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This is the age of modernist glaring white cabinets and tiles for every modern home. Imagine my surprise to stay at a recently renovated caravan park that is furnished in rustic federation shearer's quarters decor! Our mate OME has started a trend!

Great development if it works.

Takes a grubby type to destroy the only worldly possessions of people with nothing.

She was/is exceptionally good at her job of defending the indefensible and attacking the press. You have to admire her talent and confidence. She's only 28.

Trump goes to his doctor and takes off his hat to reveal a huge toad on the top of his head. “When did you notice that?” asked the doctor. And the toad answers: “It began as a boil on my ass.”

Nowadays I am forced to use the only tool that reduces that pain. It's called a debit card.

Purtting the intent aside, are those particular words racist? Just on the wording alone, I'd call them nationalistic as only the country was mentioned, not the person's race or religion. As an example, if an anglo saxon descent Australian person told a Pom of anglo saxon descent to piss off back to England, is that rascist even tough both parties are of the same race. Intent can differ, but the wording is the same in both cases. I always thought rascism was bias against someone because of their race, not nationality. If you are white and told two South Africans to piss off back to South Africa and one is black and one is white, is it racism in both cases, only in one case or in none?

Maybe not only an EV issue.....

People who worry that Covid Vaccine might change their genetic make-up, should welcome that possibility.

Which is why neighbourhood batteries and a more distributed grid in general makes sense. Keep generation, storage and usage close where possible.

You have to hand it to short people..... They can't reach it themselves.

Some people don't get what a will is........ I mean, come on, it's a dead giveaway.

This is you being quick?

In spite of all the stuff going on so far, It's gone beyond just a case of 'What has tRump done now?'.... Quoted from Pearls & Wisdom: "a group of 36 senior neurologists, forensic psychiatrists, general psychiatrists and mental health professionals experienced in the diagnosis of cognitive disorders and evaluation of dangerousness, who had signed an earlier statement in 2024, issued an update on 30 April of this year. They cited examples of Trump’s “marked deterioration in cognitive functioning, evidenced by disorganised and tangential speech, rambling digressions, factual confusions, unexplained sudden changes of course in strategic matters, both national and international, episodes of apparent somnolence during crucial public proceeding. Grandiose and delusional beliefs, including assertions of infallibility…claims that his decision-making authority is unlimited – with no need to consider domestic and international laws and constrained only by his ‘own morality’. Severely impaired judgment and impulse control…Significant loss of self-control (disinhibition) and getting stuck on the same thoughts or actions, unable to let go or move on (perseveration), including seemingly compulsive, manic-like late-night communications – e.g., 150 social media posts in one night.” They conclude: “it is our expert opinion that Donald J. Trump is mentally unfit to be the President of the United States, and that steps to remove him from office must be undertaken with the greatest urgency”. And this bloke has 24/7/365 access to instantly start launching numerous preplanned nuclear ATTACKS. https://johnmenadue.com/post/2026/07/for-president-trump-starting-nuclear-war-as-easy-as-sending-a-tweet/

Why are we surprised? Trump admires dictators and despots. He has stripped the top level of administration of anyone with knowledge and brains, and replaced them with yes-men. The only required attribute is loyalty (and tribute). He has openly said that the American public won't have to vote again, and is actively dismantling democracy. He has used his position to gain him and his equally disgusting family billions - the most corrupt public figure, let alone president, ever. He supports and enables the worst white supremacists in the country, allows and encourages political violence when it's against his adversaries, and is racist himself. And we're surprised when something like this happens?

It's a bit cool here in Nyngan. We are camped by the river, enjoying a glass of red whilst dinner simmers on our little fire pot. Life's good.

So when my son and partner picked us up from the airport they were planning to go to their sea shanty at the pub club. They asked if we would like to come? We had a brilliant time drinking beer and singing shanties. Many obscure shanties. They also make up the verses for the crowd to join in at the chorus. They have written shanties about public transport and current political issues. The crowd varies in age from 10 to very old. Most people seem to be in their 20s or 30s They sang this shanty bellow in honour token Australian. We had an absolute ball and intend to find a club like this near us.

