Impmk2

Just took the plunge and ordered a 32:9 (5,120 x 1,440) 49" OLED monitor to replace my current 34" 1440p UW (+2 1080p) setup. I do really like the 21:9 UW aspect ratio over the traditional 16:9, so interested to see how this goes. Expecting pretty bad game support out of the box!

Was on sale, and as I have a university email address I was able to get a staff discount which made the price too good. Was considering the 57" (7,680 x 2,160) which is essentially 2 4k VA panels stuck together, but I can't justify the cost, doubt even the 4090 could run it, and I really want to see what OLED is like for gaming.

2 hours ago, Fragile Bird said:

The couple had small children, and my friend commented to the wife that he was surprised there was no play area in the backyard, swings or a slide, like you’d see in Canada. Ah, she said, the problem was the pythons, they had lost a couple of dogs to them and they didn’t allow the kids to play in the yard.

Unlikely to be pythons. They're not venomous. There's none in Australia that'd be a threat to a human afaik.

The eastern brown snake is the more likely culprit. One of the most venomous snakes in the world, and you do occasionally see them around in urban areas. Dogs will go for them which can end very badly for the dog. I do worry about our girls.

However they're generally not aggressive snakes at all. They'll go the opposite way when they hear people coming, so while there's the odd rare death they aren't a big worry. We're talking maybe a single death a year for a snake pretty commonly found around the major Australian cities. Just gotta look where you're stepping if you're off the beaten track, don't walk through long grass, and if you see one don't get ideas about trying to kill it or catch it.

https://www.theguardian.com/world/live/2024/apr/19/middle-east-crisis-live-updates-iran-israel-today-explosions-isfahan#top-of-blog

Fuck.

Kerry Stokes is backing some real winners here.

I would caution against undue alarm (at least at present info). The infection through an intermediate animal is probably the most concerning aspect, especially as its in the food supply chain. However bird flu jumping to humans has been reported reasonably regularly in the last couple years. It's whether that infected person can continue to transmit.

https://www.cidrap.umn.edu/avian-influenza-bird-flu/cambodia-reports-another-human-h5n1-avian-flu-case-hong-kong-notes-h9#:~:text=Cambodia has now reported 5,an older H5N1 clade (2.3.

Not sure why you guys are talking about Elon's latest dribble. It's (as usual) almost certainly undeliverable gobshite, which he'll have to walk back (if/when) they finally release it.

Under 1 second 0-100kph would be near 2x as fast an acceleration as the fastest production car right now. Cars are already massively massively grip limited, which is why on drag strips they use glue to literally hold the car to the surface so it can accelerate quickly. Unless he's developed magical tyres it just isn't going to happen.

1 hour ago, Deadlines? What Deadlines? said:

0-60mph in under 1 second is almost 3 G's . It also likely means 0-100 mph in around 2.5-3.0 seconds. How much do you want to bet that's beyond the processing power and reaction times of a modern stability control system? 

This is where the electrical drive train have a huge advantage. Lucid (and they're generally pretty transparent around their tech) claims they can poll traction 1000x per second, and then make adjustments to torque output on each motor 25x per second. They can put an individual motor on each wheel and independantly do this at each corner of the car. It's way, way over and above what's possible on a traditional internal combustion engine.

9 hours ago, Mr. Chatywin et al. said:

Honestly that's a horrible selling point. My now mostly dead G35X was hard to keep below 30MPH and that was actually a problem. This is so much worse. If they do release something like this that has to be a special gear you switch into. Imagine that thing in a parking lot/ramp or even just trying to park it in general. 

It's an electrical drive train. Most EVs only have 1 gear. It's all drive by wire, the accelerator pedal isn't linked to anything but a computer. You just map the pedal in the most relaxed drive mode to only give 10% power.

29 minutes ago, DireWolfSpirit said:

Aussie and NZ possums must look different than the ferral, godzilla hissing, N.E. Wisconsin possums which are also pests to pets, garages, etc. and by no stretch cute.

They do. First time I saw a possum in the US I thought it was a giant rat.

Australian possums look like this.

They do still hiss and bite though.

13 hours ago, Paxter said:

The underlying cause is high inflation. Australia has been and is running one of the highest rates of inflation in the OECD. Housing costs are one element of this. 

The US has not had the same erosion in incomes, in part because it happens to use the world’s reserve currency. One of the reasons our incomes have suffered in Australia is a dive in the exchange rate as the Reserve has not maintained the higher interest rates of other developed nations. The petrol we import, for example, is typically US dollar denominated.

ETA: I should add, the story here is not about timing or whether inflation lagged in some countries from a timing perspective. It’s that Australia has had one of the highest magnitude falls in real incomes since the pandemic. 

Again, it's hard to comment on an article I can't read, but re: Australia being hit by inflation uniquely hard - I just don't see it in the data I do have access to.

