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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 29th, 2023

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  • I’d say if the copyright holder says you’re not allowed to then you’re not. It’s piracy.

    People will tell you that you’ve already downloaded the data so saving it is fundamentally, technically no different, but that doesn’t matter to the law, it’s still piracy.

    Like yeah, it’s absurd and pointless and anti-consumer and anti-knowledge and unenforceable and unsustainable, but that’s copyright. It’s always been that way.

    Copyright destroys culture and piracy is our ethical duty in the face of that. The only reason to care about it is so you don’t get caught.



  • Genuine answer is that you need to get a feel for when the clutch begins to bite. The rest of it - when to use the brake, handbrake etc, is going to depend on what you’re doing. Learning to feel the clutch is the critical skill.

    The way to learn how to use the clutch is to start on a flat piece of ground with no traffic around, like an empty car park. With the engine running and the brakes off, press the clutch pedal and put the car into 1st gear. Then, slowly release the clutch pedal without using the throttle. Practice this until you can get the car moving without stalling the engine, and you’ll have a feel for it.

    When starting normally you’ll gently press the throttle as you do this. Cars usually idle around 1K RPM, use the throttle to maintain about 2K RPM for a normal take-off.

    Then all the other skills will fall into place. The key objective is that you should have the brake engaged until the moment the clutch engages and is ready to take control, then the brakes should be smoothly & quickly released.

    You can do this with either the handbrake or the foot brake, but if you’re using the foot brake you need to be manipulating the clutch, brake and throttle at the same time.

    That requires pressing both throttle and brake with the right foot, which is a more advanced technique, but very useful for smooth driving in a lot of situations. It’s often called “heel-toe”, but that’s misleading. You don’t use heel & toe, you use the two sides of your foot.





  • I don’t know that much about the process of selecting the court or corrupting it, but in Australia in the last little while we’ve had three whistleblowers tried in our supreme court.

    One was exposing the government illegally spying on East Timorese diplomats to gain bargaining power. The trial was held in secret because of “national security concerns”. The accused was only known as Witness K, and he managed to avoid jail time.

    Richard Boyle exposed abusive practices by our welfare and tax offices to illegally share information in a “robodebt” scheme that fraudulently sent poor people crushing amounts of debt. A lot of people committed suicide as a result. He may go to prison for a long time. (Edit: he’s facing up to 46 years, and it seems the robodebt scandal was separate, but the ATO was part of that as well EDIT 2: It was in fact about robodebt and the predatory culture in the ATO that spurred it)

    David McBride exposed war crimes by Australian special forces in Afghanistan and was given six years jail time. His identity was exposed when our previous right wing government raided our national journalists’ offices and stole documents regarding their investigation into the war crimes.

    Our current nominally-leftist government could have stopped the last two of these prosecutions at any time and they just let them continue.

    Oh and of the three incidents, only the whistleblowers were prosecuted. None of the people doing the crimes have been charged with anything.

    Our government and its courts have made their priorities extremely clear: snitches get stitches.




  • There is a “puzzle” in Riven that I got stuck on for hours, just searching the map looking for anything that I had left to do. I couldn’t find any more interactable things that hadn’t been done. Then I looked it up and found it was a door that you had to enter then turn around and close to find the hidden passageway behind it. There was no puzzling value to it being hidden like that, it was something you either simply found or didn’t. I put it down to old-style game design that hadn’t yet learned what not to do in a somewhat open world game.

    Honestly this iteration could move the entrance like one metre to the left so it’s not hidden and it would be a better game for it.