Viewing profile — iamthemonster

Parent of a Year 7 kid here (that's the first year of high school and a very common age at which all kids have phones). The social media ban has been a wild success in preventing 1…

Do you have any references for your statements? The majority of car sales in China are EVs (which is more than the UK, the EU and the US) so locals are buying the supply right now.…

In 1990 it was only 5% of Americans and now it's 50%. In the UK it's 85% but a better comparison is probably France who are in the Schengen Area so only 60% have a passport. If I l…

Where I live in Western Australia, it is perfectly normal for 10-year-olds to be getting on their bikes and going round to their friends' houses after school. The swing towards "Fu…

Absolutely. My kid just started high school shortly after our social media ban started, and they only interact with their friends outside of school via phone calls and text, withou…

I will forever remember my experience with the development of a new tool in my job as an engineer in hazardous gas processing. We had a consultant who was developing this tool that…

The Noongar calendar from the south west of Western Australia is, of course, a much better fit to the local climate. We are just starting Djeran, with probably the best weather of …

I've got a 12 year old in Australia and the social media ban has been amazing. Since the algorithm-distraction-machine is parasitical on users' social network, the kids just have l…

My solution to this is that I ring my bell when I'm far from people, usually twice while I'm still a fair way away. It just gets pedestrians conscious that there's a bike around, w…

Sorry I didn't see your comment until now, apologies for the late reply. A classic messy judgement call would be: 1. Input information includes some word of mouth info that I have …

I'm an engineer in the oil and gas industry. Some of my job involves messy judgement calls that I would never involve LLMs in, but some of my job boils down to integrating differen…

This reminds me of the opposite, which is how the cost of hydrogen for home heating is surprisingly high enough that there are several consumer goods that yield more Joules of heat…

Sadly international diversification is far less effective during downturns, which is exactly when you need it. It really turns out that the old adage "when the US sneezes the whole…

I was interested to hear Trump mention Australia's retirement system the other day (amongst the endless stream of what he normally talks about, it really stood out). In Australia y…

I've benefited a lot from my specialist area (energy industry) in which consultants and analysts will post genuinely informative and thought-provoking articles. It works to enhance…

I was very surprised at how many statistical methods are taught in undergraduate psychology. Far more statistics than I ever touched in engineering for sure. Yet the undergrads rea…

I don't own guns myself but I know someone who runs a gun club and a policeman. They are both in agreement that the latest legislation changes have introduced absolutely no improve…

Absolutely superb. The 'hot bricks in a box' concept of very high temperature thermal energy storage has been really coming into its own with the fall of solar PV costs, and it's q…

Porter's a well known climate denier, this article about her gives some background: https://www.desmog.com/2023/06/22/climate-sceptic-goes-uncha... We're really past the point of c…

Yes - I'm a senior member of my team too (to the extent that I've previously been the team lead of similar teams) and it's so freeing to be able to: 1. Give plenty of credit to the…

In Australia you start with a birth certificate and photo, and that leads to passport and driving licence. The three of those are the holy trinity of ID (though you'd very rarely b…

For the rest of my life, AI will be coming for my job and full-self-driving cars will be just around the corner.

I can't believe we're still asking Elon about when we'll get full-self-driving, he's already answered that question every year since 2013. It's coming next year.

He came to talk at our school in the mid-90s and a journalist from the local rag was allowed to sit in the audience for some reason. The journalist asked about 1987 and Michael Fis…

we fired all our junior devs so we can't write code any more