Inflation peaked in Australia at 7.8% in December 2022 per the ABS. As far as I can find the OECD average peak inflation was 10.7%, with several of the advanced economies in western europe (Germany, Italy, UK, Spain) peaking above 10%, the US at 9.1%, and eastern europe faring much, much worse. Right now much of western europe (notable exceptions of France and Italy) looks to be still sitting in the 3.5-4.5% range at the end of 2023. 

I still think we need to wait to see how this all shakes out in a couple years rather than just looking at datasets mid-crisis. 

ETA: To be clear - not denying that Australian's have had a lot of an increase in their cost of living pressures with little relief over the past 18 months and inflation is a big part of that. But I am skeptical of the narrative that cranking rates another 1% could've done much to ease them without crashing the economy (and the pain associated with that). There's other factors at play such as very high personal debt levels, and long EBAs leading to a lag in wage increases.

7 hours ago, Paxter said:

Australia is running higher inflation than the US. Let’s not give the Reserve too much credit! That’s eating into real incomes. 

I mean you're obviously far more of an expert, but if i recall inflation started spiking in the US a good 6 months before it did here, so it makes sense it would also lag the fall.

7 hours ago, Paxter said:

ETA: For the wonks: Cost of living Australia: Nation records biggest income decline in the developed world (afr.com)

Behind a paywall unfortunately, but from what I can read the first couple factors listed are mortgages and tax. Mortgages are no real surprise given Australia's absolutely insane housing market leading to one of the highest level of indebtedness in the world, leading to a massively outsized impact of rate rises.

Taxes (again without being able to see the article) are down to bracket creep? To a certain extent that should be helped by the revamped stage 3.

Would be interested to see the same analysis run in 12-18 months time, when we'll hopefully be at a more neutral cash rate, and stage 3 has kicked in. As is it seems like it's written mid-story.

Of course none of that will help the large underlying causes of the problem - the ridiculousness of the Australian housing market and a stupid tax system no one can touch without the vested interests destroying them politically.

On good news inflation continues to drop ahead of forecasts. The RBA seems to have known what its doing.

Another quarterly read like Q4 (0.6%) and we're within spitting of the 2-3% target band. Things may not go as smoothly but looks like the back has well and truely been broken at least.

Very well deserved win to the Windies. That was a much better match than I was expecting after the Adelaide test. Right down to the wire.

May have spoken too soon about Smith. Nail biting stuff 

9 hours ago, Paxter said:

Again, that Smith opening decision is backfiring hard. 

Yep. Nice to have Green for the extra bowling, but I really think they need to bring in a specialist opener (Renshaw?). Smith isn't a long term solution for an opener in any case, they'll need to solve it sooner or later.

Chicago issue looks to be a combination of:

a) Chargers being out (probably local grid problems - note: this would also take a gas station out) / charging cords and ports getting frozen up and
b) Newer owners not understanding that in extreme cold the cars will sit there and warm the battery for a while before starting to charge, and then charge slower.

You can't really solve a). Extreme weather happens. Charging (and gas / petrol) stations will occasionally go out. And before extreme weather events it's always a good idea to charge to a high level (or get a full tank) so you don't have to screw around with the inevitable infrastructure problems.

You can largely solve b) by making AC charging available everywhere people park their cars (these can be just normal power outlets with metering), so people aren't trying to charge cold-soaked batteries and clogging up the DC infrastructure - which should really be reserved for people travelling long distance anyway.

4 minutes ago, Conflicting Thought said:

i think that EVs are kind of a distraction, specially when it comes to cars, like we shouldnt be aming to replace all combustion cars for EV ones, we should be getting cars the fuck out of the streets.

This is a pipedream and simply won't happen. Much of the western world is built around cars. There is a trend towards less cars per household, but large portions of the world won't accept just stopping driving altogether. For net zero we need that transportation to be fossil fuel free, and EVs are looking like the only viable solution right now.

Yes DC chargers pull a lot of power - they need to so you can get back on the road in minutes rather than hours. But as I said above that's why you really need good AC charging infrastructure so you can minimise its use. No one should be relying on it for their primary source of electrons.

3 hours ago, Ran said:

Chinese EVs are going to be eating some lunches. I've started seeing BYDs here in Sweden over there last year or so.

Chinese EVs are going to have a difficult time in the US due to the extremely high import tariff imposed on them (25% from a quick google).

But yeah here (Australia) BYDs have been on sale for about 18 months now. They're everywhere. Have driven one and it's a bit weird on the design side but ok otherwise. Not sure how the materials will hold up but time will tell.

4 hours ago, Mr. Chatywin et al. said:

I'm no expert here, but I heard a report this morning that in general the EV market is in a lot of trouble (at least in the US). They said Tesla was the one brand that was still holding up, but that could be crashing too, Musk or no Musk. 

