Looks like I could buy one for $55k (AU) - would be kind of fun to have actually and cheaper than a lot of new 4wds. Pity some wowsers had issues with it running around with a machine gun, I feel like that’d reduce traffic problems…

Chirp ran fine on Linux when I needed it to program a UV-5R a year or two back - was provided in a flatpak then but looks like they use a Python wheel file now.

Self checkouts that just let you scan items without issue and accept payment are a nice enough idea for a bag or less of shopping, my problem with them is how they are implemented in reality (in Australia anyway). The first implementations I encountered I considered an useful addition but both the machines and the staffing changes due to them have steadily gone downhill in terms of user experience.

Instead of a quick painless experience you get a horribly touchy weight sensor which can’t reliably handle particularly small items, particularly large items, or non-standard bags (and there are no longer standard bags due to plastic bag bans), a machine which demands assistant intervention at the slightest issue (and the assistants are understaffed so never arrive quickly), and when you finally get to payment it makes you click through an annoyingly slow interface to tell it you don’t have a rewards card and don’t care to donate to some charity before it will activate the card reader. To make things worse the manned checkouts are never staffed at a level - if any are even open - to cater for people with full trolleys so these end up clogging up the self checkouts (which have tiny bagging areas and are not intended to handle a trolley load) and making everything slower.

The icing on the cake is the self checkout treating you like a thief and throwing errors if the camera system thinks you didn’t scan something in the trolley or letting off an alarm like you’re trying to make off with something when you just want to buy a can of paint.

As in plasterboard sheets? I don’t see why not if hand loading, plenty of vans will fit a 2400x1200 sheet (my Transporter fitted a bunch of plywood with room to spare). Loading one with a forklift is harder due to no side access long enough to fit 2400mm but that’s a problem shared with tub back utes. If however your plasterboard pallet is side accessible a van with barn doors (like you’d buy if pallets were a priority) will allow you load it in fine.

The thinking involved in driving a manual is very minimal once you get used to it, so I reckon any safety issues caused by that would be outweighed by a reduction in the unfortunately common situation of unintended acceleration crashes. You are lot less likely to drive through the nearest wall (or kids) if your instinctual reaction to moving when you should not be is to also go for the clutch and cut power instead of just pressing harder on the wrong pedal.

They have a clutch, but once you’re moving it is possible to shift a manual transmission without using the clutch. What you need to do is first take off the load currently passing through the box (if power is being transmitted either direction it holds the engagement dogs in place), so if accelerating you quickly let off the throttle and if decelerating you quickly tap the throttle. This lets you move into neutral, once in neutral you increase or decrease the engine revs to near (ideally exactly) what they would be in the gear you want to shift into at your current road speed, and holding those revs you can then shift smoothly into the new gear.

It is not something I would recommend unless in a jam with synchromesh transmissions (e.g. regular cars, light trucks) as most people aren’t going to get it exactly right every time and will just burn out the synchros. If you’re unfamiliar with the term these are the parts of the transmission that let you shift from one gear to another in one motion without having to stop in neutral, let the clutch out, and increase/decrease the engine revs to suit your desired gear before clutching in and shifting into it.

Clutchless shifting can and does work well in non-synchro transmissions (e.g. motorbikes, many heavy trucks) once you get the knack, as these transmissions are both more forgiving of not being exactly rev matched and will provide a strong auditory signal if you don’t get it close enough (i.e. you’ll know if you got it right or not so won’t half arse it). Many motorbikes now actually automate this process with devices known as quickshifters - named so because even when doing it by hand clutchless shifts on a bike are noticeably faster than using the clutch.

The sun would be the most obvious choice for such a reference point, though it’d be amusing to make it Greenwich and therefore make everyone deal with Earth’s rotation and orbit if they want extremely precise calculations (though I expect there wouldn’t really be a practical difference on that scale).

The design of the front forks also assists with stability - having some rake and trail means the front wheel has a tendency to self centre (particularly at speed).

