Reading the news while having breakfast, though it’s now on my laptop instead of the newspapers I started this habit with.

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.

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.

I’ve found a plunger useful for a sink occasionally, a bit of back and forth plunging can loosen up a hairball or break a layer of fat/soap scum. On the other hand I’ve never needed to use a plunger on a toilet - I don’t know how much of this is exaggeration on the internet but Australian toilets don’t seem to have anywhere near the amount of issues the American designs do.

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.

The watermark is noticeably more readable in the Facebook image I linked though, and it does say photography (even there it is somewhat blurred though, so assuming it was actually clear in the original source that copy is a few recompressions along the chain).

The dates of the other sources however are what really convinces me it’s not AI. After all, who was doing good quality photorealistic AI image generation in 2021?

The one I was thinking of is this one from a Facebook page, but looking around a bit more there’s also this one from someone’s instagram. The instagram one is mainly notable because it dates the image back further to at least 2021, making it even more unlikely to be AI generated.

The common attribution appears to be this Instagram account but google images didn’t show me one from that account when looking for other version of the photo and I’m not about to make an instagram account in order to scroll through years of photos looking for the potential original.

Seems legit enough to me. The next rack of tomatoes would only be ~2m away after all given the gaps between rows aren’t going to be massive. Pretty sure the sharpness issues are primarily from repeated JPEG recompression data loss - you can find a better quality version of the image by searching ‘carmine spina tomatoes’ which both looks less compressed in the far ground and dates from at least 2022 (so before mass popularity of AI generation).

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.

A blue ringed octopus - they’re a cute looking tiny octopus but quite capable of killing a human.

What’s worst is that after getting bitten by one you will be mentally alert but completely unable to do anything as you feel your body just stop doing things that keep you alive (like breathing)…

Nutbush City Limits might have a chance then, we’ll see whether Australian public schools are still teaching the dance in a couple of hundred years…

The choice is left to the driver.

This almost certainly means you’ll get the choice to inconvenience yourself by performing a deliberately long procedure to disable the feature every single time you turn the ignition on, otherwise it’ll turn itself back on again by default.

A year or so back I had the misfortune of driving a rental MU-X with this feature. It turned out to be really good at seeing the speed signs on highway offramps, basically every time I drove past a turnoff it’d start beeping at me telling me I should be going 80 or even 60 km/h instead of 110…

Indeed, I just realised that point - the force of propelling the anchor is tiny compared to what you can exert on the ship once the anchor is hooked.

A trebuchet primarily transforms downward motion (of the counterweight) into forward motion, so it would actually work - the trebuchet doesn’t push the ship back as much as it pushes its load forward. This is particularly so if your trebuchet has wheels and you have room on your ship to accommodate it rocking back and forth when firing.

Edit: Thinking about it this technique would work even with something that does impart equal backwards force on the ship when firing a projectile, because there is considerably more force involved in winching the ship towards the anchor than what is involved in actually moving the anchor. You aren’t pulling against the inertia of a free floating anchor after all, you’re pulling against the ground the anchor has hooked into.

I never had a problem with walking around cows as a kid and I did it pretty often. Visitors would get spooked occasionally because cows love to follow you and see what you’re up to, but I never got chased or anything. That was beef cattle country though so these cows were mainly cows (female) and steers (castrated males). I’ve heard that some bulls could be territorial however so your mileage may vary if one is around - the couple I’ve walked around were fine but your chances of issues are higher with them.

Yes, the move towards integrating the infotainment further into the car with propitiatory parts instead of generic sizes and not separating out vehicle related controls is definitely going to make long term upkeep harder.