NamTaf

It's worth also emphasising that they can be combined, so that you can combine the touchpads with the gyro such that the touchpads do coarse mouse movement and the gyro does the fine tweaking. This is apparently surprisingly effective, though I've not tried it myself.

Similarly, for FPS the gyro can be used for additional aiming and even set such that it's only enabled when one of the joysticks is touched (via the capacitive receiver).

One of the steam deck's really underappreciated features is the trackpads. You can use them to play a whole heap of KB+M games that were otherwise off bounds for a handheld.

I've been playing through the Sam & Max episodic games this way: trackpad for pointer, and buttons for clicks. It doesn't need fast-paced interactions so it's very forgiving there. When more speed is needed, I've heard others combine the trackpad with some minor gyro mouse input such that the touchpad does the coarse pointer manipulation and then gyro does the fine detail. Apparently you can get quite fast with this approach.

“His” as the default gender pronoun is a semi-old-fashioned but very widespread convention.

That's djent, not (d)jinn

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jinn

It's part of the demoscene culture, which overlaps a lot

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demoscene

a16z is Andreessen Horowitz, which is trivially discoverable via your search engine of choice since it's also their website, https://a16z.com/

They're a major VC firm

I never quite understood the meme of getting diarrhoea after eating fast food (chiefly, taco bell) because the couple of times I'd tried it in Australia, it seemed average but entirely uneventful food and didn't cause any sort of adverse reaction for me. Nor did KFC or any other one I can think of where that's been made as a joke. It was all just... fast food.

Then the penny, rather like an anvil, dropped when I realised it must instead be describing by proxy the food safety standards inherent in US fast food vs elsewhere around the world. I hadn't then also factored this specific issue into that broader realisation, but it definitely tracks.

It may come to you as a surprise, but if my colleague is taking 20 sick days a year whilst I'm taking 2, I'm not jealous of them 'working less' because they are instead sick at home.

This has big Anno-series "You've been playing for [x] hours!" notification energy. I love it. Both of those game series are incredible time sinks.

Yup, as an Aussie my understanding is that UK English would call it a blackboard whereas US English would call it a chalkboard. AU English therefore followed the UK, regardless of if they're the dark angels-esque green or fully black colour.

This feels like awkward sponsored product placement like you see in pop music videos.

No it doesn’t. Doubling the number of trains doesn’t double the number of vehicles if each train is half as long.

You don’t know what you’re talking about here. Longer trains are harder to handle and end up with dynamic forces down their length that are less visible to the drivers. Long enough trains can lead to severe in-train dynamics that the drivers aren’t even aware of which in turn can also produce dangerous vertical wheel-rail contact force scenarios that cause derailment risk to skyrocket.

Oh, the CEO gave his personal guarantee that they won't leave until everything is clean. I'm certainly convinced now!

There is absolutely no way they won't walk away from this the moment they can unless they are legally compelled to stay.

Imagine knocking off for the day, rolling into your favourite post-work boozer, having pints with your mates for a couple of hours and then it drops you home as you finish. Talk about efficiency!

This could totally help ease the housing crisis in London if spun the right way. I’m sure of it!

To be clear, Sun Cable entered administration this week. I wouldn’t hold your breath.

https://www.abc.net.au/news/2023-01-11/sun-cable-enters-admi...

They are only vaguely similar in the remotest of ways and certainly not with respect to what the OP meant, so not really.

Just chiming in to say that I went through all of this myself in 2015. It’s a long adjustment and grief is non-linear, but ultimately adjust you will.

Two things are generally required for a Westminster-system government to have mandate to govern: supply and confidence.

Supply relates to the access to money, specifically through approval of the government budget. If a government has supply, it has an agreement with enough members of the house that it will retain approval to spend money on its policies. If a government loses supply, it loses the support of the house to spend any state money.

Similarly, confidence relates to support that the government represents the will of the people. Just as with supply, a government must secure a vote from enough members that they will support the government’s actions (they have confidence in the government). When they talk about a “vote of no confidence” it specifically means voting to remove support of the government in this way.

Further info can be found here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Confidence_and_supply

No.

Things that really matter (banks, etc.) have well-established next-of-kin processes. You can cause problems if you subvert them, as there's processes to go through to prove who might have claim to the estate and if necessary divide it between multiple parties. Similarly, subscriptions will just bounce once you inform the banks of the death and they freeze further transactions as part of said process. In my experience, your next of kin don't want to be dealing with cancelling a bunch of subscriptions when they're already planning your funeral, informing loved ones, etc. - there's already heaps of shit you have to consider and it's a very stressful, emotional time.

Giving over passwords implies that you expect someone to log in and do something with them, so it's not really important for them to have it for these reasons.

Secondly, I doubt any of my next of kin care about e.g. my Steam library or my Reddit account. As I've gotten older, I've realised that people don't really want to inherit the overwhelming majority of your stuff (they have their own stuff). If you think someone really does want something in particular, you can have that conversation with them specifically, but that's going to be very few and far between.