Can't work my wife out. First she says "Sure! Get yourself a tattoo." Now she's whining about the bagpipers in the garden.

If you have solar, smart meters are essential as standard meters are unable to deal with feed in tariffs. I am a VPP (virtual power plant) & buy sell electricity on the wholesale market. My monthly average buy price at the moment is 18.3 cents/kWh & my average FIT is 20.3c/kWh. I have a 18.64kWh battery & sell power to the grid usually from 5pm to 7pm when the price is high. This is all managed by my system provider as the spot price is checked every 5 minutes and my system is told what to do. It even curtails my solar production when the battery is full and the spot FIT goes negative so I do not pay for exporting to the grid.

A guy hears a noise outside at his shed. He looks out the window and sees a burglar trying to break into the shed. He quickly calls 000 and explains the situation. The operator says "Sorry sir, we have no resources to send." The guy looks out again, and says, "You have to come. He's stealing my mower." The operator again says," I told you sir, we have no resources to send." Then the guy says, "Oh, don't worry about it, I just shot the twat. He's dead on the lawn.' Within five minutes, there were two helicopters, six police cars and fourteen police swarming around his house. There was no body on the lawn. The police said, "Sir, you lied to us. You didn't shoot anyone." The guy said, "You started it by saying you had no resources."

I know the feeling. Arthritis in the knees means normal knee propulsion to get up off the ground is long gone. I end up like a beetle on my back, then have to roll over on all fours and get up that way.

OME, give Jerry his keyboard back.

So the Iran invasion achieved its purpose.

Jerry? Is that you?

After the rain finally came a month or so ago, the earth burst forth with mallow weed which took over where I would have liked to have had a lawn, save for two years of drought. It had grown to shin-deep in thick patches, and I knew I had to cut it down. Unfortunately, my lawn mower hasn't been used for two years, either. I pulled it out of the shed, and put in some fuel, which had been in the can for two years as well. You knop already that teh mower would not start. So I had been thinking for a while that the mower had probably had it, and I done some looking around at the price of a new one - about $400. As a last resort, I tipped out the old fuel and oput in some freash stuff. I rejoiced when the mower fired up. I set about attacking one section of my yard and will knock over teh rest of it tomorrow. Eight bucks worth of fresh fuel save me a coulple of hundred bucks, abd gave me a bit of satisfaction for finally starting a job that was high on the To Do list.

He means a BUBALUS (Latin for gazelle)

Can we have some video of OME leaping like a gazelle?

Where there's a Will there's a bunch of squabbling relatives.

Here's a literary gripe. I'm reading, and enjoying, a series of fiction books set in modern Edinburgh about the lives of people living in a small, middle class area of the city. The writing is good and make for good bedtime reading. However my gripe concerns the practice of the author to have his characters include either Latin or foreign phrases in their speches. Sometimes I know the phrase, but very often I have no idea. Of course, since the characters are Scots and the setting is Scotland, some of those unique Gaelic words sometime appear, but that is what is called "atmosphere'. What gripes me is that these phrases cause me to stumble, losing the otherwise free flow of the writing. I have to pause and wonder if my interpretation of the phrase makes sense. Frotunately, the words are printed in Bold, so I can see them coming and can decisde whether to pause at them, or ignore them and leap over them like a gazelle.

To appreciate The Goodies one had to have been exposed to English humour. The show involving pizza and hot dogs suggests to me that it was American, and we all know that American humour is not as intelligent as that of the British. The British made excellent children's programmes. Did anyone ever watch Worzel Gummage starring Jon Pertwee and Una Stubbs? Pertwee was, of course the third Dr Who.

No one I know Mentioned it. Men's shed tomorrow. I'll ask there. They did something like this over 20 years ago. I was randomly selected to be on the group in the MT Macedon area that formulated various aspects of it. The idea has Merit.. I support the idea of doing such things. It's acting responsibly. Nev.

Rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic??????

Canola time was always a pretty time to fly.

