Psychlist

The flip side s that you don't have to use Chrome+Google for everything. I buy ebooks and watch youtube on it, plus my phone (so I buy android apps via the same google account). And Gmail is my fallback email account so that doesn't see much traffic.

I use 3-4 browsers and because WFH + VM's for coding some incidental sandboxing.

Isn't Linus Tech Tips an ad, though? The only times I've looked at it all I've seen is sponsored content with breaks to talk about sponsors and maybe buy some merch. Oh, and exhortations to use their affiliate links. And that's using Premium, I expect that without it the sponsored content would be broken up by youtube's ads.

Maybe my expectations are biased by subscribing to Nebula? And for those who do, Medlife Crisis just posted a fun video on the placebo effect featuring great (fake) sponsor callouts.

People can have absolute/exception memory for other things too. I dated a woman who could look at a bit of cloth and say "that's the same colour as..." and be right every time. Even when she hadn't seen the other item of clothing for months. It made shopping with her somewhat less painful because she wasn't constantly swapping things just to look at the colours.

Much better than perfect pitch, otherwise known as the ability to know that something is out of tune, by how much, and struggle to ignore that. A violinist friend managed to train herself to shift pitch to match the rest of the orchestra but I suspect part of the reason she turned to the dark side (jazz) was the latter's ability to adapt to her sense of correct pitch.

the "real" perfect pitch people are always anchored, no matter how much noise anyone throws at them. Which is also a source of discomfort and difficulty

Not least because the argument about "what note is this" and "what note do you think you're singing" starts basically day one of singing lessons. Trying to learn any practical music when you can hear the difference between close frequencies mean you're effectively learning colours from a group who insist that blue and green are the same colour.

One of my party tricks used to be saying the song and artist from the first 5 seconds of a track. These days with samplers and synthesisers that's almost impossible. I still get tripped when I hear some samples, like "that's the bass guitar from {song x} WTF" in the middle of some otherwise pleasant song.

If you have a fast design/architecture, you may never need to optimise the code at all. But the flip side is that with a bad design or bad architecture optimising the implementation won't save you. With a sufficiently bad architecture starting again is the only reasonable choice.

I've seen code that does "fast" searches of a tree in a dumb way come out O(n^10) or worse (at some point you just stop counting), and the solution was not to search most of the tree at all. Find the relevant node and follow links from that.

Meanwhile in my day job performance really doesn't matter. We need a cloud system for the distributed high bandwidth side, but the smallest instances we can buy with the necessary bandwidth have so much CPU and RAM that even quite bad memory leaks take days to bring an instance down. Admittedly this is C++ with a sensible design (if I do say so myself) so ... good design and architecture means you don't have to optimise.

My expectation is that one combustion car owners have to pay more of the cost of that fuel choice they'll change over. Lots of people already drive 20 minutes to save $10 on a tank full, or queue at the gas station ditto.

What we're really waiting for is second hand EVs in real numbers, or the political decision that small, electric cars are the only ones allowed on most streets. That would dramatically cut the death rates from both pollution and vehicular homicide.

https://www.vehiclesuggest.com/what-happened-tesla-battery-s...

Tesla tried it. There was no point Tesla building more swap stations because so few people paid the premium to get a swappable battery. It turns out that people who won't buy an electric car unless they can swap the battery will find some other reason not to buy an electric car if that reason is removed.

nothing interesting, just repairs and tweaks. I'm building a granny flat instead :)

https://ibb.co/0sJx4SN (new cog on the left, old on the right)

I'm not saying you should do this. And Rohloff strongly suggest you don't do this I'm just saying that you can do this.

My limited experience is that it's easier to recruit more muscles on an upright, so your peak power can be higher. In my 30's I would hit double for a 30s trial on an upright vs a recumbent (last time I had a decent power meter was in my 30's). But over 5 minutes the recumbent was better even if both were fixed to stands. So I don't think it's the balance issue.

For an hour or more the recumbent wins just for comfort, and unfaired records it wins on air resistance (that's why the UCI banned them, it let povo scum beat gentlemen athletes). But then the UCI doesn't have faired records... it's only the IHPVA et al that make that distinction.

Interestingly the PBP etc records (we don't have records, this isn't a race!) are all uprights AFAIK. But that's xenophobia rather than technical skill from what I know. And the Round Australia record is an upright, largely because no-one on a recumbent has been inclined to attempt it. RAAM is held by a bent (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Race_Across_America#Records).

A missing top tube is much easier to deal with than a missing down tube. Lots of bikes have pushed that a very long way. But the main forces there are twisting the pedals against the handlebars and using the front brake, which the downtube is very involved with.

You could build that bike out of steel tubing and it would be rideable, as I said, but insofar as it's broken it's broken at the missing down tube.

Slingshot, for example, had no down tube just a wire and that was a bit notorious for being squirrely in the steering.

