AdmiralGinge

Depends, public transport outside of London is often a complete joke in the UK. I switched to cycling after getting pissed off at a bus that came once every hour and a half, was often 30-40 minutes late and occasionally didn't bother to turn up at all.

Yeah, I think I'd be utterly "half a bottle of gin a night" miserable working in the average corporate environment. It's hard to put my finger on the precise reason, but that kind of environment just has absolutely zero appeal to me even though I'd be earning a fair bit more.

Money's nice, but not hating your life is nicer. I'd make a rubbish Sisyphus.

It's even worse in the other direction; I used to go from Oxford to Aberystwyth quite often and Arriva Wales were truly appalling. They only ever ran two carriages for part of the route despite Aberystwyth being a university town so even when the Biblical unreliability of the trains wasn't a factor you were inevitably crammed in like cattle for the slaughterhouse. I've heard things are a bit better now Transport for Wales has taken over.

Beeching's axe really did a number on Wales, the country is effectively cut in half by rail and travel between North Wales and Cardiff takes a massive 3+ hour detour across the border to Shrewsbury. Reversing some of his cuts and reopening the Aberystwyth to Carmarthen line has been seriously talked about in recent years and I think it would be a very good idea. Beeching's cuts were extraordinarily myopic and allegedly the government of the day was in bed with road haulage companies who had an interest in hurting the railways. At any rate I hope his route to the afterlife involved a tediously indirect detour via limbo and purgatory!

http://llanfairpwllgwyngyllgogerychwyrndrobwllllantysiliogog...

Welsh place names can be brilliantly literal, Aberystwyth for example is "mouth of the river Ystwyth". Llanfairpwllgwyngyll... means "St Mary's church of the pool of the white hazels over against the pool of St Tysilio Gogo" but the name was completely contrived in the Victorian era to promote tourism to Anglesey.

I've been realising this recently, while I'm a professional programmer I only ever really learned the maths I needed for my degree and even then most of that got forgotten after I graduated beyond what's necessary for my day-to-day work. I did a bit of ML at university and I've been meaning to pick it up again but wanted to avoid half-arsing it by just learning the libraries rather than the underlying mathematical principles as well. One of the mental hurdles has been getting over this idea of "ML maths" as this black box, I've started with some linear algebra courses and while it's very interesting in its own right, it's also showed me I have some pretty enormous gaps in my knowledge!

Next time I'm between jobs (hopefully won't be for a long time) I'm going to revisit maths as its own thing, I really want to get my calculus and trigonometry up to scratch as well as things like linear algebra and statistics. It's interesting how quickly it leaves your head too, I did pretty well at university with ML but having not exercised those muscles so much fell out the instant that exam timer hit zero.

Obviously this isn't going to be affecting a huge number of people in 2021, but if you listen to AM radio (I'm a bit of an anorak for Radio Caroline so I've been trying to pick that up) it's amazing how much interference modern devices give off. The monitor I bought last month absolutely wipes out 648 kHz, and Apple's Magic Trackpad 2 is a pretty bad offender as well.

This is something that never seems to come up in discussions on Scottish independence interestingly enough. I guess it'd be like Ireland and Northern Ireland where both jurisdictions use a common electricity market, unless politicians on either side throw their toys out of the pram which is highly likely in my opinion.

I love this!

Cheers for the heads up about OFDM, I hadn't heard of that before! I wonder if that 18 kHz I've heard is per channel ie the sum and difference channels are both 18 kHz?

They don't need to be internet-connected though, there's many "smart" LED bulbs that run off a traditional remote control.

Sounds like exactly the same problem British farmers are having post-Brexit with things like fruit-picking, they're scratching their heads wondering why British workers aren't keen on having half their wages taken for "rent" to live six people to a crappy caravan on-site and do backbreaking labour day in day out. Their only choices are to improve their wages, conditions, both, or go bankrupt.

I think Twitter in general is such a harmful thing. There's very little worth saying that can be compressed into 280 characters beyond "I'm right, you're wrong, anyone who disagrees with my subjective opinion is scum" yet somehow it's become the platform of choice for journalism in general.

That's very succinctly summed up something I often struggle to articulate.

My main sound system is a Leak Delta 70 from the early 1970s. It was an absolute joy to work on and bring back to life, especially the turntable which is a rebadged Lenco with a wonderful drive system I'd never seen before. It uses an idler wheel (which is still the original, it hasn't perished like they often do in cheaper ones) on a cone-shaped rotor. The speed selector is a slide with little protrusions at 16, 33, 45, and 78 rpm which slides the idler wheel along the cone-shaped rotor. That means you can choose any speed between the common ones giving you pitch control way before that was common.

Despite being nearly half a century old and an uncommon design it was literally an afternoon to get it up and running again after it'd spent over a decade in my neighbour's garage. Ridiculously well made bit of kit.

I didn't have a TV for a long time out of spite towards the TV licencing system in the UK and the heavy-handed way it's enforced. I'd love someone with a background in RF engineering to explain how those TV detector vans are supposed to work with modern TVs and the massively higher electromagnetic noise floor!

I think anonymity or pseudonymity is the differentiator here. Things like Facebook have never been authentic because they're so welded to your personal identity, if your colleagues and family can find you then I think you're always going to be posting through a mask.

