davidbanham

It may be correct, but was it good? If it's obvious that someone has plopped some slop in that file and then said "Yeah that'll do, ship it", then that gives the reader information about how much the author cared about the project. If someone's first touchpoint to your project is a billboard that yells "I DIDN'T REALLY GIVE A TOSS ABOUT THIS" then don't be shocked if they don't engage.

The fact that you didn't feel it was worth your time to make sure it was excellent is a strong signal that I shouldn't bother to read it.

If it wasn’t important enough for someone to take the time to write, it isn’t important enough for me to take the time to read.

It’s a pretty solved problem. In NSW, Australia we have automated systems for heavy vehicle noise fines. (They could of course be used for regular vehicles as well, we just don’t)

For all vehicles the police can issue a defect notice to anything that seems too loud. The owner then has to present to an inspection station and prove that they’re compliant. If they don’t show up or don’t test as compliant their registration is voided and they’re fined. Of course, they can remove the modification before visiting the induction station then reinstall it afterwards, but that gets pretty time consuming pretty fast and people largely stay within the bounds of reason as a result. The system isn’t perfect but it works fine.

That’s what they did for CS:GO, developed by Hidden Path.

That resonates for me. I spend lot of time teaching volunteers. Early on, I encourage them to learn the skill from me, but also take any opportunity to have others explain and demonstrate the same thing to them. I tend to work from first principles, explaining how the pump functions and why that means water goes in here and out there, and what different configurations of valves are therefore valid and which ones will never do anything useful. Others often explain it in terms of which valves to turn in which order to achieve a given outcome.

Neither is right or wrong. Most people will be left pretty cold by one explanation while the other will land neatly into a hole in their brain shaped perfectly for it. Which one is which will be different for each person.

I think that there’s value in gearing educational settings towards having a plurality of instructors available on each subject and letting students gravitate towards the ones that work for them.

I have also been very happy with Hyprland as a past dwm user.

I was completely unaware of view transitions and speculation rules. All of my products are server rendered for speed and simplicity. It’s amazing how snappy the interface is when your pages just load quickly because your software is performant. These seem like a great way to add an extra 10% of flavour.

Floodwater is horrible. Full of sewage overflow, agricultural runoff, etc. Any building contaminated with floodwater will at the least need to have all the furniture, floor covering, drywall etc ripped out and replaced. Even then you’re rolling the dice that the timber in the frame won’t just grow mould forever.

The US border has been more trouble than it’s worth for over a decade.

Parenting isn’t just about defending your kid’s boundaries on their behalf. It’s also helping your kid to grow and expand those boundaries, and giving them the skills to manage them independently.

The end goal is to create a happy, fully functioning adult.

Right, I see the quick shot in the video now. Looks like it would be inaccessible until the rear seat frames are removed. Also, it appears the only way to get the angle required to penetrate the adhesive disc is to clamber inside the vehicle, directly above the battery pack that is on fire and/or in thermal runaway.

That is once again a big no-thankyou from this hose dragger.

I came across someone in a Renault Picasso the other week stopped in the middle of an intersection late at night. I blocked oncoming traffic and went to see what was wrong. Turned out their alternator was faulty and the battery had run down to the point where the car shut down, fair enough.

First option, push the vehicle to a safer location then sort it out. The fine people at Renault, however, had equipped the vehicle with a button-operated handbrake and a by-wire automatic gearbox. No overrides obvious, none listed in the ACAP first responder guide entry for the vehicle, and no mention of anything in the vehicle manual. No way of pushing it. Great.

Next plan, jump-start the vehicle where it is. Did that, engine started, battery had enough voltage to run everything even without being charged from the alternator, no problems. However, the Renault flatly refused to disengage the park brake or go into gear because of the fault code being thrown by the alternator. Even though the engine was running and all systems were powered, it refused to permit the driver to operate it. After a few cycles of shutting off and jump starting it we managed to get it to agree to if not drive under it's own power, at least permit the wheels to be turned so it could be pushed.

Once we finally got it out of the intersection, I learned the driver was only a few hundred metres from home. I suggested they might want to remove the battery from the vehicle, take it home, and stick it on a battery tender overnight so that they had a shot at driving it to a mechanic the next day. Unfortunately, the fine engineers at Renault had decided that the battery should be mounted lengthways in the engine compartment with 90% of it buried (had to ground the negative lead to the chassis when jumping it). Removal of the battery apparently required disassembly of half the radiator shroud and general engine plastics which took at least 30 minutes.

I made an offer to fetch a drip torch in order to burn the bloody thing to the ground, which was politely declined. We all went home.

It appears to me that the positioning of that port is only useful when the battery pan has been removed from the vehicle.

There is no way I’m crawling under an EV that’s already on fire while wearing breathing apparatus and wrestling a charged line to get a branch up and under a chassis rail to puncture that weather seal. You’ll find me in the cab of the truck aiming there remote control monitor while on the radio calling for every bulk water appliance in the district.

The people buying your ads want to know how many people saw them. If your ad is embedded in 3D space, when did someone “see” it? If they were standing at a 10 degree angle for 6 seconds does that count? 11 degrees and 5 seconds?

With video ads they want completion rates. With all ads they like people to be able to click through and engage further with the product. None of these questions have satisfying answers with embedded ads. That’s why they never took off.

If the content of the commit is too small to be meaningful, the commit is too small. Either wait until you’ve done more before committing, or rebase -i before pushing your branch and merge up any piecemeal commits into better sized ones that communicate a story.

