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Joined 9 months ago
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Cake day: February 15th, 2024

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  • Incoming Chinese carmaker Xpeng

    Australian firm Pegasus Aerospace Corp received airworthiness certification from CASA for its driveable Pegasus E flying police car last year

    you would need a pilot’s licence – not simply a car licence – to be able to eventually fly the X2 in Australia.

    likely to be bungled in red tape for some time before it could take to the skies

    We can take orders… you can secure one with a fully refundable $100 deposit.

    So I guess a more accurate headline would be this:

    “Australia’s” “first” “flying car” “now” “on sale.”







  • As long as you know what it is, consensus as to okay-ness or better, then it’s still a decent metric. Still, “universally okay” is not always what I’m after, nor is it quite the achievement the studios will proclaim.

    If you’re inclined to take reviews seriously (and it’s a whole other discussion, but I very much believe criticism and analysis are worthwhile when done well in their own right) , still better to find a few sources whose takes tend to line up with your own.


  • Shit, man, I dunno. I already voted. I fly my blue-team flag in a red town. I hope that most of the people voting for him are just insensitive clods who aren’t as personally hateful as the jokes they’ll laugh at, or that they’re somehow stupid enough to have been genuinely convinced that our creaky business-friendly center-left coalition is some sort of economy-dooming experiment in socialism. So yeah, I’m reduced to hoping that a large percentage of my fellow citizens are idiots and/or assholes, rather than actual fascists.

    It’s too close to know who will win, so things could turn out kinda okay if the Democrats pull it off. If Trump wins, maybe they don’t manage the Senate and little of longstanding legislative harm gets passed. Sotomayor should be okay for the next four years, so for SCOTUS itself the damage is likely already done. Finally, I still mostly think that Trump will be content to line his pockets for four years and then pardon himself on the way out. He’s too old to inspire any energy to repeal the 22nd amendment, and I don’t see anyone behind him ready to slot in as an heir apparent, so maybe the less intensely awful republicans will reclaim some measure of control, or a gaggle of pretenders fragments their base and they can’t really get organized to win nationally. A second Trump term is going to fucking suck, though, and a lot of innocent people are going to get hurt all across the world, many more than in a Harris administration, IMHO.

    Shit’s grim, and the Christian Nationalists see this as their time, possibly their last good chance in their current form, to really seize the reins of power.




  • wjrii@lemmy.worldtoAsk Lemmy@lemmy.worldWhat are your hobbies?
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    18 days ago

    I’d like to do a proper split as a project, but I don’t properly touch-type, so there’s a pretty large learning curve that I’m not particularly interested in overcoming. Before I accepted my truth, my second handwire was a permanent split that just bundled the matrix wires into a ratchet-ass cable. It works fine, but I just never used it, even enough to want to do a refined version.


  • I’ve been making mechanical keyboards “from scratch” for the last year or so. I leverage a lot of pre-built parts and existing tools of course, but I tweak the standard layouts to fit what I want to do, fabricate the plates and cases with my laser engraver and 3D printer, assemble everything, wire them up to the switches and the microcontroller (usually “dead bug” hand-wiring, but I have done a very basic PCB in KiCAD as well), and configure the firmware. It leverages a lot of my other interests, provides an opportunity to improve incrementally between projects, and results in a product that is legitimately pleasant to use.

    Little bastards are piling up, though.



  • Two things come to mind (apart from just being annoyingly defensive in Scrabble).

    In high school, our friend group would play Risk. We had one friend who was the youngest of the type of family that probably played Risk for fun, and probably discussed strategies afterward. He was clearly better than any of us, but he was never better than all of us. So there was an unspoken rule that everybody just ganged up on Brian until he was crushed, then with the tall poppy gone, the rest of us weeds would figure out who would win that night. For some reason he stopped wanting to play. Some people, amiright?

    Then, off and on in my 30s, I played indoor soccer. I was awful. I came to the game late in life, and anyway was WAY past my already-low peak of being a useful player in pickup touch football or Ultimate Frisbee. My most useful contribution was showing up to make sure we didn’t forfeit.

    However, all the guys playing O30 rec-league indoor soccer had some hole in their game, so if I could figure them out I could make myself useful until I got too tired (at which point they simply ran around me, LOL). Mostly it was just simple stuff like always pushing attacking players to the corner on the idea that they would take a low-percentage shot out of selfishness (or that none of their teammates would make a trailing run), or else I’d press quickly on the idea that they would eventually make bad passes, and they often did. However, one I was pretty proud of. I noticed a pretty good player (for our level) liked to keep an eye on the build-up from his keeper and defenders and trap the ball with his chest to turn and dribble. I saw one of his teammates launch one of these long balls, and I saw him start backpedaling towards me so I just… stopped.

    I was not moving at all, and this skinny little fucker had a pretty good head of steam for somebody moving backwards. He plowed right into me and crumpled before bouncing up frothing mad. He only got angrier when the ref called him for the foul. I smiled a fat little smile, and then got off the field cuz I was already getting tired.

    I had a few others where I got away with shit because the refs could see I was awful as easily as anyone else, so they assumed I couldn’t have intentionally directed the ball with the hand I was holding against my torso, or that I must not have been able to stop before running into some dude, but the backwards jackass (he really was unpleasant) play was uniquely satisfying.


  • I play an ongoing ladder/tournament for a Scrabble clone (Wordfeud). I’m kinda stuck at a middling level because of certain holes in my game that I refuse to fix because it would be boring (e.g. I could know what your last 7 tiles are but I do not intend to figure it out), but I’m decent. One of the ways I power through the lower tiers was by realizing that you can play defensively, specifically by shoving ‘C’ and ‘V’ in places that fuck up your opponent’s access to high-scoring tiles (because they have no two-letter words to jump off from), or just leaving points on the rack because maximizing each turn would open things up on the board.

    New players simply cannot handle this. I’m sure they don’t have much fun, but I win and go back up to the levels where the strategy helps some but you can’t rely on it. Higher level players can bust through by sheer force of pattern recognition and vocabulary, or they can build words that open up so many avenues that they can withstand my getting some points too, or them fuckers DO keep track of which tiles are left (the gall!). I’m trying to remember that I’m good enough that an open board can help me too, but my tendencies are still pretty defensive.