I often experience very slow time to fix with cell service off (& having location off beforehand) - I believe this is due to Assisted GNSS/GPS which significantly improves the time for GPS to start working (the associated Wikipedia article states that ~1 minute often without it, and worst case ~12.5 minutes)

Yeah, assisted GPS is great. I remember ye olde GPS consumer receivers taking minutes at a time to find a location while modern phones are of course much better and a lot of it is down to having a network connection to help out. It got so much better so fast that it's easy to forget how janky it could be!

Python's default arguments are evaluated and stored once. This can cause issues, for example the naive "default to []" program:

    >>> def function(b, a=[]):
    ...     a.append(b)
    ...     print(a)
    ... 
    ...     
    >>> function(1)
    [1]
    >>> function(2)
    [1, 2]
    >>> function(3, [4])
    [4, 3]
    >>> function(5)
    [1, 2, 5]

A correct implementation would be:

    >>> def function2(b, a=None):
    ...     if a is None: a = []
    ...     a.append(b)
    ...     print(a)

Surprised to see this works for list() as well.

  >>> def func(b, a=list()):
  ...     a.append(b)
  ...     print(a)
  ...
  >>> func(3)
  [3]
  >>> func(3)
  [3, 3]

Honestly surprised this quirk hasn't bit me yet

Maybe uh... not like Wikipedia does https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WP:CANCER

Hah, yeah, I've seen that page before. It's not ideal. I'd still take it over their current funding strategy of "don't piss off Google."

Or maybe I should find a better example. But one thing about Wikipedia is that it appears to be much the same as it was 10 years ago and more. Wikipedia hasn't started introducing Wiki VPN, nor has it partnered with Mr. Robot to temporarily insert marketing stuff into articles.

To the extent that Wikimedia has graft and vanity projects, they're not ruining the core "product".

So... I guess yeah, just like Wikipedia, as in "Look, even with donations you can spend a crapton of money. Maybe not $500mm a year, but still enough to support development of an open source software product."

Would helmets in cars make them safer though? It's a different risk profile; I don't think you tend to fall out of your cars and hit your head?

I can't find any stats of prevalence of various types of injuries in cars, although it does seem to be a thing to get brain injuries in cars (whether that is due to impact or neck/head stopping I don't know)

Yeah, I'm not quite sure how other countries do it, but for the 2000 Olympics (Sydney) they basically renewed this giant landfill site. There's been a bunch of apartments, etc, built around there since then because it basically became a suburb where you could live.

> but for the 2000 Olympics (Sydney) they basically renewed this giant landfill site.

Why would you need the Olympics to have land repurposed. They were waiting for a good excuse? No need to have big expensive party if you could have done that in any other context. But then again you'd need to whole country to accept paying for making new apartments just in Sydney.

I remember a report on how Sydney was the only Olympics for a while that was net positive.

Paris might also be, as they have very little new infra to build.

That's not correct. Sydney lost money, and Atlanta (4 years prior) made money: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cost_of_the_Olympic_Games

I am a bit split. If I’m reading it correctly, Wiki’s source is a journal’s comparing their simulation of what Sydney’s economy would have been without the Olympics, and the numbers published officially, with a twist on additional costs they think should be added to the official estimates.

> We simulated the behaviour of industries, households and government resulting from hosting the Games for each of eight Australian regions over the years from 1997 to 2005. Our results revealed that rather than producing an economic benefit the Sydney Games actually reduced Australian household consumption by $2.1 billion.

For comparison there are later reviews of the economics of the town with the 6 years after Olympics, with less simulation apparently, which come to a different conclusion https://repository.tcu.edu/handle/116099117/10360

I honestly don’t know which one is more trustworthy

I believe they recently updated the O'Reilly Rust book with a new edition so it's not out of date anymore.

Alternatively, I used zenstates and played around with VID values on different p-states (or is it c-states? I can't remember) which allowed my cores to go from ~400Mhz and then speed up as necessary.

There's info scattered around on the internet for how to do this; I don't have my script to do this easily accessible atm.

I do concur on the governor's though, nothing else really makes much of a different. My old HP laptop I permanently had on the powersave scheder and it would draw about 2.5W - the battery life was stupidly ridiculous. My new AMD Lenovo I can't even get below 6W by the same method unfortunately.

I haven’t compared power consumption for a full cycle of active use at 400MHz flat and 1.2GHz flat. I should try it. But as to whether it’s worth reducing the idle frequency, I doubt it: I observe no measurable difference between the two frequencies at idle—though it’s made harder by the fact that the /sys/class/power_supply/BAT0/power_now figure seems to take some time, even minutes, to reach a steady point, e.g. slowly drifting down from 7W to 6.6W. And the lowest it’ll reach seems to vary a lot, e.g. sometimes it won’t drop below 6.6W, and other times it’ll settle to 6.1W, about the lowest I’ve measured. But at 400MHz flat it can’t quite get it to 9W with a dozen or so `while True: pass` busy loops in Python, while at 5W (1.2GHz) I can get it up to almost 11.5W. (And then I throw it into boost mode and watch it climb rapidly to 64W while remaining dead silent, and wonder why the fan isn’t roaring away as it’s supposed to in boost mode and what of my fiddling just now prevented it from doing its job.) Even these comparisons aren’t great because of the lack of GPU load. Wonder if I can throttle that at all?

True, but whether or not it should be or not doesn't change the fact that it is the current state of the US.

And it's not really just the phone number, but the combination of personal info that allows for social engineering - without having the existing customer confirm the transfer.

> These bridges are made from lightweight Fibre-Reinforced Polymer > In just 11 months we have developed a prototype bridge that is stunning in design, environmentally friendly and will take days and not weeks to install and thereby causing less disruption for the surrounding community.”

... How exactly is this environmentally friendly? FRPs don't tend to be recycled easily or cheaply[1], not to mention the fact that they are often derived from oil-based products and require high-temperature curing.

[1]: "The recycling of composite materials is on the right track, but challenges still have to be taken-up in order to finally make it a commercial reality" (https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S007964251...)

I don't think this really works, for a number of reasons:

- A user-enabled feature for "Driving Mode" probably won't be enabled, because drivers intend to use their phone.

- An automatic system that (magically) detects that you are in a car won't work, because what if you are a passenger, or in the backseat?

- A system which activates when connected with the car's system could work, although drivers could again choose not to connect or a passenger could be connected instead.

(Although this system wouldn't actually work for learners/under 25s many states in Australia, since you are legally not permitted to connect your phone to the car stereo)