Keeping that metadata in tickets means that it can’t be read within ‘git blame’. It’s also all too easy for it to be lost entirely when changing ticketing systems, transferring codebases between teams or companies, etc.

> People seem to get "start a group chat" vs "send a message to each person individually."

The WhatsApp groups for my kids school classes, bands and sports teams beg to differ.

Communities seems like a legitimately useful feature to manage this. Absolutely nobody uses it because that would require an iota more forethought than the bare minimum.

The difference with email here is that if these were email groups I have access to sophisticated tools to manage that noise on /my end/. With WhatsApp I’m beholden to the tools that Meta deign to provide, then to the subset of those that the group chat convener bothers to enable. Thus, all I actually have in practice is “mute this chat”.

Yes, absolutely. I would be shocked to learn of a jurisdiction in which that is not already the case that seems bizarre.

I am very much the target market for this and it looks super interesting. Some feedback on copy: from the website I thought the espresso machine worked like the flair et al where you pour water into a reservoir on top, so I dismissed it since while that’s a neat thing, it’s not my preferred workflow. I then read a comment here that said it’s actually designed to suck up water from a kettle placed next to it. That’s brilliant! I suggest making that clear in the marketing.

Accuracy matters. The Glock 18 is the factory produced fully automatic. It’s intended to be used with a brace to assist recoil management and accuracy.

It’s possible to fire full auto with reasonable accuracy and no brace. The amount of training it would take, though, that shooter is likely to be just as effective firing semi automatic.

In Sydney there’s so much rooftop solar generation that feed-in tariffs for grid connections frequently go negative. Ie: you have to pay the grid to have it take your excess power.

From memory South Australia has had multiple occasions of being 100% powered by renewables with all their fossil generators shut down.

Yeah we definitely have work to do in completing the shift away from coal. The natural gas export contract situation is a shambles which makes it difficult to use for the transition as planned. It’s certainly not doom and gloom, though, and apart from lines getting aced by trees falling during storms, the wall holes are always full of electrons at my place.

Managing runoff is a factor in any vehicle fire, secondary to immediate protection of life, of course. Runoff is contained in binding, by digging ditches, etc. Contaminated runoff may then need to be removed by a specialised hazmat crew, depending on what’s in it and where is draining to.

Australian here, but I can’t imagine there’s much difference on this issue.

I had no idea tsnet existed. Seems very handy for little home automation and family utility apps.

If you add your fastmail account to iOS it’ll populate the inbuilt calendar and mail apps. Then you’ve got separate apps for each in addition to the fastmail app. Use whichever ones you please.

Recovering a car from a remote area can be a big job. Not only do you need a vehicle capable of getting into and out of the spot where the first car got stuck, it might need to do so while also carrying the first car.

Dragging the first car to where you can get it on to the recovery vehicle can cause significant damage to the trail. Repairing that can be a big job when you can't just drive a tip truck full of sand/gravel/rocks to the spot. It's not at all outlandish for the consequences of a stuck Subaru to pretty quickly run to "We need to contract a high lift capacity helicopter for a few days to fly in a half tonne of gravel and a repair crew".

And then there's the fact that to some degree, you're endangering the people who need to come get you.

Definitions are hard. By that wording, any Land Cruiser outside the 70 series is forbidden because they're a full time 4WD. Nobody will argue that an 80, 100 or 200 series cruiser isn't a very capable 4WD.

I don't begrudge the parks people that wrote the regulation, though. Fundamentally what they're trying to say is just "Don't be dumb, only drive the trails in a vehicle that you know is capable, and if you don't have the experience to know that you have your answer".

The job of the regulation is to give them the ability to deliver an enforcement action where it's warranted. The job of the rangers is to use their judgement in a given situation, and either pull someone up or just wave hello. That's what's happened here, the system works.

You correctly interpreted my meaning with "none of the above". An older gen Forester with a good set of tyres fitted can fit the bill, for sure. The Subaru Brumby is an outback legend and you still see plenty of them rolling around, going more places than you'd imagine possible.

A Subaru Crosstrek wearing it's original HT tyres, though? It's not intended as an off-road vehicle. That's not what it was built for. Low clearance, insufficient travel, weak tyres.

Actually independent wheel braking as part of an electronic traction control system is pretty common and _can be_ excellent. The Land Rover Discovery looks to have gotten a bit soft in the latest iteration, but they've used that system for years. Coupled with the coil suspension all round with good articulation, they're well regarded off road. Not long-term durable on high speed rough roads, mind you, but brilliant at climbing a snotty hill.

For serious or regular off road work, a mechanical locking diff is the way to go. Yes, most electronic systems will completely freak out and stop you going anywhere in soft sand until you remember to turn them off. They do have their place though.

If you've driven the trail before, know what the weather has been like recently, and have some info to suggest that the trail remains in good condition then absolutely!

Thing is, there are great fire trails and awful fire trails. They don't consistently stay one or the other, either. Some of the trails near me have just been re-done and I'd happily drive in a Subaru BRZ. Others I wouldn't go down in our Isuzu FTS-800.

Locking differentials are very useful in particularly challenging terrain. Think step rough rock climbs or soft sand. For punting along an average fire trail or dirt road, though, it’s clearance, strong tyres and suspension travel that’s more important.

A Subaru has none of the above. They make great cars, but they’re not an off road vehicle.

A server is just a computer. You could run this software on the computer in front of you, or a computer in a datacentre. Either is fine.