stephen_g

I’m not a TikTok fan by any means but that really does feels to me like bordering on delusion…

I’ve mostly seen it at Asian cuisine restaurants where you normally order several dishes and order more as the meal progresses. So it builds up a tab and then you pay at the end.

> 10 Gb/s Ethernet interfaces do not require 20 Gb/s USB ports for reaching maximum performance, they already reach that on 10 Gb/s USB ports, despite of what the writer of TFA believes.

While this may be theoretically (almost) possible, I’m quite sure this is absolutely not the case in practice.

For example see these benchmarks of one of the more recent USB to Ethernet chipsets [1], that can reach ~9.5 Gb/s on USB 3.2 Gen 2x2 but only between ~6.2 to ~7.3 on 3.2 Gen 2x1 laptops.

1. https://www.jeffgeerling.com/blog/2026/new-10-gbe-usb-adapte...

Edit: Haha, didn’t realise TFA was by the same author as these benchmarks but he’s done a lot of testing and benchmarking of these kind of devices over a long time, and it agrees with all the other benchmarking from other people I’ve seen too!

The gold standard makes zero sense. Why should the amount of money the economy needs have any relation to the amount of gold a country holds?

What happens in practice is that you set a conversion rate to account for this, and basically immediately things start to drift further and further out of whack leading to massive distortion. There's a reason the gold standard era was a cycle of big swings of inflation and deflation, with panics, recessions, crashes pretty continually.

It's the same with fixed or pegged exchange rates - you can set it to something reasonable at the start but it will always drift, usually until things are distorted that the system fails. That's why we don't have a gold standard anymore and why fixed exchange rates have all mostly failed and gone away too.

There's just no reason to believe that pegs to commodities or other currencies would ever correspond to the amount of money that the economy needs to be in circulation, so they always fail.

If it’s a “well known tactic” (well known by whom?) then it’s a counter-productive one - the more the extreme is heard in the mainstream, the more rational the slightly less extreme version sounds (It’s something the right-wing tends to use extremely effectively, the left wing spends too much energy infighting)

Neither is road infrastructure basically anywhere in the world... Here in Australia we have a fuel tax and each state has registration fees but combined those don't even cover half of what is spent by Government and local councils maintaining existing roads and investing in new road infrastructure, and that's before even thinking of the hidden costs of traffic enforcement, ambulances responding to accidents, etc.

It's the same case for basically everywhere around the world, driving ends up being quite heavily subsidised too.

Not that simple. In Australia over the last 10 years, the number of dwellings increased by 19% while the population increased by a smaller 16% [1]. Yet house prices still doubled. This is the same trend that has continued for decades, growth in number of dwellings has tended to outstrip population growth but house prices shot up since 2001 when the tax settings were changed to massively benefit speculation.

We also have a pretty high number of unoccupied dwellings that are left empty, since some investors see the bother of renting them out as not worth the money, since they’ll make so much when they sell that it doesn’t matter!

1. https://australiainstitute.org.au/post/is-population-growth-...

Most Aussies aren't really worried about China... China remains our largest trading partner, and polling shows less than half of Australians think the AUKUS alliance (which includes the nuclear subs) makes our region safer.

It depended on how long the account had been active - one or two of my cousin's kids were pretty sad they lost access to some of their accounts but had new ones the same day with an older sibling or friend's face scan to bypass the age check.

Reportedly more than 3/4 of under-16s who were using social media before the ban still are.

It's not really anything to do with "an era where these [...] provided a pretty steady level of energy", it's just the only way that makes sense to describe it in any case.

Demand is always instantaneous, and transmission lines from a generator need to be sized for the maximum instantaneous generation, so in terms of the size of (any kind of) generator it's the main thing you're interested in. Capacity factor brings in seasonal / daily output variation but that's a whole different thing.

But it’s not what anyone was talking about. Such a cable should be really quite rare because it’s unlikely to work at all in most situations, whereas devices with USB-C ports that don’t work with PD chargers (due to a cent’s worth of missing Rd resistors) are irritatingly common, because they do work with USB-C to A cables!

> The poor man was made into a local Australian celebrity by the media.

I wouldn't say that's quite what happened - I mean, he was explicitly trying to use his profile to raise awareness for brain cancer research so was very public with the progress of his experimental treatment!

Not to the same extent though - for example I can't remember if I ever had to take my shoes off (maybe there was a couple of months where we had to do it back after the attempt happened in December 2021?), so I was pretty shocked to go to the US for a work trip in 2019 and have to do that. Here in Australia there's no liquid limit in carry on for domestic flights.

It depends what your skill set is - professional engineers are qualified to make the flowcharts and sign off on designs. So it’s not about how you see yourself, it’s whether you have the experience and training to be able to follow actual engineering methodology.

Unemployment (JobSeeker payment) is actually pretty brutal here, we have a thing called ‘mutual obligation requirements’ where you have to go to meetings with (very ineffective but extremely profitable) private job service providers who force you to apply for enough jobs per week (no matter if they’re relevant or not).

