lathiat

In Australia, prescription drugs generally cannot be advertised to consumers. Additionally, prescriptions for all drugs are written in the generic drug name form and not the branded form.

That said, where this currently seems to fall apart is the pharamacies.. most only stock a single "brand" and pricepoint for many drugs, two at most. Most pharamcies aren't online so you can't easily compare prices. In practice, I have frequently observed over many different prescriptions a price different of 1-2x between pharamcies in the same area for the exact same thing and dosage. Additionally, the way we fill scripts here you don't even get the price until you go to pay and theyve already labelled your box with your script, etc.

There's also largely no pricing on the shelves, even if you can see the behind the counter ones.

The only thing that saves us, is that "many" but not all drugs are subsidised by our public health care and the government negotiates the price. But for any non-subsidised drug it's open season and also much of the pricing is "per dispense" and not at all related to the drug quantity.

e.g. 4x10mg or 28x5mg of the same drug has the same price.

Also recently the much-publicised Ozempic which is used for weightloss and diabetes which is $150/dose here, because the price is fixed by that government negotiated price for diabetic patients but off-label prescribers get the same price even when not subsised by the government and they actually have to pay the full $150. They launched the literal exact same drug for weight loss as "Wegovy" but they vary the recommended dosages a little so that in practice you can't cross-fulfill the prescription. The exact same 1mg is $150 when sold as Ozempic and $250 when sold as Wegovy :) And for some straight reason the weight loss dose is "2.8mg" but the diabetic doses are 1mg and 3mg.

I do solidly remember this from the "earlier" (200x) Gentoo days.

Also, if someones DOES have this ability and gets found out, e.g. someone finds the certificate, it makes it clear someone had that ability. You'll know that root CA is compromised one way or another and it potentially gets burnt.

Thus, they'll only use it under the strictest smallest of circumstances where the reward outweighs the risk, in a high profile scenario, rather than rolling it out willy nilly.

Similar to when threat actors use a 0day.. if they use it all the time it eventually gets discovered and fixed. If they save it for a special case they may manage to use it a couple of times before it gets patched.

Ubuntu is experimenting with making a more modern CPU build: https://discourse.ubuntu.com/t/trying-out-ubuntu-23-04-on-x8... https://www.phoronix.com/review/ubuntu-x86-64-v3-benchmark

Also -O3: https://www.phoronix.com/news/Ubuntu-Evaluating-O3-Optimized

I am not sure off hand how that CPU level compares to Intel Clear Linux's options. The phoronix comparison fo Ubuntu with and without v3 were mostly quite small single digit percent though, on an Intel CPU.

Notes: Canonical (Ubuntu) is my employer, I am not working on this project.

Mark Rober covered the “Zipline” drones which are near silent, unlike almost any other drone you hear. There’s a demo in the video.

Done by varying the propeller design so that the noise is spread out over many frequencies instead of concentrated in the buzzy band.

I also remember Apple talking about doing the same in their MacBook pro fans at one point. Varying the blade pitch from blade to blade to do the same.

https://youtu.be/DOWDNBu9DkU?si=jW6Iaeobg7j5yAzW

That doesn’t make it useless. It still severely limits the rate of brute force versus having no limit.

One of my favourite talks: https://youtu.be/1qSTcxt2t74

In Australia/Perth we have a "Daily Supply Charge".

We also have one of the higest rates of residential rooftop solar here, you get relatively little payback for exporting in Perth (its hard to get more than about $20/month) but can save quite a bit on what you self-consume during the day.

As a result, this Daily Supply Charge has been steadily going up over the last decade, much more than the per-unit fee. Currently it's $1.13 AUD/day + $0.316/kWh (that's 74c USD/day + $0.21 USD/kWh)

Because they've already been on the road to moving off of them for a while now (for this reason)

You can also inspect python frames, objects/variables etc directly from GDB: https://docs.python.org/3/howto/gdb_helpers.html

Plenty of manufacturing tolerances that could explain that, firstly look at overclocking in general - different examples of the exact same CPU will be highly varaible in how you can overclock, undervolt, etc ("Silicon Lottery")

Also a bunch of the power, voltage and frequency stuff depends on the motherboard BIOS settings and you may be surprised if you don't follow the enthusiast circles just how much influence the BIOS has over the CPU power, frequency, etc. Different motherboards can also net you quite different performance, both by default and by tweaking settings, plus may have cleaner or less clean power, etc.