So this is where you need to be careful with the reporting. The US EV market 'crash' was EV sales growing by less than predicted. They still grew (7.6% of new car sales in 2023 vs 5.9% in 2022). A lot of that is probably to be expected in a high inflation, higher interest rate environment especially when you're looking at more expensive cars.

58 minutes ago, Kalbear said:

(though they're getting a LOT better, and solid state batteries will be better yet)

I'm of the opinion that the promised land of solid state will never come (has been 5 years away for the last 10 years), and probably never needs to. We're getting to the point where the latest chemistries being trialled in traditional lithium ion batteries (lithium sulphur, silicone doped anodes) are close to hitting the energy densities promised by solid state, with none of the draw backs around ease of manufacturing or the fragility of the product.

5 hours ago, Paxter said:

Glad they U-turned somewhat. I'd prefer the Stage 3 was just scrapped altogether (per my previous posts - I think we should be raising taxes, not cutting them), but this is definitely better.

Go Albo!

This is pretty much where I'm at.

My biggest problem was stage 3 wasn't the readjustment of the brackets to address creep, but the elimination of a bracket and flattening of the system to make it dramatically less progressive.

Also think it might be politically astute. I think most will forgive the breaking of a promise in a way that directly benefits them. Puts the coalition in the position of running against a bigger tax cut for the vast vast majority of income earners.

And finished Sekiro. Very much enjoyed, when the fights clicked everything just kinda flowed. Didn't feel at any stage like I just got lucky on the bosses, or went and farmed an overpowered build like in the other souls games. Also helped that it's relatively short and sweet.

I think it was my favorite souls-like game in the end, though have yet to play Bloodbourne (and am unlikely to unless they bring it to PC).

Now downloading BG3 on to the new PC for an evil Dark Urge playthrough. I never normally play evil in RPGs, so will be interesting to see how this goes...

Sekiro update: Owl part 2 dead. And wow the Divine Dragon was strange and easy.

Now on to Demon of Hatred. Why has a Dark Souls boss been teleported into this game?!

Really loving Sekiro this time around. Jedi Survivor was indeed a pretty reasonable proxy for the playstyle, though the parry timings are much tighter and the boss fights seem better designed (ie no bullshit, no overlevelling, hard but fair). In some ways the trash mobs were harder in Survivor, given you can just sneak up to and execute basically everything in Sekiro with a degree of patience.

Currently working on Owl (mk.2 Hirata estate) which is supposedly one of the harder fights in the game... Feel like I'm getting there.

15 hours ago, BigFatCoward said:

Rohan Dennis has been charged with causing his wife's death.

Sounds like some accident where he was driving next to her while she was riding and she has done something out of the usual/trick with tragic consequences.  

Worth mentioning she was herself an olympic medalist on track.

Doesn't at all sound like a cycling accident, police have said she wasn't on a bike when she was hit. Apparently was just outside their home. From the reporting it sounds more likely a domestic violence incident, but will have to wait for the details.

3 hours ago, IlyaP said:

Really? How many crashes have you had so far (if you've counted). 

I played it on a system that technically should not have run it - though it did run, albeit it at somewhere between 25-30 frames per second, which is all I need, as anything faster than that...I just don't notice, nor much care about.

Probably crashed every couple hours on average. Aside from in that fight where it crashed every couple attempts.

PC is brand new, maxxed settings, ran silky smooth otherwise. Just googled some more and apparently it's a known bug when ray tracing is on which makes sense I guess.

I just finished Jedi Survivor over the xmas break. Story started out a little all over the place but it really picked up towards the end game. Thought it maybe slightly overstayed it's welcome (took me 40hrs), though I did do an awful lot of the side content. Still crashed a decent amount on my PC, especially during the

fight, which made it doubly frustrating , so that's not sorted yet.

Would give it a solid 8/10. Definitely worth playing, but wouldn't pay full price.

Now playing Sekiro which I bounced off on my first attempted play through a few years back. Had to get used to parrying a lot in Survivor, so hoping that carries over.

Just now, IlyaP said:

We have fiber to the node and it's still slow. 

A friend back in the states has fiber to the home and he taunts me with the blazing speeds he gets. TAUNTS ME I SAY.

Yeah I was stuck on a fttn connection at my old place. It was slow as hell and dropped out all the time. I feel for you.

Luckily now on a hfc (coax), which I can at least get a steady 100mbps out of.

So many Australian households still use copper to connect to the internet. For many there's no paying for fiber option because the fiber does not physically exist. You'd have to pay to get it run down your street.

4 hours ago, The Anti-Targ said:

Has Aussie ever had a hung parliament?

Federally? 2010-2013 (Gillard / Labor) is the only hung parliament in living memory I believe. With the crossbench getting more seats each election a repeat is becoming increasingly likely though.