tau

  • 181 Posts
  • 212 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
cake
Cake day: June 17th, 2023

help-circle
  • The destruction of tender plants and evergreen trees by fire and the nurturance of plants that are tough and high in oils seems like a recipe for fire.

    One problem is though that in much of Australia* we’ve had tens of thousands of years of people modifying the (presumably biased towards flammable to start off with) environment through repeated fires, so we already have an awful lot of vegetation that’s adapted to a regime of regular fire.

    * Exceptions that come to mind are rainforests and alpine areas, which must not have been burnt often since the vegetation in these places doesn’t cope with fire well.




  • The idea of like having to put on a comedicly overwrought accent to make a machine understand you is 👌

    I’ve tried this to good effect before when I got my current motorbike helmet headset - the voice commands on default settings worked much better when hamming it up with an American accent like one was trying to audition for a part in a Western. Luckily though I ended up finding out that Cardo also trained a British accent option in the settings, and that works a lot better if you want to talk like a normal person.










  • That’s pretty much what I was expecting; the Liberals getting enough seats for a majority would have been quite surprising so it was really a matter of how close Lab/Lib would get and who Labor has to negotiate with. I am not surprised that Labour’s primary vote is middling considering it’s been two decades in power, the fact that they still hold power is a real testament to how badly the Libs are received in this town.

    The rise of independents is interesting, and I can’t say I dislike a shift away from party based politics. How it turns out is obviously going to be more variable though - I will be curious to see if they retain their seats after a term.



  • The smartest thing in any of my vehicles is an aftermarket Android Auto unit so I can’t speak from personal experience, but there are various things such cars can do where the connectivity could be useful. Three I can think of are notifications/video of things happening around the vehicle at the time of occurrence (a la Tesla Sentry mode), being able to remotely start the vehicle to give the air con a head start on a hot day, and over the air updates for bug fixes or possible new software features without having to go near a mechanic.

    Part of the problem here is that the things that can invade privacy do have genuine use cases, it’s just that you can coopt them to also gain information. For example even the seemingly hard to justify internal cameras could have a genuine safety use by watching the driver for fatigue symptoms. If effective this would save lives over a car model lifespan, so you’re balancing obvious privacy issues against the idea that such inconvenience is worthwhile if it saves a life (a sentiment more typically seen in speed limit debates, but applicable here too).







  • I do think there is something to be said about being wary of modern cars in regards to security. I wouldn’t trust manufacturers as far as I could throw them when it comes to actually making secure systems - particularly when you’re dealing with remote connection capabilities. The focus on China is convenient for the US but I wouldn’t trust their systems either. Ford in particular has been concerning recently by patenting a way of ad serving based on user data a normal person would consider private (such as conversations within their cars). It doesn’t even take the OEM being malicious to be a problem, they only need to miss a security hole…










  • Public transport in this area is indeed less attractive if you have any other form of transport, particularly if you live on one side of the ACT/NSW border and commute to the other. Google reckons for example that it’d take me a bit over an hour to get to either of my usual work sites on a bus compared to the 15-20 minutes it takes me normally.

    Not mentioned (like usual) is motorbikes as an alternative to cars. The space advantages when it comes to both on road and parking are obvious compared to the usual one person per car (and they use less resources to make, particularly when it comes to EVs) so you’d think anyone actually worried about congestion would do more to encourage their use.





  • Yep, they ended up deciding it was sparked by various batteries that had ended up in one of the compactors. Whatever they had for fire protection mustn’t have been enough to stop it once the fire was noticed - I assume the source was within a big pile of recycling so would have required a serious amount of water to put out. It ended up being a rather large fire (one of the local accident chasers has some decent photos) and took out the recycling capability for the whole area. The rubbish piles within ended up smouldering away for a few days after the main fire was put out.

    For over a year and a half now I believe most if not all the ACTs recycling has had to be sent to Sydney due to this fire, so I can understand the new centre getting priority when it comes to the waste management budget.








Moderates