AdmiralGinge

Depends, public transport outside of London is often a complete joke in the UK. I switched to cycling after getting pissed off at a bus that came once every hour and a half, was often 30-40 minutes late and occasionally didn't bother to turn up at all.

Yeah, I think I'd be utterly "half a bottle of gin a night" miserable working in the average corporate environment. It's hard to put my finger on the precise reason, but that kind of environment just has absolutely zero appeal to me even though I'd be earning a fair bit more.

Money's nice, but not hating your life is nicer. I'd make a rubbish Sisyphus.

It's even worse in the other direction; I used to go from Oxford to Aberystwyth quite often and Arriva Wales were truly appalling. They only ever ran two carriages for part of the route despite Aberystwyth being a university town so even when the Biblical unreliability of the trains wasn't a factor you were inevitably crammed in like cattle for the slaughterhouse. I've heard things are a bit better now Transport for Wales has taken over.

Beeching's axe really did a number on Wales, the country is effectively cut in half by rail and travel between North Wales and Cardiff takes a massive 3+ hour detour across the border to Shrewsbury. Reversing some of his cuts and reopening the Aberystwyth to Carmarthen line has been seriously talked about in recent years and I think it would be a very good idea. Beeching's cuts were extraordinarily myopic and allegedly the government of the day was in bed with road haulage companies who had an interest in hurting the railways. At any rate I hope his route to the afterlife involved a tediously indirect detour via limbo and purgatory!

I've been realising this recently, while I'm a professional programmer I only ever really learned the maths I needed for my degree and even then most of that got forgotten after I graduated beyond what's necessary for my day-to-day work. I did a bit of ML at university and I've been meaning to pick it up again but wanted to avoid half-arsing it by just learning the libraries rather than the underlying mathematical principles as well. One of the mental hurdles has been getting over this idea of "ML maths" as this black box, I've started with some linear algebra courses and while it's very interesting in its own right, it's also showed me I have some pretty enormous gaps in my knowledge!

Next time I'm between jobs (hopefully won't be for a long time) I'm going to revisit maths as its own thing, I really want to get my calculus and trigonometry up to scratch as well as things like linear algebra and statistics. It's interesting how quickly it leaves your head too, I did pretty well at university with ML but having not exercised those muscles so much fell out the instant that exam timer hit zero.

Obviously this isn't going to be affecting a huge number of people in 2021, but if you listen to AM radio (I'm a bit of an anorak for Radio Caroline so I've been trying to pick that up) it's amazing how much interference modern devices give off. The monitor I bought last month absolutely wipes out 648 kHz, and Apple's Magic Trackpad 2 is a pretty bad offender as well.

This is something that never seems to come up in discussions on Scottish independence interestingly enough. I guess it'd be like Ireland and Northern Ireland where both jurisdictions use a common electricity market, unless politicians on either side throw their toys out of the pram which is highly likely in my opinion.

I love this!

Cheers for the heads up about OFDM, I hadn't heard of that before! I wonder if that 18 kHz I've heard is per channel ie the sum and difference channels are both 18 kHz?

They don't need to be internet-connected though, there's many "smart" LED bulbs that run off a traditional remote control.

Sounds like exactly the same problem British farmers are having post-Brexit with things like fruit-picking, they're scratching their heads wondering why British workers aren't keen on having half their wages taken for "rent" to live six people to a crappy caravan on-site and do backbreaking labour day in day out. Their only choices are to improve their wages, conditions, both, or go bankrupt.

I think Twitter in general is such a harmful thing. There's very little worth saying that can be compressed into 280 characters beyond "I'm right, you're wrong, anyone who disagrees with my subjective opinion is scum" yet somehow it's become the platform of choice for journalism in general.

That's very succinctly summed up something I often struggle to articulate.