Sir John Cockcroft, leading the project team, was sufficiently alarmed to order the filters. They could not be installed at the base as construction of the chimneys had already begun, and were constructed on the ground then winched into position at the top once the chimney's concrete had set.[42] They became known as "Cockcroft's Folly" as many regarded the delay they caused and their great expense to be a needless waste. During the fire the filters trapped about 95% of the radioactive dust and arguably saved much of northern England from becoming a nuclear wasteland. Terence Price said "the word folly did not seem appropriate after the accident".

You've got to love the British understatement! Having said that, this was really at the start of the nuclear age and came about through the UK being excluded from US nuclear projects despite having contributed to the Manhattan Project under the incorrect assumption technology would be shared after the war. Windscale was built because Britain needed the atomic bomb to prevent its post-war decline making it geopolitically irrelevant and needed it before the US and Soviet Union banned further testing. There's no way anything like that would be built today by any sane government knowing what we do now.

Yeah it might be true, but it's extremely counterproductive to point this out when you're trying to convince someone of something. People like to feel like they have agency, even if it's mostly an illusion.

We have to start reminding people that they are in control of their decisions, and that they can take steps to reduce their social media usage to healthy levels. I know the common refrain is "Delete Facebook!" but that's the equivalent of abstinence-only education. We need to start talking about how to configure Screen Time on iOS, or how to use Facebook's built-in tools to hide content you don't want to see.

I couldn't agree more, and to add to that I think it's usually a foolish approach to treat people as hapless automatons without any agency if you're trying to convince them that your point is worth listening to. If you look at two of the worst political failures in the UK recently (the Remain campaign for the Brexit referendum in 2016 and Labour's election campaign in 2019), I think what they have in common is that they essentially told people "you're a downtrodden proletariat buffeted about by forces well outside your control, but we can make things better for you" which is such a foolish approach in my opinion. Regardless of whether they actually do or not, the average person likes to think they're in control of their own destiny so blaming everything on Facebook being manipulative bastards will never work if your aim is to change the public's relationship with social media.

There is one very niche area that Prime is quite good and it's their VR app. I have Prime on my Oculus Quest and they've really nailed the player itself, it's like being in an actual cinema. Netflix also have a very good VR app, but none of the other streaming platforms I use have put in any effort in this regard.

I used to live in Ceredigion in Wales which despite being a mere county now almost perfectly maps to the 5^th century post-Roman kingdom. There's parts of Ceredigion which look pretty much the same as they've done for millennia, the mountain road between Rhayader and Aberystwyth has got to be one of Britain's best drives!

Why would I let someone else dictate what I listen to when there's plenty of on-demand content available 24/7?

To be fair there's still good radio out there and not even just on the internet. The really commercial stuff on most of the FM band is tedious but personally I really love people who are passionate about music play me things I might not have heard before. Things like BBC Radio Six Music and the former offshore pirate Radio Caroline are both pretty good in this regard.

A good radio DJ can create a far more personal and human experience than just waiting for Spotify's algorithm to give you something vaguely related.

To be fair nothing is really "necessary" beyond a 8' x 6' cell, potable water, and a crate full of Huel or something but no sane person outside of those who actively seek an ascetic lifestyle would actually want to live like that.

Just because something isn't strictly necessary doesn't mean that life can't become difficult without it. The sad fact of the matter is that by cutting off Facebook you're also cutting off the primary way of staying in touch with some people along with things like events and so on. Yes there are workarounds, of course there is but the vast majority of people don't care and can't be convinced to care about the politics and social effects of Facebook's dominant position.

As trishmapow2 correctly guessed, I have visual snow syndrome. Whether it's a quirk of vision or an outright disability really tends to depend on the intensity, for some people it doesn't affect their lives at all but for others it's completely disabling because they can't read any more. Personally I'm quite lucky, I'm never going to drive in the dark or be good at things that require excellent vision but I can still hold down a job as a programmer.

This could really be a game-changer for me when we're allowed to travel again. I have a rare condition where a problem with brain metabolism screws up the signal to noise ratio in multiple senses, by day I'm quite photophobic and by night I can't see a thing thanks to "TV static" in my vision. Having a navigation tool that sticks to well-lit areas would be an amazing improvement over existing tools for me!

I swear half of these SEO'd pages hawking tangentially-related rubbish at us read like they were written by a GAN bot or something.

I used to use that years ago! I had to stop when everyone moved over to Facebook Chat (what became Messenger) and eventually made a breaking change Adium couldn't support.

I find the sort of 18-25 internet culture that exists on other platforms is full of "look at how depressed I am lol just kidding" kinds of posts. It's like an amplifier for dragging people down, and this year social media in general has effectively given every rabid doomer a megaphone to spout (mostly unsourced) doom and gloom like a million funeral bells ringing constantly in your face. No wonder rates of depression are up!

Personally I find it a lot less readable than things like JSON or TOML.

Either way, it seems like the whole debate is kind of misplaced. Analogue and digital systems have pros and cons, but crappy mastering will make almost every single one of them irrelevant in terms of sound quality.

Personally I think vinyl often sounds better simply because it takes a higher quality of engineering to make it work at all. It's the limitations of the medium that mean you can't just compress it halfway to buggery and crank the loudness up like you can with a CD.