 years, where any new cats registered or adopted after a particular date have to stay indoors, but older cats can continue to roam.

@geillescas @jajabor @asklemmy That, and also making files/emails/calendar events synced across your computer and your phone.

@denshirenji @asklemmy On photos, does NextCloud Photos or Memories play nice with Digikam or any other desktop photo gallery applications? And what about Immich?

@Seagoon @TinyBreak Totally.

Honestly, I feel icky just thinking about KFC food, it's just so greasy.

Unless you have a specific craving for the greasiest thing imaginable because you're pregnant/emotionally eating/have cramps/have a hangover/are really drunk/are six-years-old, I don't know why anyone would want it?

@Ilandar @TinyBreak Is there a good Korean or Asian grocery near your house? It's worth looking up on Google Maps.

Assuming there is, stop by and pick up some Korean rice cakes, gochujang, and daishi stock.

(I have seen gochujang in Coles, fish stock can work as a substitute for daishi.)

If you can track down these three main ingredients, you can make yourself tteokbokki:

https://mykoreankitchen.com/tteokbokki-spicy-rice-cakes/

@Nath @StudChud Nath, it's great you had a good job experience.

But not all call centre jobs are like that.

Many call centres are micro-micromanaged.

Adherence to work hours. Conformance to schedule. Call handling time. Calls per worked hour.

There's often caller feedback forms, and those irrational or malicious customers basically decide if you keep your job.

The calls are recorded, and your team leader or dedicated contact centre staff listen in randomly.

In many commercial organisations, there's a mandate to upsell or cross-sell, even if it's an angry customer who wants to close their accounts.

In those cases, you also get judged on the average value of products you sell, and the percentage of calls you upsell on.

You have already angry people who have just been on hold for up to an hour, and have been transferred across different departments and teams.

And there are some men who are either creepy or misogynistic when dealing with women over the phone. And yes, clearly it's a small minority of men. But that small minority exists, and they're shitty.

@Seagoon Overheard in the office...

Colleague one: "As you are aware, we've decided to postpone event until August or September. Can you change the dates on the website please?"

Colleague two: "No, I was not aware, thanks for letting me know. When was the decision made? I'll update the website."

Colleague one: "I am very sorry, I thought you were aware."

The "Manager" strikes again.

@Gibsonisafluffybutt @Seagoon Lovely post-modern art piece by Gibson 😸

@StudChud @Seagoon Congratulations! 😊

Many years ago I worked in a call centre and it was utterly soul destroying.

You'll feel so much better once you're out of that toxic environment.

@calhoon2005 @Seagoon Sort of.

Basically, when the first 4G and 4G LTE networks were first being rolled out, the technology to make voice calls over 4G networks wasn't quite ready yet. So the earliest 4G phones dropped back to 3G for calls, but used faster 4G networks for internet and data.

Eventually, the telcos rolled out a technology upgrade that allowed calls to be made on 4G LTE mobile networks, called VoLTE (voice over LTE).

But it only worked on newer 4G/4G LTE phones that supported VoLTE for calls. Older models still dropped back to 3G for voice calls

Sounds to me like your MIL has an older 4G LTE phone that still falls back to 3G for calls, instead of making them over the 4G LTE network.

If that's the case, she'll no longer be able to make calls with that phone once Optus 3G shuts down.

Time for an upgrade.

@Thornburywitch @bacon To all whom this may concern,

I am writing to express my strong and sincere recommendation for Mr. Simon Fluffybutt as a candidate for this position.

In his previous role, Simon unlocked substantial value, leading both directly and indirectly to a strengthening of the sales pipeline, while leveraging and fully capitalising on synergistic new opportunities for revenue growth.

In a dynamic, fast-paced, lean, and agile environment, Simon demonstrates a natural flair for delivering outcomes while expertly liaising across multiple internal and external stakeholder groups with divergent expectations, while diligently managing competing priorities.

He is both a dynamic self-starter who thrives when taking ownership of projects to drive strategic results, as well as a collaborative team player who works efficiently towards shared goals and KPIs.

I have full confidence in Simon's extensive expertise, knowledge, and skillset, which will contribute meaningfully and substantively to the long-term growth of your organisation going forward.

If you have any questions in regards to this letter, please don't hesitate to reach out.

Kindest regards,

AJ

@StudChud Even though I'm not directly in his department (thankfully!), I am affected by his decisions.

I mentioned to a colleague today: "Have you noticed manager has a habit of springing decisions on people, and not taking things into consideration even if they have been explained to him?"

She said yes, and gave me some of her own examples.

So it has been noticed by people — although unfortunately the people who he answers up to are new in the role as well.

Earlier today, I was in a meeting with Manager and some people from the business sales team.

Marketing had wanted to run an end of financial year promotion for business customers.

Manager overruled them and decided that they should instead run a discount campaign aimed at consumers. (It's a small team that doesn't have the resources to do both.)

(This despite the fact that he said himself a couple of months ago that he wanted to focus more on business sales.)

(Manager's idea is the stupid campaign they don't want to do.)

I explained to the sales team that because the consumer discount campaign was happening — the one marketing doesn't want to do — there wouldn't be a promotional campaign for business.

This apparently hadn't occurred to Manager, even though it was clearly explained to him. (I was in the meeting when it happened.)

"Well, ummmm, maybe we can do both?"

And then this afternoon I had a meeting with a colleague. One of Manager's brilliant ideas is for her to cross-promote a product from Manager's division with a product from another division.

"Okay, well before you go too deep into this, you might just want to be aware that the IT systems in Manager's division aren't integrated with the systems from the other division."

She gives me a mildly horrified look. What do you mean not integrated, she asks?

"Many years ago, Manager's division used to be a completely separate organisation. So it has its own separate IT systems. That means its own customer database, its own accounting package, its own content management system. Many of the platforms are different to the ones the rest of the organisation uses.

"Nothing is integrated.

"IT is planning to eventually move everything across to the same systems, but in the meantime any data that you want to move from one system to the other has to be done manually.

Her face dropped as she realised her workload was now at least triple what she had expected. Why didn't Manager tell me any of this?

And that's a very good question...

@Seagoon Feeling really annoyed at an acting middle manager at our workplace right now.

He's terrible at communicating. He refuses to listen to people. He makes decisions and orders people to do stuff without asking anyone if the thing he wants to do is even possible.

There's a whole string of bad decisions as a result, and everyone else is left to clean up his mess afterwards.

For example, there's an event that was scheduled on a particular date. An email was sent out to the people (outside the organisation) who are likely to attend.

Before that email was sent, he decided to postpone it. Just he didn't let anyone know until after the emails were sent.

Another example. One of my colleagues was told she had to drop everything to find leads for a new product that he decided to launch in two weeks. He then blamed her for not coming up with enough leads.

He's decided the IT team needs to roll out a new automated reporting system right now. The IT department has already said it's not adding any features to that system because they're getting rid of it in the next year or so. They don't answer to him, and will just refuse to do it. So there's a whole series of meetings now planned because he's insisting that it has to happen.

There's also a whole marketing campaign that the marketing team thinks is a stupid idea that won't work, because they tried it last year and it didn't work. He's insisting they do it anyway.

And there's a whole string of decisions like this.

The thing is, I'm not sure he's aware at just how demotivating his unique management style is to those around him.

Sorry for the rant, I'm just feeling really frustrated right now.

@Seagoon So recently, I've been thinking about possibly getting a buzzcut.

I don't think I'd be brave enough to go for a full buzzcut, plus I like having long hair.

But maybe a half-shaved head? Or an undercut?

Has anyone else here had one? If so, what was the reaction?