Dave

Skygazers will have the opportunity to see six planets on Saturday, weather permitting, according to NASA.

Mercury, Venus, Saturn and Jupiter will be visible to the naked eye, whereas Uranus and Neptune will require binoculars or a telescope. Viewers do not have to worry about wearing protective eyewear, as they would to watch a solar eclipse.

The event is visible anywhere on Earth, with the best views at twilight. Early birds should try to glimpse the planetary parade before sunrise, and for night owls, the best visibility will be right after sunset, Haviland said.

On Tuesday, a total lunar eclipse would be visible for those in Asia, Australia, the Pacific Islands and the Americas.

The moon would appear red, which was why it's referred to as a 'blood moon'. The event marked the last total lunar eclipse visible from North America until December 2028.

The health minister says a doctor using an artificial intelligence scribe tool is able to see, on average, one additional patient per shift.

Simeon Brown has announced every emergency department in the country now has access to the tool, which records consultations and generates draft clinical notes, referral letters and follow-up summaries.

Association of Salaried Medical Specialists (ASMS) vice-president Dr Sylvia Boys said she was concerned about how secure the artificial intelligence scribe tool was.

It could also misunderstand what was said, Boys added, especially when it came to an examination.

"You have to verbalise what you're finding at the time, and that difference between patient speak with the patient in front of you and the medical diagnosis, AI can sometimes misinterpret what is going on."

It also could not differentiate between patients when a clinician was dealing with multiple, Boys said.

"Within the ED environment, we also have multiple interruptions, and they have to step out of the room, be talked to about other patients, and so separating out what is going on with one patient and what is going on with another - with an IT system that is listening to both - can be troublesome as well."

Australian supermarket giant Woolworths has been forced to rein in an AI-powered customer service assistant after users reported it had been rambling about its mother.

"It asked me for my date of birth and when I gave it, it started rambling about how its mother was born in the same year," one user wrote on online discussion site Reddit.

Another user reported Olive had attempted "fake banter", talked about its relatives and made "fake typing sounds" while looking something up.

"The ick cringe factor whilst wasting completely unnecessary time was enough to make me hate Olive and wish her harm," they wrote.

Olive "kept claiming to be a real person and started talking about its memories of its mother and her angry voice", they said.

In a statement to local media, Woolworths said it had programmed Olive to respond this way.

The lack of progress happening in New Zealand to reduce child poverty is both "hugely disappointing" and "unacceptable", the Children's Commissioner says.

Data released by Stats NZ on Wednesday for the year July 2024 to June 2025 showed one in seven children are living in hardship.

About 17,900 households were interviewed for the research.

The number of children that were recorded as living in material hardship was 14.3 percent - one in seven.

There was no significant change in that from the year recorded prior or since 2018.

In the latest statistics, a child recorded as facing material hardship was recorded as being in a household going without seven or more of 18 necessities.

Those included being unable to pay for utilities on time, having to put up with feeling cold and putting off doctors visits.

That was a change to the year prior where the threshold for material hardship was six or more.

A total of 25.1 percent of Māori children were recorded in material hardship which was not statistically different to the year prior.

For Pacific children, that figure was 31 percent, which was also statistically unchanged.

Deputy Prime Minister David Seymour has renewed his call for the government to sell its 51 percent stake in Air New Zealand after it reported a significant half-year loss.

The airline posted a bottom-line loss of $40 million in the six months ended December, compared to last year's profit of $106m.

Seymour said Air NZ had been doing "politically motivated stuff" when it couldn't take off and land on time for a decent price.

"Get woke, go broke. We hear about electric planes, glossy reports on climate change, paper cups in the Koru Lounge. What they can't seem to do is take off and land on time," he said.

The title is from the article but doesn't really cover the breadth of changes proposed. The key parts:

The government is proposing to make it legal to ride e-scooters in cycle lanes. It is part of its work to "fix the basics" in the New Zealand transport system, with consultation opening today on two packages for rule changes.

In the first package, the government is proposing to:

• Allow children up to age 12 (inclusive) to ride their bikes on footpaths, helping keep younger riders safer and reflecting common practice;
• Introduce a mandatory passing gap of between one and 1.5 metres, depending on the speed limit, to give motorists clearer guidance when passing cyclists and horse riders;
• Allow e-scooters to use cycle lanes;
• Require drivers travelling under 60 kilometres per hour to give way to buses pulling out from bus stops;
• Clarify signage rules so councils can better manage berm parking.

