Daisy Leigh

just had autocorrect change “awoo” to “swoop”, so I guess my fursona is no longer a golden retriever but rather an australian magpie, watch out im coming for your eyeballs

Can we have a moratorium on transport services called The Spirit Of The Place That It Goes? There’s obviously the Spirit of Tasmania ferry, but what used to be the diesel Tilt Train from Brisbane to Cairns is now the Spirit of Queensland, and one of SeaLink’s two ferries is the Spirit of Kangaroo Island, like it’s been done, come up with something else

I am at the town market in Penneshaw, on Kangaroo Island in regional South Australia, and it’s a very small market that nonetheless hits every stereotype of the sorts of stalls you get at a country town market, good and bad. We’ve got: • hippie-looking shawls and other related bits and bobs • shockingly good French patisserie run out of the back of a Ford Transit • freshly baked bread • someone who’s bought one of those heat presses and started a “business” of printing AI slop onto ceramic mugs • homemade jams and preserves • handmade leather goods • handmade soaps and candles • handmade crocheted and knitted things • secondhand books

RE: https://mastodon.social/@invalidname/117295247645401965 The very last sentence of this is the most 2026 sentence ever

straight people are all like “boo hoo hoo when do we get straight pride?” and the answer is LITERALLY TODAY, there’s a whole-ass parade celebrating straight culture, there’s even a public holiday, we don’t get a public holiday! #Melbourne #AFLGrandFinal #DayBeforeTheAustralianFootballLeagueGrandFinalPublicHoliday

This isn’t an original idea but rather a distillation of the ideas of others in a way that made it click for me, but: AI slop code review is so much more draining because it is a fundamentally different task; your job goes from verifying and sense checking someone else’s human understanding to, oftentimes, developing the human understanding that the “author” has not bothered to undertake at a more-than-perfunctory level. Which is exhausting in itself and ALSO violates the social contract of code review.

Conferences: we have set the CFP to close at the end of day Anywhere on Earth (AoE) so that submitters don’t have to do timezone math! Me: hmmmmmm okay so I’m UTC+10 and AoE means UTC-12, 10+12 is 22, so that means I can keep putting it off until 10pm the following day

The existence of metres in Outer Wilds implies the existence of a Hearthian French Revolution

Here’s another one: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ScvfRP9ViIw&feature=youtu.be But yeah, in general, back home an iced coffee is something a bloke-y tradie would grab for a pick-me-up on the way to the jobsite.

RE: https://mastodon.gamedev.place/@eniko/117292152041410285 absolutely not, it is totally reasonable to want to store your children in a box in a cool, dry place away from direct sunlight for the first 18 years of their life and expect them to become well-adjusted adults

Last weekend’s weather was beautiful, but how are we all feeling about Third Winter this morning? #melbourne

it’s cute when girls modify things to charge over usb-c

I have successfully made it to Brisbane and onto one of their weird skinny trains

Me eating breakfast in my hotel in Brisbane before the opening day of #PyConAU while on the TV in the corner, the Premier of the very state I’m visiting extols the virtues of not just AI but also fossil fuels, and talks about how great it is that he’s convinced the Prime Minister to allow Queensland to use coal and gas to power AI data centres:

Uber driver: hello! Me: g’day! Uber driver: how are you? Me: not bad! Uber driver: Virgin? Me: pardon? Uber driver: Virgin? Me: … [remembers that I’m flying with Virgin Australia and that they have their own terminal here] Me: yes please

thinking about the guy at Brisbane Airport who was giving me the dirtiest look ever as he and I both were boarding the flight to Melbourne. Like dude if the existence of pink haired trans girls bothers you, you’re not gonna like it where this plane is going

@mcc@mastodon.social adhd

Imagine being called Matt and founding a tech company with Matt in the name and then having the board of directors force you out of the company because you’re such a nuisance, that’s peak cis white man shit right there

none of these words are in the bible what is “Worfie time” I genuinely don’t understand https://mastodon.au/@TheVoiceGuy/117336120833648918

I saw a post recently where someone was observing that as a software developer, a lot of what you do and how you end up wiring your brain to work is built around building systems that are predictable and intuitive and work the way someone else would expect, and they were really struggling with creative writing (or songwriting or poetry?) because they were struggling to rewire their brain to write things that were surprising and unexpected and subvert expectations. But I can’t find it for the life of me.

"Even if you get away from the Elon Musk of it all, Australians have their own ideas about how they live their life that are very different to Americans." —Cam Wilson #PyConAU This is really immediately the most evident with how a lot of tech products treat expletives. I've literally ditched speech to text software because it just would not let me send texts to my friends with a normal Australian amount of swearing.

