Lemmy NZ

With much of Europe glowing pink will we get to see a good display here in NZ?

Transcription: a photo of a shared pathway entrance with a series of steel pipes placed to create very narrow pathways to enter. The width is hard to tell from the angle of the photo, but far too narrow for a wheelchair or bicycle to fit.

More than 4000 people have already been laid off as a result of the austerity measures imposed by the NACTF government.

Woolworths has apologised to thousands of customers after mistakenly telling about 79,000 people they had won a competition.

The email for the Big Night In prize was meant to be sent to about 1000 winning customers.

Instead, 79,000 extra so-called winners were sent the same email - awarding them 4000 points towards the supermarket's Everyday Rewards card system, which would equal $30 worth of groceries.

There are a few dashboards around. I saw someone shared their own personal (next level!) grafana dashboard.

• Transpower offers a Live system and market data view: https://www.transpower.co.nz/system-operator/live-system-and-market-data
• Transpower offers EM6 Live: https://app.em6.co.nz/
• The Electricity Authority (EA) has: https://www.emi.ea.govt.nz/
• EA also offers historical datasets: https://www.emi.ea.govt.nz/Retail/Datasets

The open data situation for electricity information in New Zealand is "pretty good". The main problem is that people in charge see commercial value in up-to-date cost and usage information so the "free data" is delayed. This prevents people from using near real-time data to improve efficiency of their own power systems.

This paywall exists because of the belief that profit is more important than climate action.

Please keep this handy for when Seymour starts coming after parents who feed their kids Quinoa and hummus charging them with child abuse.

Remember folks. Only feed your kids high carb, high fat, fried, nutritionally empty foods.

Also of course no vegetables of any sort.

More austerity for the government. Lucky for all the people who lose their jobs the government is going to make them go to seminars before they do on the benefit.

I am sure this will be super effective and will not cost any money at all.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.blahaj.zone/post/11902186

joyous skittering of the least-bird

The national electricity grid operator is warning of possible insufficient power generation to meet households' demand on Friday.

Transpower has issued a notice saying there was a risk that power generation and reserves would not meet demand between 7.30am-8.30am.

It said if power generators could not provide enough electricity, Transpower would manage demand to avoid a grid emergency.

"The system operator may instruct the grid owner to disconnect feeders without further notice to connected parties," it said.

A super security and intelligence agency recommended four years ago and said to be "not too far away" last August, is under "active consideration" by Cabinet.

The number two recommendation of the 2020 Royal Commission of Inquiry into the 2019 mosque attacks was to set up a national intelligence and security agency, or NISA, as a way to cut through the confusion and inaction exhibited between the layers of government agencies prior to the terror attacks.

However, in a new report submitted to the government, FIANZ, far from being impatient, has called for caution.

"Given the complexity and the changing global politics and eco-climate context, there needs to be a serious rethink on the form and function of the proposed but absolutely necessary NISA," it said in the 40-page report.

Housing minister Chris Bishop has announced his decision on the Wellington District Plan, approving a series of amendments to radically upzone most of Wellington, allowing tens of thousands of new townhouses and apartments that were previously illegal to build.

Decisions where Bishop sided with the council

• Adelaide Road will be part of the centre city zone
• The walkable catchment will be 15 minutes
• Smaller character precincts
• The Johnsonville train is a train [“mass rapid transit”]
• Ten-minute walking catchments around all train stations
• No setback requirements for townhouses
• Hay Street, Hania Street and Moir Streets will be zoned for high density

Decisions where Bishop sided with the independent hearings panel:

• Kilbirnie will be zoned for high density
• Every heritage removal is rejected

Other links:

• RMA Minister rejects Wellington council's bid to remove heritage protections from buildings -RNZ
• Wellington Mayor responds to Minister’s District Plan decision - WCC

Only slightly disappointing, and not too surprising. It's honestly pretty impressive how little the timeline has slipped so far. Neutron was announced in 2021 with a target launch date in 2024. If it takes only 33% longer, that will still be pretty quick for rocket development.

Add voter suppression to the list of disasters

Having binged Fallout, 3 Body Problem and The Boys recently, I've moved onto Severance. It's a quirky, slow burn with an intriguing setup. 7/10 jaffas so far.

What are you watching?

In Parliament last Wednesday, Te Tai Tokerau MP Mariameno Kapa-Kingi said the government "will not waver in its mission to exterminate Māori".

Tad hyperbolic, don't you think?

Wellington City Council have put plans to build a permanent cycleway in Brooklyn on hold after losing over half of its funding. Waka Kotahi was expected to fund 51 percent through the Transport Choices fund, however Transport Minister Simeon Brown confirmed there would be no funding for the project in December.

There was also no mention of the Transport Choices programme or any alternatives in the draft Government Policy Statement in March.

A trial bike lane was installed in 2021 through Waka Kotahi's Innovating Streets programme.

"In the interim Brooklyn Connections continues to function as a successful cycleway," Hodgetts said.

A 43-year-old man has been arrested in Auckland after an elderly woman was viciously knocked to the ground in an unprovoked attack in broad daylight on Sunday.

In a video sent to RNZ, a person walking briskly away from the security camera can be seen hitting an elderly woman in the face with their elbow as they walk by, knocking her to the ground before walking off, while onlookers attempt to help the victim.