Learning on a transmission with >6 speeds is hard mode, they do take a little more thinking with the gear pattern than in a car. Synchro versions are not that hard if you’re used to a regular manual but adding another thing to learn is not ideal when starting out. If it was a non-synchro variant then good luck getting someone to pick that up without a few solid hours of learning time.

If you were being taught by someone used to heavy trucks it makes sense why they didn’t tell you to push the pedal right in - on many (all?) non synchro transmissions pushing the clutch all the way in brakes the input shaft and if you’re moving you then have to resynchronise it with the gear speed in order to get into gear.

Note you don’t actually have to push the clutch in all the way in a car either, all that really matters is getting it past the point where the clutch is fully disengaged. After all the clutch plate is either touching the flywheel to some degree or it’s not touching, once it stops making contact pushing it further away doesn’t make a difference. When first starting out though it’s easier to just push the pedal all the way in - save thinking about finer details until you’re comfortable with the basics.

It’s the first floor above the ground level (or the first floor that you have to start calling a separate name, because if everything is single level you don’t need to specify a floor).

If I’m doing a small shop I’ll take a bag in, fill it up as I go, then everything goes out at the checkout and ends up back in the bag. I’ve never had anyone care about this and I’ve been doing it for a few years now (ever since the old plastic bags got banned in my area).

The ACT does get a bit cold in winter, but I feel like it’s closer to England than Finland (if England was drier and actually got hot in summer anyway). We are after all talking minimums of -5 or -6 for the coldest days in winter and snow normally only settling on the tops of the nearby mountain range (and temporarily at that).

I think the main problem with searching for fediverse posts is not that they’re not indexed but the lack of a singular tag to append when you want to search for them. To search for reddit posts it was easy because you could put in your keywords and stick ‘reddit’ or ‘site:reddit.com’ onto the end, but now there’s too many domains to keep track of and you can’t rely on appending ‘lemmy’ pointing a search engine towards all Lemmy instances, let alone kbin/mbin instances.

I do like Whirlpool, an Australian forum primarily centred on technology. It’s still active despite the general decline of forums, has a lot of useful info to turn up in searches, and I appreciate how it has remained clean and fast without the visual clutter and wasted data of modern web design.

It’d be interesting to see how much this changes if you were to restrict the training dataset to books written in the last twenty years, I suspect the model would be a lot less negative. Older books tend to include stuff which does not fit with modern ideals and it’d be a real struggle to avoid this if such texts are used for training.

For example I was recently reading a couple of the sequels to The Thirty-Nine Steps (written during WW1) and they include multiple instances that really date them to an earlier era with the main character casually throwing out jarringly racist stuff about black South Africans, Germans, the Irish, and basically anyone else who wasn’t properly English. Train an AI on that and you’re introducing the chance for problematic output - and chances are most LLMs have been trained on this series since they’re now public domain and easily available.

A broken wisdom tooth with one of the parts rubbing against the nerve that passes through that side of the lower jaw. Definitely would not recommend, it did cost me ~$2k to pull those wisdom teeth (or what remained of them for the lower ones) but it was well worth it.

Edit: Found the x-ray image of that tooth, the dentist told me the white line running past the bottom of the broken tooth is a nerve.

It appears to be a 1970s bike (I would take a stab at a Yamaha LT3) and by that period shutter speeds of 1/500 or 1/1000 were readily available amongst better quality cameras. That would be plenty to get a clear shot of the spokes on what would be a relatively slow moving bike (I would assume <40km/h, likely noticeably less). I’ve got several 50s era cameras that have 1/500 top speeds, so even if the bike was new at the time of the photo it didn’t require a new camera to take the shot.

I would not say having the inside foot off the peg and held forward in this situation is an indicator of the photo being fake, seeing as it’s a common behaviour when riding dirt bikes.

I think a mud track with occasional bits of gravel is basically what the display is suggesting, it’s just that the mud is dry.

I agree, I just thought it worth mentioning that telling people ‘don’t be be a coconut’ has the potential to backfire if you want them to be agreeable to whatever you say next.