There are so, so many factors that go into that. While I'm sure you could generalise to some degree, a single case will be meaningless and the variance person to person would be very high (here is an example of some real data but is missing both of these countries: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC10519902/)

The immediately obvious factors to me that would all strongly influence this would include: How many commitments they really have (this might include work, volunteering, friend groups); How much time & energy they already spend caring for someone else (particularly their partner); How much energy/general impact of their physical health - e.g. is it easy for them to move around and chase kids; The age at which the grandparents and parents both had kids will heavily impact all of the above (Quick scan/aggregate of Google images graphs for this suggests this has risen about 5-7 years total steadily since about 1975. We'd now now be seeing the impact of this adding up from both generations pushing the age of grandparents quite a bit older on average); What the family relationship is like in both directions; How much that person enjoys or more specifically doesn't enjoy kids in general; How much free money they have to spend on the care; Travel time to/from

Speaking from an Australian perspective about your specific example though, once a week seems like a lot of time, especially to make an exacting persistent commitment rather than organising it on a more ad-hoc basis.

We have an absolutely amazing relationship with my wife's parents. As an estimate, they probably end up helping out for at least part of a day in most fortnights and easily 1-2 full days every month, with some months easily double that.

I don't think I'd ask for a persistent once a week. That said, we also have government subsidised child-care and it's affordable for us so we don't really have a need for the regularly scheduled work-days.. our needs are the ad-hoc times that doesn't cover like appointments, school commitments, a random extra work day, school holidays, a date night/concert/party/dinner, etc.

I work full time (but from home, so I get to see my kids when home at least a little), my wife works 3 days (only 2 for our first child) so we also have been happy having them in daycare for only 2-3 days a week.. we are both very keen NOT to have them in daycare every weekday until school age and fortunately are in the situation to be able to do so. If we weren't, the desire for more regular grandparent care over daycare would probably be higher, purely for not having them in a rigid external environment 5 days a week.

But it would not surprise me if once a week or more was normal in some cultures or places. I know some definitely lean more heavily on the family unit than others, and some are also more likely to live in multi-generational houses which would likely lend to making that more likely - no one really has to go anywhere.

Some actual data from Australia showing 21-32% of grandparents provided care about once a week or more: https://aifs.gov.au/research/research-snapshots/grandparents...

There is plenty more research and numbers on all of these things for many countries readily findable.

I was there for that talk, good times. Lot's of great linux.conf.au talks from Tridge over the years.

I'll toot my own horn here. But there are plenty of presentations about it, Brendan Gregg's are usually pretty great.

"bpftrace recipes: 5 real problems solved" - Trent Lloyd (Everything Open 2023) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZDTfcrp9pJI

Not in Australia. No hot bags for any orders including Pizza. It drives me nuts, I never order really now. It’s not cold enough for the food to be stone cold, but it’s like warm at best. Not enjoyable at all.

Using a standard supermarket freezer bag makes a HUGE difference.

I don’t understand how it’s not a hard enforced requirement by doordash, Uber eats, etc. It’s nuts. I have seen it more common in other countries where it gets colder. They’ll have branded delivery bags. Though more often they are also bike couriers rather than cars.

Especially since they so often drop two orders now.

I would have assumed linux conntrack to do more rigorous "tcp window checking" as an assumption, however the article also notes they received a positive response from OpenWRT who implemented a mitigation, so I am curious to see the details of that mitigation.

Yep.. "DMA" direct memory access.. reading the HDMI output, simulating controllers.. it all exists.

The google term is "hardware cheats"

Like most mac power user tools there are a few versions of most. I'm currently preferring Multitouch.app as it combines: - Letting me assign 3-finger click to middle-click for opening tabs in chrome (in Safari you can use force touch but I never really liked it, and Chrome doesn't seem to have it) - Window snapping to half/half, third, etc.. either by dragging to the edge or with keyboard shortcuts. I use keyboard shortcuts for both window splits and thirds on my 34" Ultrawide.

My favourite less known app: https://www.inyourface.app/ - This amazing app throws up a fullscreen modal dialog with a countdown to your next calendar meeting and has a button to click to open the Google Meet, etc. I set mine to countdown 1 minute before it starts. I'm almost always on-time for meetings now. It's also included in SetApp.

