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2 yr. ago

  • "How did this happen?"

    Well let's see, they were found at a 100 percent FIFO coal mine that ships in ridiculous quantities of equipment, materials, and food from all across Australia and the world on a daily basis, and 600 people are shuffled to and from Brisbane every week via the local airport.

    I wonder how those ants ended up there, it's a complete mystery.

  • They also iterate very quickly.

    First car design - "functional" is being polite about it.

    Fifteen years later when they are on their tenth revision - pretty damn good.

    Meanwhile US car manufacturers can squeeze in a revision/refresh every 5 years if they're lucky.

  • I've test driven a few BYD models here in Australia. 50 thousand dollarydoos for an electric car that goes 400+km, can power your house in a blackout, has all the normal electric car performance (6 seconds to 100kmhr) and is chock full of user comforts and safety features.

    There are a LOT of these getting around in Brisbane, and for good reason. I didn't get one this time round, but by the time the lease expires on my Volvo EX30 in 4 years, I'll be looking pretty hard at BYD. Especially if they get their new solid state batteries going by then.

  • Exactly. Every person worries that they are one shaky phone video away from internet mockery.

    It worked out ok for this guy but only by a stroke of internet luck.

  • I test drove the Kona and Ionic models in Australia a couple of months ago. I also drive numerous different hire cars for work and I can say Hyundai has the most intrusive driver alert system out of the lot of them.

    Constant and loud pings and bings from the safety system. Infotainment on the Kona was also very slow to respond.

    Yes, I am doing 103km/hr in a 100 zone, thank you, Hyundai.

    Yes, I am again doing 103km/hr after briefly dipping to 98km/hr thank you, Hyundai.

    Yes, I am nearly on the edge of the lane, mainly because a large semi is coming towards me in the opposite direction and they're looking a little loosey-goosey on this two-way highway, thank you Hyundai.

    Yes, I am looking at the dash wondering what is causing the noises instead of watching the road, thank you, Hyundai.

    Yes, I am now actively poking around in the menus trying to turn this shit off instead of keeping my eyes on the road, thank you, Hyundai.

    After those test drives, I bought a Volvo instead. It has very low key warnings (or a buzz from the steering wheel like a mild ripple strip if it thinks you are leaving your lane). Just like Hyundai , you can't permanently turn the speed limit warnings off, but you can adjust them to be up to 20km/hr above or below the speed limit.

  • "Buuuuut I need my RANGER ULTRAMAX PRO LAND BARGE TITANIUM EDITION to carry all my toooools!" - every young tradie ever.

    Meanwhile old painters are still getting around in falcon utes just fine.

  • Why?

    Because people should be looking to expand their knowledge by getting into the details. By handwaving those details away with an AI summary that may or may not actually summarise the article correctly, people lose the opportunity to learn.

    If your attention span or cognitive capacity can't get you through a basic Wikipedia article you need to work on that, for your own betterment.

    If you're reading an article and you're lost in the weeds you should be taking a step back to simpler concepts in Wikipedia (or elsewhere) first. Don't trust a LLM to make a coherent summary about a topic you can't understand, because you won't be able to tell if it's feeding you bullshit.

  • That's right - the Australian government has bulk purchasing power and that's a big motivator for pharmaceutical companies. When companies get their medications listed in the PBS, sales in Australia skyrocket.

    There are some very expensive drugs on the PBS simply because it makes financial sense from a cost of care perspective for the government to do so.

  • It's BLE - Bluetooth Low Energy.

    Basically devices with BLE can listen for a wake-up command and turn on, similar to the "magic packet" of wake on Ethernet.

    Super convenient for "find my device" applications, also nice to be able to connect and activate the device without having to press a power button like a peasant.

    It also means that most devices with BLE end up flat within a month. I had a speaker with BLE and had to deliberately download a much older version of the Android partner app to turn it off, as they dropped the option to do so in later versions for "convenience". With BLE on it would be flat in about 6 weeks regardless of whether I'd used it or not , which really ruined ad-hoc usage for me.

  • The Apples and Googles and Microsofts of the world are all about offering cloud services to hold your precious data, for what is essentially "free" to the end user. Push you into their services with dark patterns, make it a pain in the ass to do without them, join the cloud, it's awesome.

    Unfortunately all that comes with a catch - when automated services fail, and self-service solutions fail to resolve it, you have zero chance or ability to contact a real live human who can apply reason and judgement to sort out the issue. You and all your data are basically fucked at that point.

  • We've all been there, back in the day haha

  • But they had "kernel tweaks for buttery smooth performance!!! \*"

    oh yeah bluetooth, wifi, fingerprint sensor doesn't work, camera takes green tint pictures, phone app crashes, and I've had some hard lockups, but it's been my daily driver for two hours now and it's awesome!!1!

  • Had a winter solstice bonfire last year. I've had two since.

  • Also fuck that private section of the track, that’s horrible.

    The rest of the train and bus network for a hundred kilometre radius is 50 cents.

    Previous state government in the late 90s "did a deal" with a private corporation to construct the line out the to airport and allow control for 35 years.

    10 more years of this shit and then it gets handed over to state government.

  • It's mainly because there are 15 stops along the way a couple of kilometres apart through the CBD, plus a 7 minute wait in the middle to change trains to another line.

    The trains are capable of 100 km/hr but basically through that area they get up to 40-60km/hr before having to slow for bends/switching tracks/the next stop.

  • It’s super hard to resist public transit at higher prices

    It was 65 dollarydoos for a projected 25 minute uber home from Brisbane airport on Friday night.

    I took the train for 55 minutes instead. $22.30 of my train fare was for the 10 kilometre section that is privately owned by "Airtrain CityLink Limited", the public owned section that took me the remaining 10km cost 50 cents.

    Fuck the corporations that want to try to replace public transport.

  • Perhaps it’s time to start researching alternative materials.

    Plenty of metals floating around in space. Just need to go and get them.

    Only need to capture one decent sized metalliferous asteroid from a near earth orbit and we'd be set for a century or two.

  • showed the "percent of time spent viewing content posted by 'friends'" had declined over the past two years, from 22 to 17 percent on Facebook and from 11 to 7 percent on Instagram.

    This is ENTIRELY because of Meta's content algorithms that buried the content from everyone's friends under a torrent of shit. It's pretty disingenuous for the company that controls that algorithm to present this as some inevitable fait accompli, something out of their hands, oh well.

    But of course Meta was terrified of people just viewing all their friend's posts and then logging off for the day because, as everyone knows, line must always go up.