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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 20th, 2023

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  • It’s the eternal debate: Should you, as a parent let your kid “win” when playing games, or should you play fairly and crush them until they either give up or get skilled enough to actually beat you?

    There are pros and cons to either solution and ultimately it depends on what the individual wants; the immediate satisfaction of a balanced experience, or the assurance that every win or loss was earned fair and square.

    I don’t play these types of games anymore, but as a teenager I played a lot of Battlefield and I went from noob who would get absolutely crushed every game, to good enough at some game modes that my presence in a 32 player lobby would be sufficient to tip the whole game in my favor and my team winrate was well over 50 %. That is a meaningful, long-term reward that does not quite compare to the modern approach where no matter how many hours you sink in honing your skill, you’ll still only win about 50 % of the time. Yeah sure you have a fancier badge or whatever, but it doesn’t feel like improvement.

    Of course Activision makes a compelling argument that SBBM is overall better for the health of the playerbase. I do feel like we lost something though, and that it is another area in life where algorithms decide what our experience is going to be and smooth out any meaningful challenge.


  • The main display that shows your speed,etc. randomly shutting down

    I know two people who had this exact issue with their new-gen Golf. First cause was the French language would crash the whole dash if you cycled the dashboard views (to my knowledge they never fixed the issue and the workaround is to set the car to English). Second cause was a malformed JPEG from a radio station would cause the dash to bootloop until you drove far enough from said radio station, which would allow the car to work long enough to disable that feature (IIRC).

    So yeah, QA is down the fucking drain with VW on their latest gen. They had a new CEO, and now a new one again I think? But the reputational damage has been done. Too bad, I really liked my '18 Polo.




  • You don’t need a data plan to call emergency services. Any protocol-compatible device can dial 911/112/etc. for free.

    This is why in remote areas your phone may say “Emergency Calls Only”. Your carrier isn’t available, but someone else’s is and they are legally obligated to route emergency calls.

    Of course if your car has a modem and a computer, adding a data plan isn’t a huge leap. But it’s a recurring expense and plenty of cars sold today do not have internet connectivity, at least on the cheaper side.



  • EVERYONE sees through the bullshit

    Group 1 is MAGA and lying is fun to them. Truth is meaningless and the cruelty is the point. Trump could say “sike I lied” tomorrow and they would not care one single bit.

    Group 2 is the rest of the GOP, too scared to say anything and with no incentive to do so anyway.

    Group 3 is “enlightened centrists” aka “why should I care about the rise of fascism for I am not a Jew”.

    Group 4 is dems too scared to say literally anything because it might scare away swing voters or rile up Trump’s base. I guess focus groups have shown it’s more effective to let him dig his own grave and look like a bumbling fool than intervene and fight him on his truthless turf?

    Group 5 is us, shouting into the void.




  • Anyone can fork at any time. The US gov could theoretically hold Wikipedia’s brand and servers hostage, but the actually valuable stuff is already mirrored in a decentralized fashion that is completely unrestricted under US and international law.

    EDIT: Maybe you meant that the US could covertly vandalize Wikipedia? Maybe, if they keep it very low-key. Editors are used to this kind of stuff though, it happens all the time from all governments since they can just, y’know, edit it. Anything actually impactful will be noticed by the editors which will just cause a fork.


  • Wikipedia also releases all content for free download under a permissive license, so I don’t think it’s fair to say that the US government is a meaningful threat to its quality of information, especially over non-English languages that are managed by an independent set of volunteers who could pack up their bags and move everything over wherever they want at any point.

    Still a cool project and technological diversity is good though.


  • Very good writeup.

    It actively forces your mind off those things.

    That’s the biiiiig thing for me. It’s incredible meditation. The road demands the rider’s full attention for short-time planning, spatial visualization, sensory inputs, and muscle control. It’s literally a matter of life and death. At the same time other parts of the brain aren’t required, so the mind wanders, but in a much subdued way where stormy thoughts turn into a calm flow.

    Stay left, look in, lean, apex, watch out for the pothole, left again, shift down ahead of the intersection, ok they are yielding, back on the throttle, shift up, don’t lean over the manhole covers, wow view’s pretty, hey pedestrians looking to cross let’s come to a smooth stop…


  • The much more general I’d give is don’t brake at speed. Well do if you have to, but afterwards look back and see how it could have been avoided with better planning. Outside of a handful of situations (offramps, downhills, some wild speed limit changes, and of course coming to a complete stop) engine braking is more than sufficient for any driver that actually anticipates and maintains a safe following distance. Not only is it much safer, forces you to think ahead, but it also greatly reduces fuel consumption.

    It’s also IMO the best way to ride a motorcycle spiritedly on the road.

    (However you should also know how to perform an emergency stop. Whether you’re in a car, on a bicycle, or a motorcycle, get on a straight and train for the hardest possible stop. It might save yours or someone else’s life someday. Crazy that some drivers don’t even know what their ABS feels like!)



  • It’s already a thing with near-zero delay. MS Teams does it (dunno about the translation) and the QSMP Minecraft server has a bunch of livestreamers from different countries who use it for realtime translation.

    [EDIT: Live demo from today. Shit’s impressive.]

    What actually happens is that the current sentence gets “corrected” several times as you keep speaking. It’s a bit jittery and if the word order differs significantly then the translated sentence might be a bit wonky for a few seconds, and there are a few misses but overall it works really well; at least well enough that people who don’t speak each others’ language can have a conversation in their native tongues with essentially no more delay than reading speed. I can easily follow a livestream in a foreign language with the live subtitles (which was not the case a mere 6 months ago for any language other than English).


  • Fuses should be required for any power strip that is not rated for 20 A (2.5mm² wires). At least where I live that’s the highest current an outlet circuit can be rated for.
    The power strips that cheap out and only put in 1.55mm²/16 A are stupid. For 20 A power strips though, fuses are redundant.

    Modern European plugs are already plenty safe for “accidental” insertion, you have to push into both holes at the same time for the outlet to “unlatch”.


  • Regarding Type F:

    If you have a monopolar switch in your appliance, you dun fucked up real bad.

    Reason is here in Belgium (and a bit of France apparently) and especially around Brussels, it’s very common for houses to be wired with two phases (+115/-115V). This was done post-war for copper-saving reasons, and we call this 3x230V. So any device that cuts the brown wire only will still have 115VAC to ground, which is obviously unsafe.

    Also more generally there is no guarantee that the live wire is on either side. From what I understand each electrician has their preference, and as long as the wiring is consistent then it’s up to code.

    So wherever there is an outlet, nothing can be safely assumed by the appliance besides that the total voltage is around 230V AC. Even assuming that there is a ground is incorrect due to old houses still having Type C (which incidentally means that even Type E also is not polarized when plugged into a Type C receptacle!).


  • The title of the post is literally “I love my Gitea”.

    The content of them meme does conflate “git” with its various frontends (like gitea), but it’s an incredibly common misnomer so who cares?

    The person I responded to then went on a weird rant about how “git by itself is distributed” which is completely irrelevant to the point since OP’s Gitea provides a whole lot more.