• When did Australia join the 20th century?
  
  Anyway, I'll be upgrading from my 100Mb internet plan this weekend to a cheaper 500Mb one with the same provider.  I have a business plan for the static IP and extra support (one of which I depend on and the other I have never used), and they didn't offer the cheap fast plans that recently became available to consumers.
  
  Now apparently they do.
  
  
  I could upgrade as high as 2Gb now but that costs twice as much as my current 100Mb plan (for 20x the speed) and requires a tech visit to upgrade the modem.
  
  Update: Done.  Went from 100Mb to around 250Mb, at least as measured from my laptop's WiFi.
  
  Apparently these new plans became available just last month.  Consumers automatically got the speed upgrade, but business customers had to request a plan change.
  
  It was completely painless; even my SSH connections to work didn't hiccup.  I made sure I could access all my servers through my bastion host just in case, but there was no need to worry.
  
  
  
• Also bought two weed eaters today because my old one went phut.
  
  The old one was a Bosch cordless, which I bought because I have several other Bosch tools and a stockpile of batteries.  It worked well until it when phut so I went onto Amazon to buy a new one and they're out of stock.  Bosch sells at least three different models in Australia and Amazon has none of them.
  
  So I found something cheap with decent reviews for about $70 with two batteries and a charger, and bought that.
  
  Then I discovered that Bosch runs its own store on eBay, and bought their current model for about $85 without a battery.
  
  Weeds better look out!  In a week.  Out here in rural Australia, same-day delivery is still a pipe dream, even if 2Gb internet is readily available.
  
  
  
• The Earth is getting darker and scientists are trying to find out why.  (404 Media)
  
  We've been warned about this since at least the 1970s.
  
  Or wait, was that the other thing?
  
  
  
• Digital ID: The new chains of capitalist surveillance.  (The Slow Burning Fuse)
  
  Ignore this woman, she is clearly deranged.
  
  
  
• Everything is terrorism in Trump's America.  (The Verge)
  
  No, not everything.  Just terrorism.
  
  
  
• Apple has removed the ICEBlock app from its App Store.  (The Verge)
  
  Like that.
  
  
  
• AI has already run out of training data.  (Business Insider)  (archive site)

  With the web tapped out, developers are turning to synthetic data - machine-generated text, images, and code. That approach offers limitless supply, but also risks overwhelming models with low-quality output or AI slop.

  The risk there is 100%.
  
  
  
  

Musical Interlude

1 There are two problems the Democrats have in claiming that they are faced with politicized charges of terrorism. The first is that quite a lot of observers might have come to a conclusion that the Democrats in 2020 were literally running on a platform of being terrorists. The second is that they have actually lost a lot of goodwill with their opponents.

2 As I watch things from here in the Southern Hemisphere, it seems that the Democrats have only doubled down on running as terrorists.