I don't have a lot of time, so. I will try to be quick (given I have only skimmed the posts since OME asked the question). The algorithm is not predictive in the sense of predicting the future. The predict what you meant by what you typed, and whether or not their response will make sense. For example, if you asked how many legs a dog normally has, it will predict that 4 is the correct answer; not that my some genetic mutation caused by increasing radiation in the atmosphere, they will grow 5 legs in the future. Well, not unless you ask it, anyway. But even if you did, it would use existing data to try and predict the correct answer based on the data it has, not to perform its own scientific analysis and determine for itself. It may take the factors and apply it to an existing theory to mimic scientific analysis and intelligent conclusion drawing, but it is not doing that itself. In terms of AI implementation, it is likely to be a lower level language such as C or C++ = not python because it is too slow; the end point AI functions can be done in Python, but that is on a precomputed large dataset - usually. The algorithm will be surprising small.. usual Bayes theorem or something similar. It is able to be repeated over billions of nodes - or data points. The code will likely be recursive in building the precomputed data set to apply simpler probability maps across the data you provide. And it will likely be recursive in using that map to answer your question. By recursion we mean the same code calls itself.. So, you will be able to crawl heterogenous data sets, over and over using the same code developing deep nested stacks (well, heaps to be accurate) of responses from which it will map as many of the different types of data that can be used to probably represent what ever bit of data it actually is. Tagging data is old these days.. That is what these maps do. This of something like if you type the number 4 into your LLM. That is easy, because it is represented by whatever coding mechanism you are using... and there are only a handful of coding mechanisms - ASCII, EBCDIC (not used anymore) UTF-8, UTF-16 and a few others. But, they are translated to the discrete representation of 4 to AI. No thinking required. Now, say you provide it a scanned doc, which contains the number 4 somewhere. It has to read all of the pixels and look at the shape of each character to determine if it is a letter, number, whitespace, part of a diagram, etc. Say it worked out it was a digit. Now it was to work out what digit it is? It has to look through its maps/nodes and get the most likely digit it is.. it predicts what digit is is because it spits out a probability index of what it has been taught what that digit could possibly be, across any digit which it may match. Is it a 4, or is it a H.. It also has to take into account font. As you know, a 4 can be represented very differently in different fonts... So, the sort answer to your question is that there will be a set of probability algorithms that will read data, build probability maps, and then apply the same probability algorithms to inputs and compare to what it has learned. Machine learning means it constantly refines its probability maps. The technical implementation is likely to to be a lower level language (a lot of Python maths/stats libraries are written in C++).. and there will be a lot of recursion.

I knew I liked De Havillands for.some reason

No point posting them here then, Nev.

I took an instructional flight from Moorabbin today. To be honest, there's a lot I could write in the gripes thread, particularly around a) the commerical properties that have gone up, and b) the introduction of landing fees. The urban sprawl is there - the training area has less and less open country. But, that is progress. But, the flight was quite a good one. Just practiced stalls and forced landings.. Didn't die, to that is a positive (for some, I guess not ;-)) The young instructor was very professional and a natural instructor.. sad that an airline or other jet career beckons.. The flight was in an Archer with full EFIS.. Took a bit of getting used to - to be honest would need a bit more time to get comfy with it (and a manual and some prep time). Weather played ball as well.

All things considered, I find gravity somewhat attractive.. It creates an atmosphere all of it's own. Nev

Some guys formed a band they called 999 megabytes. Still haven't got a gig.

That's my excuse too. I'm really much younger than I look.

Well, a week has passed since I arrived on these fair shores.. I decided to travel up to Tocumwal today to look at some land that may feature in my retirement. But, a nice surprise - I reconnected with my ab initio flight instructor of over 30 years ago! It was fantastic to meet up We flapped the gums chatted about old times and of course our different journeys; and I happen to be in town of the evening of the local aero club meet. So, will do the three S's and trundle off shortly to meet the local aviation fraternity, Doesn't get much better than that!

We messaged our son in NZ to remind him of our flight details. My wife referred to us as FIFO workers. My son's message back was "f***ing Australians, coming here and taking all the jobs"😆

In similar news, because I was born with brown eyes I've never had a period.

From the Guardian...

Just pointing out something many may not have known.