Welcome to this week’s casual kōrero thread!

This post will be pinned in this community so you can always find it, and will stay for about a week until replaced by the next one.

It’s for talking about anything that doesn’t justify a full post. For example:

• Something interesting that happened to you
• Something humourous that happened to you
• Something frustrating that happened to you
• A quick question
• A request for recommendations
• Pictures of your pet
• A picture of a cloud that kind of looks like a hippo
• Anything else, there are no rules (except the rule)

So how’s it going?

A while back I made a post about Lemmy.world federation and a lot has changed since then so I thought I'd do an update post.

TL;DR Lemmy.world posts, comments, votes coming to lemmy.nz have been delayed by a gradually increasing amount over recent months, peaking at about 4 days behind, but we should be back on track soon.

Background

Check the above post for some background, but TL;DR our server is in Auckland, NZ and Lemmy.world's server is in Helsinki, Finland. We are about as far apart as we can get from each other. Because Lemmy can currently only send one action at a time (Post, comment, vote), we can only accept about 4 or 5 actions per second as it takes around 1/5 of a second to make the round trip. Lemmy.world is now creating more than this on average, which means we have been falling behind more and more.

Pre-fetcher

After that post, things continued to get worse. While hanging out on Lemmy Matrix rooms discussing the problem, someone (I'm not actually sure of their Lemmy account) offered to set up a pre-fetcher. Roughly how it works is it monitors lemmy.world for new posts and comments, then sends a request to lemmy.nz to see that content. Lemmy.nz then requests it from lemmy.world because it doesn't exist.

This helps because when lemmy.world sends lemmy.nz a post or comment, lemmy.nz then needs to make other requests. e.g. it might not know about the user, so it needs to request the user from their home instance, it may need to generate a thumbnail, etc. By pre-fetching the posts, this means when lemmy.world sends it's normal outbound federation lemmy.nz already has it so can move straight on to the next one. We can't prefetch everything, notably votes, so for a long time we have had lemmy.world posts show with zero votes until the federation activities start coming through. Unfortunately comments from lemmy.world users on lemmy.nz posts can't be pre-fetched so they were still taking a long time to come through.

Prior to this pre-fetcher being turned on, Lemmy.nz was doing a lot worse than aussie.zone (as seen in the above post). After turning it on, within not too long we were in better shape than aussie.zone, but unfortunately we were both still getting worse.

This is the state we have been in until yesterday. Gradually things were getting worse and worse until we were at about 4 days behind lemmy.world, so if a lemmy.world user posted on one of our posts then it took 4 days to show up (you might have noticed this if you got a notification of a reply to your post or comment that then said it was from days ago).

Batcher

The same user who created the pre-fetcher was also working on a batching process. The basic idea was that instead of lemmy.world sending each item halfway across the world, instead you add an extra server that is hosted close to lemmy.world. Lemmy.world sends their federation items to that server, then that server collects them up into one batch, which gets sent to some software running on the lemmy.nz server. That software then unbundles them into separate pieces again then feeds them into lemmy.

The idea here is that you greatly reduce the lag. Lemmy.world gets a very quick response from the extra server and so can send the next activity almost straight away. The software that passes it to lemmy.nz is on the same server as lemmy.nz so communication is very quick. And collecting up the items into a batch for the trip across the world saves a lot of time in back and forths, so we can keep our goal of receiving things in the correct order while also not having to send one at a time. Receiving in the correct order is important, for example, if you accedentally downvoted then quickly changed it to an upvote, you wouldn't want another instance to receive the upvote first and then the downvote as it would show you downvoted instead of upvoted.

This batcher I have set up (with a lot of help!) over the weekend, and turned on yesterday morning once testing had been completed and I could get lemmy.world to redirect their lemmy.nz traffic to this new server (this was done through a change in something called the hosts file, long story short it tells your server "ignore what anyone says, lemmy.nz is actually over here").

In the last 24 hours or so we have got from 1.5 million activities behind to about 970k activities behind. This puts us at about 2.3 days behind now, a huge improvement!

Pictures

Conclusion

So that's a breakdown of everything that has happened the last few months, hopefully this new batching process will bring us back in line with lemmy.world. If you see anything weird happening, please let me know!

Also this is a shout out to all the people who made this happen, and who are building all sorts of tools that we use. We have a selection of different front-end websites you can access lemmy through, an automod, prefetcher, batcher, and all sorts of help from others! I definitely couldn't do this stuff without help 😆

And as always, if you have any questions or want more detail on any of this, feel free to ask!

Edit:

We are now up to date! Yay!

what a disappointment. I really expected better from Jack.

Who is going to listen?

Jamie Arbuckle, the Marlborough councillor who became an MP, says he has settled into having two roles so comfortably he's going to keep both salaries after all.

There's been a lot of video calls from his office in Wellington, but it's meant he's made it to most of the meetings at the Marlborough District Council since being elected to Parliament as an NZ First MP in October.

At the time, he said he felt juggling the two roles would be easy enough until Christmas 2023, and said he would hand his council remuneration back after that, should he feel he could not give the job his all.

But, for now, he said he was keeping up and did not feel that was necessary.