SetApp - Mentioning now because I mention below ones included in SetApp, it's a monthly all-you-can-eat subscription to a few hundred mac apps. It's an alternative to purchasing them separately. It may well work out cheaper in the long run to just buy them but it's a useful option.

Adjust third-party Monitor Brightness - Lunar.app for a standalone tool with the most features (can automate and sync the brightness adjustments with time of day, your laptop monitor, etc). But basic control with the keyboard buttons is possible also from BetterDisplay. DisplayBuddy is another tool in this space. They have varying features and pricepoints.

BetterDisplay - Enables HiDPI support (e.g. "more space", "more text", etc) on third party displays - makes text size bigger for people that prefer it on 1440p/Ultrawide QHD displays nicer for many and apparently much nicer for 4K displays for most people though I've not used a 4K.

Multitouch - My current favourite of the various tools that both let you snap windows to the left/right half (or third, etc) PLUS let's you assign three finger click on your touchpad to middle click for opening tabs in Chome. There are a bunch of others apps in these spaces but this is my current favourite in terms of the exact features I need, in 1 app, with a good price point. See also BetterTouchTool (also in SetApp), Rectangle)

iTerm2 - Mostly I love Terminal.app, except, when screen sharing in chrome it won't share multiple tabs for some reason, plus, it's the only terminal emulator on any platform that supports tmux integration mode so you can open multiple screens on a remote SSH server that appear as physical tabs or windows locally.

Secretive - Creates SSH keys in the secure enclave that cannot be exfiltrated by Malware, optionally it can either support "No Auth" or require TouchID/Password for each use. I have one of each style, for differing security levels of hosts.

yubikey-agent - Automates using your YubiKey as an SSH agent and makes it work every time you plug/replug.

Karabiner Elements - one of a few different ways to make home/end on third-party keyboards work on macOS.

More commonly known ones: iStat Menus (also in SetApp)

At -some- point you actually need to update things. If you're using a 2008 docker container you have all manner of bugs and security issues.

AMD have an equivalent in uProf: https://www.amd.com/en/developer/uprof.html

Power profiling is listed as supported on all CPUs though a bunch of features (including memory bandwidth, one that I had wanted) are limited to EPYC CPUs and don't exist in Ryzen or Threadripper.

It's sadly true but also without such standards it'd be even worse, and, you'd have nothing to fall back on to try to force them to fix it.

Which is exactly why we have industry standards elsewhere. Particularly in house building for example.

Case Preserving and Case Sensitive are subtly two different things. Most case insensitive file systems are case preserving and whatever the UTF8 equivalent is I forget the name.

By contrast my 2007 Mitsubishi Lancer Evolution X has automatic wipers that are just magic and other than making them slightly more or less sensitive once-off (which you can do using the dial on the wiper stalk) it responds perfectly, adjusting the speed up and down with changing rain intensity in perfect harmony with what I would do myself. I never find myself wanting. That's nearly 20 years old at this point.

2018 Subaru Outback, same thing.

Apple AirPods Pro are doing all of this now. They’ll isolate people in front of you, can reject background noise but allow voice, etc. They can also correct both music audio and “transparency” audio using your Audiogram. Unfortunately for me, they average both ears and perform the same correction on both ears and I have notable hearing loss only on one side.

I don’t see any reason proper hearing aids can’t already be doing it now though I am sure some of them are but probably the even more ridiculously priced $8k+ models.

Nuheara is also in this space but marketed and designed more specifically to be a low budget hearing aid replacement. With a similar pride to AirPods Pro.

Basically no one makes white goods locally in Australia, so :)

I only recently learnt this one, it's great for working with stacked patches in gerrit.

This is my favourite, I use it all the time. There's a couple bugs that show up but it's really good. Having real local tabs for a remote SSH is great.

One of the often not talked about problems is that lots of masks were terrible and the quality in general was very variable.

There are some really great ones, and there are plenty that are quite difficult to breathe through. The N95 standard for breathability would pass some pretty bad ones.

Most places sold all sorts of badly quality controlled masks and it was a crapshoot what you got. And less breathable didn’t necessarily mean better protection.

Plenty would also collapse onto your mouth or not etc.

Some people definitely had a nicer time than others with them.