Unfortunately, right now it is nearly impossible to actually change energy suppliers. Thanks to the insanity of the energy market, all market comparison sites are essentially not working (they list no results) and providers are refusing to show their tariffs, instead telling you to stay with your existing supplier.

They were used by the previous tenants when I moved in, so I basically had to stick with them. Nevertheless, the above really didn't leave me with a good impression of a competent company.

Tangentially related to your last point, I really don't like the dominance of direct debit here. In Australia, I paid everything via my credit card in order to be able to review charges before I paid them. Here, so many places really push direct debit and as a result they can charge basically whatever they want to my account and then I have to fight to recover it if it's wrong.

I signed up to Utility Warehouse here in the UK recently and it prompted me to create a password with the following requirements:

- 8 characters

- 1 uppercase character

- 1 lowercase character

- 1 number

I used KeePass to generate a password with the default 16 characters. Specifically, it spat out: \y%/T:tMAS#1\&e9

It took me a solid 10 seconds to figure out why it was failing the first requirement: UW were only counting the alphabetic letters as characters.

I sent a screenshot to a mate in disbelief, then randomised a new PW until I got one that just happened to have 8+ letters in it.

No, in the same way that I am not tired of the restraints ethics boards put on medical experiments.

Tech is now pervasive and AI has the power to do some pretty powerful stuff. This nexus of circumstance means it’s high time similar questions get asked about whether we should.

In the same way that medical science isn’t one dude cutting apart things in his basement, bleeding-edge tech is a multi-person and very organised endeavour. It is now in the domain where it really should have some oversight.

It's different though. I get what the OP is saying. It's happened in Aussie sports too - the commentators announcing any replay as the "Harvey Norman replay" during the NRL, as an example. Sponsorships of features of a programme stand out much more than sponsorship logos on jerseys, probably because you're much more actively focused on the commentary audio than you are on the particular images on a jersey of a player.

Living in Australia, we get a lot of US TV, and it was weird when there was this weird pacing cut within a TV show. Then you realised that it was put in as a US ad break, but AU rules didn't allow as many ads so it just sort of faded to black and then came back again.

Contrast that to UK TV, which we get a lot of too. The pacing and breaks are much more in line with what you're allowed for ads in AU, so there's no weird interruptions in the middle.

I always found it a fascinating mirror to the broader cultural differences writ large.

I in fact meant that they wear through quite substantial diameter differences, but yes conical tread will further throw it out.

Yup, any controller can set a signal to red (that’s how we do track blocks, said clips are the backup to that because you always want the dude in the sky to know you’re there).

Not all trains have kit to stop a SPAD, unless you meant specifically in the instance of the operator involved in this incident. Some do, but it’s absolutely not universal around the world. For example, Automatic Train Protection (ATP) can do this, but it requires both a track-side magnet and the rolling stock to have the kit for it. We use that to trigger our driver vigilance system acknowledgement when approaching suburban passenger stations. Failure to acknowledge the vigilance prompt will throw the brake to emergency and stop the train.

That said, it’s absolutely not present out in the Wild West of freight (because maintaining that many ATP magnets is insanely prohibitive).

I tend to agree that it’s a nifty idea but I think it’s a decade or so too late as the industry settles on ETCS. The legwork to prove ETCS as SIL-rated is done, whereas this has all those uphill battles still to fight and I’m not sure it’ll have the potential advantages to overcome that. You can also approach any of the Siemens/Hitachi/Bombardier/etcs. of the world and have no issue spec’ing for ETCS today.

This does have potential advantages in maybe finding track defects if set up correctly to do so? But that sort of system already exists and is installed on rolling stock, so once again it’s having to overcome the first mover advantage.

I’ll cop that, though I’m fairly confident in saying it’s the exception that proves the rule, in that those ones end up knowing the problem space so well that they sort of horseshoe around to seeing new insights others miss.

Wheels slip and their diameter changes which throws out dead reckoning. Counters are also not accurate and will have cumulative error over time.

It’s complex because edge cases like this exist for simpler systems.

That system is track circuitry that uses relays to detect rolling stock when they short the two rails via their wheels. That exists widely, and it identifies that rolling stock is present in a track section. That same relay also locally (as in, on the ground at that location) triggers any signals to switch to red.

Controllers can’t then give authorisation to another train to enter that section, nor can they override any red signal. In cases where it applies, they also can’t remotely control track switches to enter this occupied section. However there’s nothing with that system that then controls the rolling stock itself, so a driver can still SPAD if they don’t see or ignore the red, and the remote network controller absolutely cannot stop a train that is hurtling towards an occupied section. That’s all on the driver in the cab.

Fun fact: track clips are used by track gangs to short these sections in lieu of a big axle sitting on it, which is one of the methods of providing site control to the gangs so trains don’t enter their worksite. It’s certainly not the only one, though.