There might be something they can do with respect to “unauthorised computer access” laws. I don’t really know much about our laws in that area. But failing that, I can’t imagine there’s anything they can do to get them in legal trouble.

They could absolutely revoke API keys, though that would not prevent a blunter web scraping tactic.

They either get stuck in a loop or lead to a dead-end page that doesn’t have any outgoing links.

No, the price is a fact. If the price were included in a paragraph of prose, that prose could be copyrighted. The whole design and layout of their site could maybe be considered creative enough to be copyrighted. But the raw numbers cannot.

Certainly interesting, but I feel like the X-axis needs to somehow account for all the valuable qualities of the food. If we’re wanting to compare meats and meat alternatives, that means at least protein, iron, and energy, not just protein.

that’s technically their intellectual property

No it’s not. You can’t copyright a fact, only its presentation. There might be some laws that they could legitimately use to stop you doing this, but it wouldn’t be copyright.

Huh, I’ve seen Manscaped ads in the form of specifically-placed sponsorships in podcasts and at the end of videos. But I don’t think I’ve ever seen their ads come up in a randomised ad slot.

I also never order pizza on an app though, so maybe that’s their target audience.

fwiw Sabine has a history of commenting outside of her area of expertise and having some very bad takes.

She’s an astrophysicist. Listen to her closely when she’s talking about what’s going on in space. But her comments on other subjects such as climate, trans rights, and, yes, nuclear energy, should be taken as those of a random interested layperson. Maybe they’re right from time to time, but they don’t deserve any special consideration.

In that video, for example, she herself admits to ignoring the planning stage, and she’s only talking about countries that already have large nuclear industries. Australia has no nuclear expertise to begin with, so it’s guaranteed to take a lot longer for us than it does in places like Germany and America. And even then she ends up admitting it’s at least twice as expensive as alternative options. She tries to downplay this by making a joke about astrophysics and orders of magnitude, but here on Earth that’s a big difference, and that’s in the best case.

The template link that will show what needs to be drawn over the canvas is here

That link doesn’t take me anywhere useful, just to a countdown with links to other socials. But I just want to say I hope the template shows a 7-pointed Federation Star. When I saw the Australian flag on the Reddit version I kept trying to fix it but having my changes overwritten, because a bunch of people were determined to let the star have 8 points.

Are you 12? This is the kind of context-less pedantry that could only come from someone with no real-world experience.

Words can have different meanings in different contexts, and can belong in different categories depending.

I don’t think those 4 friends ever worked with Eric Burdon, Hilton Valentine, Chas Chandler, Alan Price, or John Steel actually, so the data probably isn’t being affected.

Hey as long as you’re advocating for better infrastructure so people whose commutes are within a distance that’s cyclable can do so, it doesn’t bother me (and I doubt many other advocates would be bothered) if you drive. The thing that bothers me is that we frequently see people with long commutes explain that as though it’s a reason nobody can ride, and therefore we shouldn’t bother putting in the infrastructure.

The obvious counter is the fact that if everyone with a 10 km or less commute got out of their car and onto a bike, there would be so much less traffic. You’d probably halve the peak hour commute time for those 40 km commutes as a result.

As a small side note though, the distance is a problem, the “dropping kids off to school” is not. With good infrastructure, kids can be ridden in a bike trailer, in the front of a bakfiets, or on a kiddy seat. Older children can ride their own bikes alongside a parent. And teenagers can ride by themselves the whole journey. Bikes are amazing for independence of growing kids, rather than needing to be ferried everywhere by parents. But only if we build the infrastructure for them.

Of course there’s also a big overlap between cycling advocates and urbanism. And that overlap obligates me to ask: is your commute 42 km because you love living way out rurally even though you work in the city, or is it because housing prices are so obscene that that’s the only place you could afford to live with your family? Because a key point for urbanists is that it should be possible for anyone to be able to live close to where they work, in large part thanks to reducing the cost of housing by drastically increasing supply of medium and higher density housing. And that medium and higher density housing should come in a variety of configurations, instead of being almost exclusively 1 and 2 bedroom places with a small number of 3 bedroom, and 4 bedroom is basically non-existent, as is currently the case.

And as an urbanist, I’d say that even if you do just want to live 42 km out, it should be possible to take a train in. It’s probably too low-density for public transport alone to be viable, but a 5 k–or–less cycle to a train station served every 15 minutes or more is absolutely possible, if there were political will.

A problem, for sure, and the evidence tells us it’s a bad idea.

But the evidence also seems fuzzy enough that it seems very unlikely that this is the primary problem with cycling in this country.

How is the government (who has to end up building the stuff) getting this AI data? They’re paying some AI company for it. Money that would be better spent directly on infrastructure we already know we need.

The better question is: without the technobro hype, what do we actually have to gain from this AI technology?

No, I just think it’s silly to talk about applying AI to something that just manifestly does not need AI. It’s a dumb buzzword at best, an excuse to spend less money actually building infrastructure because more money is going to AI consultants at worst.

Like I said, if it were about filling in the little cracks once we have a really good overall network, I could maybe get behind it. But right now there’s just zero need for it, because the stuff that’s missing is so obvious and there’s so much of it. At least in Brisbane, the Council could decide to triple its spend on bike infrastructure and still take a decade before the big problems we’ve been calling for action on for years are all exhausted.

1. Better cycling infrastructure. Yeah, no shit. We need more paths, more direct paths, and more connected paths. You should be able to go anywhere you want using a route that it at least as direct as the most direct driving route, by bike, without ever sharing a road with cars above 30 km/h, and with a minimal number of road crossings where the cars get priority.
2. Use AI to identify where cycling infrastructure needs to go. 🙄 Or you could just ask cyclists. We’ve got no shortage of ideas of places that are severely lacking already. Maybe the AI could be useful once most of the basic network is done, but not today.
3. Improve transport modelling to include cycling. Yes! Add in induced demand effects on infrastructure for cycling, public transport, and cars. Use models that understand traffic evaporation when reducing road widths or adding modal filters. Our transport engineers are currently woefully behind the times.
4. Politicians need to actually care about cycling. Yeah, no shit.
5. Make active transport funding a priority. Yup. Our councillors love to harp on about how they spent X amount on cycling infrastructure, but they never put that in context of how much is spent on roads. But also, let’s make sure that money goes where it’s most useful. Spending billions building one green bridge is great, but is still much less useful than building many kilometres of good separated bikeway for the same price. (The real answer is to do both!)
6. Recognise the health benefits of cycling. Yes, but this isn’t really an actionable item. It’s just more reason to do the above items, particularly pointing to 4.

They instead should take a State-like approach

They did take a State-like approach.

The Australian Government supports Israel’s genocide against the Palestinian people. The ABC supports Israel’s genocide against the Palestinian people. State-like.

string theory lied to us

I didn’t read the “in med school” part and was expecting the reveal to be that she actually took a material science course.

The ones I have.

That article itself explains the shortcomings of the concept of political capital in the 2013 political environment, and I think those shortcomings have only grown over the decade since it was written.

I also think there’s an additional issue at play today that wasn’t present (or at least wasn’t as significant) in 2013, which is a deeper sense of discomfort with the overall status quo of politics. A sense of unhappiness that may be reason that taking more bold action, accompanied with a sufficiently strong explanation, could be much more viable than it would have 20 years ago. This isn’t necessarily incompatible with the theory of political capital; it could be described as a factor that significantly reduces the political cost of implementing those policies. But it does just add more on to why discussions of political capital are less valuable than they would have been in Keating’s day.