I have no doubt that that code is over complicated and inaccessible and probably needs a full rewrite that actually makes it accessible and effective.

That said, I’m sure there are far too many builders that are looking for the cheap and easy loopholes that certainly contributed to its current state.

Literally yesterday I found a beam in a 2007 apartment build that has been secured to the slab above with framing nails. This should have been done with a proper concrete bolt or anchor. The nails were failing and the whole ceiling was starting to fall.

Honestly. I think the government should design a cookie cutter 3 bed house that is standardised and easy to build, easy to check and certify the build. Buy or hell even make the framing and materials locally in bulk and start pumping out the same house over and over again.

It turns out to be more of a gang coperation. A decent number of archeological research projects around the Mediterranean are funded by much larger physics grants. They fund the exploration and the anthropologists and other researchers can keep everything, publish the findings etc, as long as the physics project gets all the lead that they find at the bottom of the ocean.

Yes, just like how the price of most things is an amalgamation of factors from profit, materials, labour transport, the cost of handling cash, rent, etc.

But you pay the price that is on the box. That’s a core tenant of this country as far as I’m concerned.

New fight music goes hard.

The shot of the moon reflected in the water to show Fern’s incoming attack that killed Hemmung was brilliant. Love the consistent Fern/moon imagery they have.

Was about to comment exactly this. Capacitors just can’t store the joules needed in any reasonable amount. There is some conversion loss but lithium batteries usually have a 95% or better cycle efficiency.

Useless journalist. At least link the fucking report. Or I guess don’t because people might read it and make their own opinions.

https://polis.cass.anu.edu.au/research/publications/social-cohesion-and-support-democracy-australia-assessing-recent-polling-data

It’s here and no surprise the context matters.

indicate their agreement or disagreement with the statement: ‘Democracy is always and under all circumstances preferable to any other kind of government.’

only 1.4 per cent of Australians strongly disagreed with the statement, and a further 5.5 per cent disagreed. Another 26.3 per cent neither agreed nor disagreed.

Big surprise, strongly worded poll gets a lot of middle ground votes, but less than 10% outright disagree with the statement.

It’s certainly already made it worse. And I have been knocking back a lot of papers that at first look sound amazing but on deeper reading say nothing of value. The common trend now is to make a paper sound like you have done the experiment when actually it was just a thought experiment or simulation. I have seen theory papers with diagrams you would expect from an experimental students PhD thesis.

It’s having a terrible impact on the review process. I have been getting clearly LLM responses from reviewers for manuscripts, emdashes and flowery language all over the place but saying nothing of value. Which sucks because decent reviewers are often a big help when progressing research.

But the bigger issue is that in general I think the review system is overwhelmed. I recently got a single line reviewer response for a manuscript submitted to Optics express, a journal I would have considered above such issues in the past. The quality of review is in freefall right now.

I have talked to colleges around the country that feel the same way. I don’t think the existing system will continue in the old way much longer. At this point, youa re almost better off putting a groundbreaking discovery straight on the arXiv and just skipping the peer review process. It is basically just a waste of time now, and only still exists as a gatekeeping step into prestigious journals. I also look at younger researches with high h indexes suspiciously. How much time did you spend gaming the paper system as opposed to actually doing useful research that takes time but generates less papers?

I would say it’s pretty typical of all Aus communication and intelligence legislation from the last 20 years. Put total overreach into the legislation then apply it selectively, because scary terrorists or scary guns or fucking bunyips, idk.

I have seen a lot of wives and mates getting gun licences recently. Pretty easy way to overcome the rather pointless quantity limitations. In some ways I worry the number limits may actually increase the spread of firearms in the country.

If I ever have completed amnesia, the existence of this game would probably be the only silver lining.

I haven’t found anything that comes close to the experience and it is completely impossible to play it again with the same nativity and wonder.

microslop

Looks cool, thanks for the link. I’ll give it a go.

Sounds like it’s time to switch out the 1080ti for a 9070xt. Been almost 10 years, probably due for an upgrade.

I will miss having that CUDA compatibility on hand for matlab tinkering. I wonder if any translation layers are working yet?

Swiss institution author that only mentioned a single Australian study. And their main argument is that the animals that cats kill could be breeding faster than the cats are killing them. Hence it’s not a problem.

It’s a fair point if we are talking about rats or noisy minors. It’s not a valid argument if we consider any form of endangered species, of which Aus has many.

Haha. We have plenty of moron politicians. But typically all our legislation is usually written by public servants with expert advice and lawyers, and even they get it wrong sometimes. The politicians direct what they want, but most of them have never written a law. I assumed it worked this way in most places.

All good mate, I mostly just try and stop the spread of misinformation on Aus gun laws. Most people don’t know much about them.

The leaver actions are fast. The main difference is that you can leave your finger on the trigger for a pump and are meant to take it off for the leaver action, though you could do it with your non trigger hand. People are also buying left handed bolt action shotguns to get around this, though it’s more awkward. All our shotguns have a capacity limit, usually 5 or less. It looks like these guys modified their barrel mags to hold more.

You’re not wrong about wasted ammo, reliability and reload speed, but you have to think about the worst case scenarios. Situation: close range, large dense crowd, shooter with an unreasonable amount of ammunition, and best luck in the world with no jams or reliability issues. That’s the formula for mass casualties. This is what our laws are effective at protecting against, primarily by limiting the rate of fire.

Can’t believe the guts that must have taken. Absolute legend.

Yeah no shit mate. That’s why pump shotguns are also under a cat C licence here. The legislators weren’t stupid, they basically categorised things on fire rate and public danger.

The Adler lever actions are very questionable in my opinion. They are almost as fast. Though the one I tried would jam all the time. Lever actions like that weren’t a common thing in the 90’s so it slipped by for a while.

And saying that a bolt action is potentially worse than a semi auto is some full on American bulshit. Sure things can jam and go wrong, but in the worst case situation with aresholes like this firing into a dense crowd where aim doesn’t really matter, faster shooting is more casualties.

A cat C license (self loading) is a lot more difficult to get than a cat A,B licence. So far this has worked, no semi auto terrorist attacks since Port Arthur. Thank fuck these guys did not have semi auto weapons.

I honestly wouldn’t have much issue with them removing the cat C licence, effectively banning semi auto outside of military use. But it certainly has some legitimate use cases in feral animal control.

Never heard of this but are they deliberately made to taste bad? Seems like a clever idea. The nicotine is there if you need it but the terrible taste puts you off.

That said, cigarettes smell awful to me and people keep going so I can’t imagine how bad they would have to taste.

https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.07209

I can’t stand these popular science articles that just cherry pick phrases from a paper. tl;dr it’s a very promising result but more observation of other galaxies or other mass consistent observations is needed before we should believe this.

However, the signal from the MW halo alone does not constitute the definitive proof of dark matter annihilation. Detection of annihilation signals from other objects or regions with consistent WIMP parameters will be crucial for the final confirmation. Gamma-ray observations of dwarf galaxies in the MW halo are fascinating from this perspective.

I would say the most exciting part is this gives us a mass range to optimise the search with earth based detectors. Start looking for 0.5-0.8 TeV masses.