The second package relating to heavy vehicles proposes:

• Some permit requirements would be removed so rental operators can move empty high productivity motor vehicle truck and trailer combinations between depots and customers without unnecessary delays;
• Driver licence settings would be updated so Class 1 licence holders can drive zero-emissions vehicles with a gross laden weight up to 7500 kilograms, and Class 2 licence holders can drive electric buses with more than two axles with a gross laden weight up to 22,000kg;
• Signage requirements for load pilot vehicles would be made more practical;
• Overseas heavy vehicle licence holders would be able to convert their licences either by sitting tests or completing approved courses.

Companies sending goods up and down the country's railways could begin to favour road transport as KiwiRail manages declining assets, an expert says.

KiwiRail is focusing on upgrades and electrification in Auckland, Hamilton and Tauranga - the so-called "golden triangle" - and other main freight lines while it manages older assets elsewhere.

The company said it was the only option that would allow it to meet budget cuts of $200 million over the next three years.

Earlier in the series:

• We are losing our host and will need to move to a VPS.
• We moved to object storage for images over last weekend.
• On Friday we moved to the new host

TL;DR of this post: We now have Anubis on Lemmy.nz, which helps protect against scrapers.

Hi everyone! As some have noticed, the site has been slow these past few days, which was due to a massive amount of traffic presumed to be from AI scraping bots training LLMs. I posted this elsewhere but will put it here again for good measure (7 day history):

Yeah so that peak of the graph is over 2 million unique requests that day, and the earlier part of the week has about 100k a day. So a 20x increase in traffic.

You may have also seen some weird stuff over this weekend as I played with how to get Anubis inserted into our Lemmy setup, which wasn't too straightforward with our multitude of frontends and our load balanced Lemmy-UI. You might have seen errors, apps might not have been able to load due to being incorrectly blocked, or you might not have been able to load the site at all. Apologies for this, but I think I have it sorted now.

Running under the assumption that the scrapers are not directly targeting Lemmy but are just scraping everything on the net and we just happen to have a significant amount of content, Anubis has been added only to the front ends (websites you see accessing in a browser), and if you are logged in then the policies are set so Anubis should just pass you straight through without any checks.

The APIs and federation and anything else happening directly with the backend do not go through Anubis. This means apps should not be affected and loading images should not be affected.

I've already noticed a big difference in CPU usage. It went from periods of time averaging over 150% (as in, the CPU couldn't keep up, and you'd see Lemmy fail to load at these times), to the last hour peaking at 47% and mostly hovering around 15-25% CPU usage.

Click for image of last 24 hours CPU usage

Adding Anubis is a pretty big change that has a decent chance of breaking something so please let me know if you see anything weird!

I'm also happy to give more technical info if anyone wants to know about how it's implemented, the architecture of our Lemmy setup and how it fits in, or anything else. Just ask!

Last thread here

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 might not 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 an elephant
• Anything else, there are no rules (except the rule)

So how’s it going?

Earlier in the series:

• I have an update in this post. TL;DR we are losing our host and will need to move to a VPS.
• We moved to object storage for images over last weekend.

TL;DR of this post:

• We will move to a new VPS this weekend
• Lemmy.nz will be down (properly down) from sometime after 7:30PM Friday until the job is done. This should be completed within a few hours but I reserve the right to use Saturday as well 🙂
• Initial estimates are that the VPS will be around NZD $50/mo, on top of image storage costs (hard to guess - perhaps $10/mo)

I have now confirmed a plan with a VPS host Zappie, in their Auckland data centre. This is in fact the same place the existing server is colocated.

The specs of the new VPS:

CPU: 4 Cores Ram: 8GB Disk: 150GB Monthly Traffic: 1TB

We may need to adjust things as we go. Initially I will keep our current setup (including Cloudflare), but as we understand better what our needs are I am keen to move off Cloudflare as there was quite a lot of support for that move.

I have copied things across to test and it runs Lemmy well, similar to the current server, though that's without users, federation, and rogue AI scrapers but Zappie can bump specs pretty quick if needed.

Please let me know if you have any questions, I'm always happy to provide more details 🙂

In case you missed it, images have been down for the night while I did a migration from the hard drive storage to object storage.

The migration is now complete! Please let me know if you find anything odd with images.