If day drinking at conferences wasn’t an obscenely bad idea I’d suggest a drinking game based around on-stage utterances of “human in the loop”. #PyConAU

Attending a conference at which you are a… conference director emeritus if you will, is an odd position to be in. You have no formal responsibilities, and yet you can walk into basically any room and nobody will tell you to leave. Instead, you’re at risk of being seconded into basically any role at any time, sort of like a de facto technical swing of sorts maybe?

Adelaide O-Bahn is a clocky tgirl, Brisbane Metro is a flashy drag queen, I don’t make the rules

OH: “I can’t be program chair, I want to get laid next year”

@glyph@mastodon.social @mcc@mastodon.social Yeah. My personal experience is that in simpler, more interactive workflows, the LLM is confidently and sanctimoniously wrong often enough that I don’t feel I can trust it and stake my professional reputation on its output without independently verifying *everything*. And that makes me distrust more “advanced” workflows that involve less direct supervision. And while I understand that “agentic” workflows include “harnesses” and “guardrails” that attempt to automate the process of verification, I don’t necessarily trust my own ability to write those, and I think that the assumption that it is possible to exhaustively enumerate upfront every possible failure case feels like an exercise in hubris.

@glyph@mastodon.social @mcc@mastodon.social Also I really dislike how it turns the dynamic into an adversarial one, where you have a thing that isn’t human but which is designed to pretend that it is in a very uncanny valley way, and it is trying to sneak mistakes past you and you are trying to stop it from doing that. But I recall you’ve already written about this dynamic at length.

OH: “what, you’re telling me that you haven’t put all your sexual encounters in a time series database?” Me: “I’m not gonna lie to you—“ OH: “—I know, you’re gonna tell me you’ve seriously considered it” Me: “goddamnit”

Does anyone have any good photos of me from #PyConAU? @garthk@eigenmagic.net @sophie@cloudisland.nz (I don’t know if Patrick is on here) or anyone else?

pillows for side sleepers, pillows for back sleepers, where are my pillows for people who slowly rotate in their sleep like a rotisserie chicken

To be fair, I guess my original home city of Adelaide has 10 platforms, but they are all terminating platforms; if the city centre had through services like Brisbane does, Adelaide would also probably only need 4–6 platforms I reckon.

(Also, Brisbane Central is very cute, if a bit low-ceilinged and grimy at platform level. A suburban hub station with only 6 platforms? Adorable.)

@decryption@aus.social @jpm@aus.social Yeah, but that’s 250km long, it wouldn’t fit in the same building as the other two :P (genuinely I am a massive tram nerd and do really love that our network is the world’s largest by track length!)

@mcc@mastodon.social The hard part of using LLMs effectively is verification, and it is so easy to just externalise that cost onto your coworkers And also, even in places that don’t have a formal AI mandate there’s often so much informal pressure (direct and indirect) to use it that it effectively becomes a stealth mandate of sorts

I don’t want to think about what the delays would be like on a hypothetical Gawler Central–Seaford through service though.

Excited for when the crash happens, and the business world will be all like “who could have predicted this” and everyone will be like “LITERALLY ALL OF US” and they will be like “well yes but the Very Special Computer Boys had no idea and they are very smart after all” and nobody will have learned anything whatsoever

…maybe I should move my superannuation (Australian compulsory retirement fund) into a portfolio that’s less exposed to the tech sector? There’s a lot of market wobbliness that makes me worried that a crash is imminent. https://www.abc.net.au/news/2026-08-03/korean-markets-threatening-upset-tech-boom/106981956

RE: https://cosocial.ca/@mhoye/117037614521306051 …and honestly for a lot of the code that’s written in corporate environments, the answer is often “no”

The world’s largest cinema screen is shorter and wider, which means that an IMAX aspect ratio film would be vertically letterboxed on it, and the usable size of the screen would be smaller than IMAX Melbourne Museum’s screen. Also Melbourne Museum has an IMAX film projector which the other one doesn’t, which is kinda neat too.

@firstyear@infosec.exchange Yes, Firstyear?

Stumbled across New Zealand Spy, and it turns out a Kiwi comedy spy thriller in which Australians are the bad guys is the miniseries I didn’t know I needed

@xssfox@cloudisland.nz https://cloudisland.nz/@daisy/116991365371911944

@micr0@wetdry.world This is amazing! I’m not an audiobook girlie but this might turn me into one! Unfortunately I’m on iOS though :(

@daedalus@eigenmagic.net Alright you, go form a queue behind @firstyear@infosec.exchange 😛 https://infosec.exchange/@firstyear/116991290594397718

@yaakov@cloudisland.nz That looks to be part of a test suite, but here’s a resource file that also contains those strings: https://cs.android.com/android/platform/superproject/+/android-latest-release:packages/apps/CellBroadcastReceiver/res/values-mcc505/strings.xml?q=%22AusAlert%22

What you are referring to as Linux is in fact systemd/Linux, or as I have taken to calling it, systemd plus Linux