You could definitely build a bike like that that was quite rigid, it would just be heavy or expensive or both. A decent carbon layup, for example, might bring it back to the chain forces going through the seatstays being the main issue. But that's something you'd want to analyse a lot before building it. And I think you'd end up wanting a much bigger head tube lug than shown.

https://moz.geek.nz/mozbike/ride/carry/index.html

I didn't collect photos of the real experiments, those were mostly "grab a scrap bike, hack it about, (try to) ride it, bin it and try again. But if you wander the mozbike site there's a few of those. https://moz.geek.nz/mozbike/see/misc/2001/index.html has the "MBB FWD recumbent" that's just a cheap chair welded to a BMX frame :)

There's a reason that horses were the fancy sports car/military tool of the animal transport world. They eat a lot, break easily, and don't last long.

People used oxen, donkeys, llama etc way more than horses. And the Chinese invented wheelbarrows and used them extensively rather than using draft animals. They often use bicycles much the same way as wheelbarrows now, and rich people often find that amusing (possibly because a KMart bike is a toy, a Chinese bike is a workhorse).

Nope, with single speed/hub gears chain wear is still a problem, it's just that they're less sensitive to it and there's fewer parts to replace. When the chain gets longer it gets loose, but it has to be very loose indeed to fall off or skip on a single speed. With a derailleur setup there's a tension arm with a weak spring so when the chain wants to skip that tension arm lets it. Derailleur setups commonly have some cogs with fewer teeth than single speeds so the problem is more obvious. Also, often derailleur cogs are aluminium while single speed ones are steel (not always!).

Typically a safety bike will get through 3-5 chains before needing to replace the rear cog, and many more before replacing the chainring(s). But Pinion gearboxes in the bottom bracket often run small chainrings that are similar in size to the rear cog, and I suspect they need to replace both rather than just the rear one.

I vaguely recall that people did state that rowing is what you should use to get the most energy out of a human body

The limit for athletes is normally cardiovascular, commonly oxygen - VO2max the the measurement there. For less fit people it can be the cardio side, their heart just isn't up to it so their muscles fail and they lie on the ground twitching. Oxygen-deprived people pant and gasp.

So recruiting more muscle groups really doesn't help. What does is increasing oxygen intake, and this is where recumbent bikes come in. The laid back position opens the thorax and increases effective lung capacity. As well as reducing air resistance, except that that's a very subtle thing that mostly depends on the rules governing the sport in question (fairing on bike and kayak, for example, are variously restricted or banned in most relevant sports).

You can also reverse that and exercise at high altitude... less oxygen for everyone!

The trouble with the very first render is that the author is wrong about why the bike wouldn't work. The head tube isn't braced well enough to allow the front brake to be used, and would twist when cornering to a degree that would unsettle most riders. The missing chainstay would only be an issue for powerful cyclists or people standing up to pedal. But the bicycle shown could definitely be built and ridden. Probably more practical than Saul Griffith's plexiglass bicycle (that was also built and ridden).

At one stage Klein had a problem with the chainstays separating at the bottom bracket and a number of people rode those bikes after breaking them... almost exactly the "missing chainstay" problem above.

I've built some very weird bicycles and broken both those and conventional bicycles. I have at least some idea of what works... I'd be willing to build as many of those renders as someone was willing to pay for.

Two things: college is supposed to be an opportunity to learn from mistakes so making the normal consequence of any mistake the end of your career goes against that. Historically the decent young men of Stanford were able to get drunk, pull dumb stunts, embarrass themselves, then graduate and join "real life". The recent decision that sexual assault should be taken off the list of allowable "dumb stunts" is still working its way through the system, and right now we seem to be at the "major overreaction" stage.

Secondly, part of the idea of Stanford and other elite schools is to create social links so that even quite serious mistakes aren't career-ending. The idea that "your first business will fail, and that's ok" is necessary because almost all new businesses do fail. Society needs that, and since the US can't have a social safety net, we need that group of rich kids with rich friends to provide at least some people who can afford those failures.

We can argue about whether the victim of the coffee-dumping was wrong to think it was a minor thing, but hopefully we can all agree that the death penalty was a bit harsh for that offense?

I mean supportive parents, and very likely also a supportive school and supportive community. "led a youth group" on the application doesn't arise in isolation, any more than high grades in external exams come from homeschooling (they can in both cases, but you're in the 0.1% of the 1% who get into Stanford territory).

Having a white tile and a blue tile would be fine, though. I'm really tempted by this, but I think I should start by tiling the garage floor or something rather than my whole living area.

I think the core bit you've missed is: Stanford explicitly selects for perfectionists by requiring extremely high standards of (most) students. Those students have spend several years working very hard to get in, aware that even the slightest mis-step can cost them everything they've worked for. But they're surrounded by people trying to help them get in.

Then they get to Stanford and discover that the university administration is actively hostile, it's looking for reasons to get rid of imperfect students, or students that can be blamed for imperfection (anyone running a group of students that has a problem).

Sorry, I can't remember, this was several years ago and I've since sold the truck. But loosely my requirements were 24V input to match the truck, battery life of at least a week, external antenna and ability to work without user input. I just played on ebay until I found one that looked likely, searched for support forums and found a discussion on a European trucking forum where they liked it. It was under $US100.

