tau @ Tau @aussie.zone

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252

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315

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2 yr. ago

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Zip disks ain’t that old!

That's what I like to think as well, but I guess it has been a while. It's like how I think 90s cars are still fairly recent until I see ones rolling around with historic rego...

One of the places I work at has a display cabinet showing historical media formats and devices, seeing things in it like the zip disc and the Sony camera that took floppies always makes me feel like Elrond:

The continuous output is where average people actually want more power though, one of the main points of ebikes is to reduce effort from climbing hills. Most people are not going to be at your level of fitness or investment in cycling (in both the physical and mental sense) and just want to get places without needing a shower afterwards. I can see why you want to keep a purer form of something you have an interest in (similarly I think there is limited need for automatic transmissions outside of disability) but there is a case for more power if you want more people to be riding over driving.

The 250w limit in EN15194 is overly low, NSW finally changed their laws to a more sensible 500w a few years back so this change will make it so you can't import a whole variety of bikes you can legally ride. Even 750w isn't a problem IMO, having ridden one (with throttle and all) I'd class it as definitely still on the bicycle end of things rather than an actual motorbike.

Looking on the bright side though import restrictions will hopefully induce more manufacturers to do ADR compliance for those of us who do actually want the motorbike end of 'ebikes', even for dirt bikes the ability to rego them makes them much more useful for non-track riding.

I've had some Jasper Myrtle chocolate before (albeit not that specific favour) and thought it nice, I think the chocolate's a pretty safe bet. Haven't tried the Redbrick coffee though but I have seen people say it's good.

I guess someone's been having a go at magnet fishing...

Yet again I have to mention how dumb it is that we have much safer cars than when our standard speed limits are set but all we ever get is decreases to these limits.

"People think 'I can do 110 legally so therefore it's OK to do it,'" he said.

So close to the problem but no we can't focus on teaching people to drive to conditions because lower speed limits solve everything. Never mind that even 70km/h is going to be too fast in some conditions but 100km/h+ is fine in others - even on the same road.

Probably hard to justify legally, I expect the best we can hope for is just giving back the $3m they paid without counting in the massive land price rises since then. It'd be amusing to turn around and make it the new Ukrainian embassy site though...

It sounds a logical start point, the central coast and Newcastle have a large population base to work with and it's not that far apart. The sheer amount of tunnel for that route compared to what one would expect with a corridor through more open country is a downside but you might as well start somewhere rather than talk about it for a few more decades.

Strange that the ACT doesn't run under the same umbrella as NSW, I guess it just wanted to be different again. At least Victoria has a significant amount of its own power generation so being separate makes a little more sense - while the ACT does have a reasonable amount of solar power (solar farms as well as rooftop) it's still dependent on the NSW grid for supply.

They're most of the way there but fall a bit short of a real Tim Tam. I find the chocolate has a slight sourness to it compared to the original (as if they let an American pick the recipe) - not enough to stop me eating them but enough to reduce the normal Tim Tam desire to rip through a whole packet.

The Choceur chocolate blocks however tend to be a quite acceptable replacement for Cadbury and even Whittaker so not all hope is lost for more affordable chocolates.

I've somehow managed to never read or watch any of the versions of that, I know the general gist of the story due to cultural osmosis but not the details. Might have to get around to reading the book at least.

Twenty Thousand Leagues under the Sea and The Mysterious Island (this one is barely sci fi) both include messages in bottles but not at both start and end of the story, so at this point I think I'm out of ideas.

That just makes me think of the Count of Monte Cristo, and while that plot kicks off everything with a nautical message it wasn't in a bottle.

Nothing comes to mind that matches that unfortunately.

I did initially think of Treasure Island for some reason and that definitely matches the latter criteria but I don't recall any messages in a bottle actually appearing in the book.

Even with a theoretically ideal seal holding suitable humidity it depends a lot on what paper and where the bottle spent its time. I would expect a massively broad range of times - between a few years and thousands of years.

Paper with any significant acid content will last significantly less time than acid free paper, and paper made of cotton is likely to last noticeably better than paper made from wood. You also want the paper to be kept away from light and high temperatures as these will really cut into potential lifespan. If this bottle spent most of its time buried in a beach that would have at least kept it dark and relatively cool, probably why it lasted so well even with an imperfect seal.

Over the last few years I think all our states have now banned phones from being visible in school, so there's efforts towards reducing usage at least within school. That's a relatively recent move though and does only cut down on usage during part of the day so I don't know if there's been a noticeable effect on the kids.

Doesn’t that sound exactly like the “can somebody please think about the children” argument?

It is that, but the ban in question is being justified by that same poor argument so it might as well be fired right back again.

The idea of a bus conversion is appealing, I have tossed the idea around before but I'd have to find somewhere to put the thing while I'm not out and about in it (which realistically would be most of the time - one has to work to pay for the trips). A bus would give enough space to be comfortable in on wet days and I've seen some conversions with the good idea of a garage section at the rear to put a motorbike in to explore where you can't or don't want to drive the bus to.

Pretty sure motorhomes are exempt from having to fill in the logbook too which is handy as that would get annoying for personal use, just have to remember to pull into the inspection stations (there's a nasty fine for missing those).

Here I was thinking having to run things through turnitin was bad enough a decade ago before LLMs entered the scene. At least then though there did seem to be an understanding that it was always going to claim some degree of similarity given how many other uni students were going to be writing on the same topics every year.

Detecting LLM output seems an almost impossible thing to do reliably (i.e. both high sensitivity and high specificity), the whole idea after all is that they output what is commonly written by humans in the training datasets. I can see unis having to return to having basically every assessment done in person as even with the privacy nightmare of monitoring software you can't really be sure non-supervised input actually was written by the student.