Decades ago there was what I have read was an extremely effective Government department called the ’Commonwealth Employment Services’ but that was disbanded and contracts handed to private firms for excuses like “efficiency” that (surprise) didn’t end up panning out.

It’s not close to the poverty line, it’s well under it (remember this is AUD not USD) and has been for decades!

How much of that was terminating vs splicing for the optical fibre? I have not done the actual hands on work of splicing but have specified fibre runs a couple of times and all the guidance I have seen is that for reliability you want to always splice on good-quality, factory-terminated pigtails because field terminated connectors are (so I've read) very unreliable. When possible we've just run pre-terminated cables so we don't have to get somebody in to splice and that's been really reliable.

That’s a false dilemma if I’ve ever seen one. As if those are the only options - that’s just silly defeatism and reductionism!

I was very lucky that once I'd outgrown QBasic, my father could get me a copy of Visual Studio 6.0 while it was current, because he worked at the major University in our state and could access it through their campus-wide MSDN subscription.

I played with Visual Basic at the start but was keen to learn C++ because I had heard it was used in systems programming (I had the dream of developing my own operating system). A bit later on I did stumble on homebrew OS dev and started using DJGPP (a Windows port of GCC) but having access to Visual C++ was a very important step!

I got handed down some of these from somebody in grade three or four at school (I think they had belonged to one of my teacher's sons and since she knew I was into computers, she gave them to my mum for me to have). This was around 1999-2000 kind of time so they were a bit out of date, but it was a good learning experience trying to port some of the programs into QBasic!

I was fascinated with these and read them many times cover to cover over the years. Practical Things to Do with your Microcomputer was always my favourite, as well as the robotics one. I also found the machine code one interesting but never really grasped it until later.

I think the ideas in them (as well as some other computer books and magazines I had) really helped steer my interests from just being interested in computers and software to being more interested in hardware and embedded systems, which is where I work today. These were very important in hindsight in shaping my interests!

Not at all, no - embassies are granted special privileges but are still the territory of the country they are in.

Yeah I'm still using an iPhone 12 from late 2020 and it's honestly still fine in terms of its processing power, cameras, features etc. for anything I use it for. It does need a new battery but even that has degraded way slower than earlier phones I've had.

I was using an iPad Pro from late 2018 (mostly just for casual web browsing, reading documents and watching video on, I still do all my real work on laptop/desktops) as well until this year, and would have kept using it if I hadn't accidentally dropped it in water. I don't really notice much difference at all between my old one (when it worked) and the new iPad Air I replaced it with, except for the battery being a little better and having a bit more ram being nice (websites in background tabs are less likely to be purged from memory when I come back to them).

I like wild, it’s a fun word. No need to change if you don’t want to just on account of some grouches here!

Ah, the good old "I never thought leopards would eat my face" after voting for the 'leopards eating people's faces party'...

Somehow I have zero hope the bill she is proposing as a replacement could be any better than the absolute horror that the OSA is though...

I had a similar thing when I was gooling a few days ago, I can't remember exactly but it was like "why does [product] not support [feature]" and the AI summary was confidently wrong, saying "The product does support [feature]", which knew was completely incorrect, and I did find a Reddit discussion or something in the actual results with discussions that were actually about what I was looking for!

It's really depressing how bad things are getting...

Yeah it's pretty incredible, the way they came together the plane on top came pretty close to blocking the canopy of the bottom one, if it had gone a bit differently those pilots could have had nowhere to go but into the bottom of the other aircraft!

It's not quite even that - he wanted to bail out his cousin's failing solar business with Tesla shareholders' money, but to try and justify it, they pretended that Solar Roof was a fully developed, ready to sell product that was going to be revolutionary and worth buying SolarCity for, when it was actually just a concept they'd quickly come up with and some 3D renders.

They actually had to develop it (with Tesla shareholders' money) after buying out the failing SolarCity.

Regular solar panels yes, but not the Tesla panels!

Yeah if you can do it cheap enough. Here in Australia a standard 6.6 kW system (but with a 5kW inverter, maximum most utilities let you export with single phase) costs around $US6000 before subsidies, but around $4500 after. The systems are all basically exactly the same components, and these installers can probably do two houses a day with a stock standard system.

I have a system this size and it's fairly rare for me to make less over the day than I use (we have pretty sunny winters where I live and at -27 degrees latitude am not super far from the equator). In summer I tend to produce at least twice as much energy than the house draws.

The economics have skewed a bit as export tariffs have dropped (due to there being so much solar) but batteries have become so cheap and are now subsidised quite a bit too that most people aren't getting just solar systems anymore but now are doing solar+battery.

It would probably technically be a bit more efficient to do larger neighbourhood arrays and batteries, but if they're cheap enough it works fine to do individual homes.

I’ve heard this idea but don’t believe it was actually a serious claim? Surely it’s only ever been more of a post-hoc PR kind of justification for the massive energy use that nobody genuinely believes?