Access to it was either via the manufacturer website or you could configure your own server IP and it would send JSON packets via HTTP post. No verification of the server, but it was also annoying enough to configure that I thought even a thief that found it would just smash it rather than fscking with it. AFAIK no-one ever did, it only stopped working when I stopped paying for the eSIM (the new owner never took over that tracker even though I told them all about it)

The immobiliser was a whole other ball of shit. It had a keyfob, but also remote monitoring via a physical SIM. I couldn't find a DIY-able one, so I was paying ~$US50/year to some Chinese company to monitor the system and allow me to track and immobilise it via their app. That worked, as did the geographic restrictions, but it was also easy enough to remove/bypass - the new owner hated the system and rang me to yell about it before removing it. I assume they just added a bypass wire and moved on.

There's a lot that can be done by disintegrated systems, too.

I put cameras onto a box truck so I had reversing etc, but I used an 8-camera wired security system with video recorder and eSIM for that. The screen was optional but I found one that only had one button (to toggle views) rather than a "command console" type that by its nature gave full control over the security system. Driving around displaying the bumper-height rear camera on the screen was quite handy, normally it's a blind spot of trucks.

Likewise the GPS tracking system, I bought a stand-alone navigation system (you need a truck-specific one that you can at the very least type height and weight into so it doesn't direct you down roads you can't fit through), and obviously a separate anti-theft tracker (well, two, because the immobiliser also had one).

And of course there was a radio/CD player in the cab, no need to wire that into the one computer to rule them all that modern mobile infotainment systems have. I mean, "computers with wheels" or whatever the transport as a service companies call their devices these days.

skip owning an actual thermometer

Doesn't that rely on you living next to someone else's thermometer that's published? My not very accurate setup gives me more than a degree just down my property line (~30m) largely because one end is next to a road and the other on lawn surrounded by trees. Albeit neither are proper meteorological stations so accuracy in that sense isn't even an option.

I publish a few readings but have never really looked into the exact accuracy of the https://www.uradmonitor.com/ sensors. My actions in response are pretty coarse so it doesn't matter a huge amount... PM10 goes over 300 and I close the doors and windows sort of thing.

In Australia they technically need a direct debit authority, but PayPal is above the law in Australia so our dispute process is through our local bank. It works, but it's very tedious and the bank will try to push you towards the PayPal dispute process. It's much better not to link it to a bank account at all, use a credit card because that way it's two US corps fighting with each other when there's a problem.

I have an old-ish paypal account with no phone number attached and while they prompt me every time I have not supplied one. There was a period of a month or two a couple of years ago when I couldn't use paypal at all without providing a phone, but I was quite willing to live without paypal. Mysteriously when I tried to log in a few months later it let me.

The key thing IMO is that the paper book was 0.9 lux but they cranked the ebook up to 30 lux. I missed that the first time. They also had the ebook set to "harsh blue", which my ebook reader can do but it also has a "warm" setting as well as the obvious ability to turn the brightness down from "glare of a thousand suns" to "candlelight"

The ebook reader part is kind of disturbing, I have a warm mode on mine that I always use, and the brightness set as low as it'll go (I find it too bright, but they seem to use a linear scale so there's not much range of adjustment).

I have a red LED striplight above my bed for reading paper books so I will try using that for the ebook reader and see if I notice a difference. My main issue is that interesting ebooks keep me awake longer than interesting paper books, I have a "no screens after 8pm" rule but wasn't counting the ebook reader as a screen.

The cost of diverting plastic from the waste stream is high, the cost of recovering it once it becomes litter is higher, and the cost of getting it out of the ocean is dollars per kilogramme. And once we have it the best option we have is either melting into lumps of generic plastic to use as weights, or shipping it to Sweden to be burned to generate electricity (only place that does this AFAIK, and I wouldn't trust anyone in the US or Australia if they wanted to).

Some places have gone back to milk in glass bottles: https://www.oaklandsfarm.co.nz/home-delivery

It's expensive but it's doable. Or you could say that the plastic milk people have successfully externalised enough of their costs that they can charge less than a more efficient option. Somehow producer levies to cover waste disposal are uncommon and wildly unpopular (with producers).

Because people will find another use for the reusable containers, then just take as many as you let them.

What works more often is an explicit deposit, or a pay-for-return. I buy cleaning stuff from a local wholesaler who will pay a few dollars for each 20 litre container returned, a little more if it has a tap, and about $10 for a 200 litre drum (which I can also buy cleaned from a second hand drum dealer for $15).

But when you're talking about a 500ml dishwashing detergent bottle there's not enough value in the bottle to make it worth setting up a return and reuse system. If you get down into plastic bags it's complete nonsense, even for single-material (ie, non-food) bags at less than a cent each. In NSW we have a 10c fee per bag to discourage their use and even that is not enough to cover the cost of recovering and downcycling those bags (our downcycling scam just collapsed: https://www.abc.net.au/news/2022-11-17/recycle-collapse-proo...)

Look at the economics of milk bottle returns, for example. My parents pay ~10c/time to buy milk in glass bottles on top of the ~50c deposit on each bottle. People where they are do that because they intensely dislike plastic bottles and have the spare money to pay extra for milk.