The people that don’t understand the problem usually are management, and I have to spend an exhausting time each day explaining to them why the problem exists and why it takes so long to fix it. I once was honestly telling them their meetings were a big part of the delays. Which then obviously led to more meetings on “how we can better communicate so we can have less meetings and more productive time”. I wish I was joking.

If you have to say it often, it might indicate you have trouble formulating your initial advice in a way that is acceptable to people.

Nobody likes to be told they’re wrong, so it helps to be empathetic about it. Packing your advice or instructions into a tactful and diplomatic approach doesn’t cost you much, but makes it much more likely for your advice to be accepted and implemented. And the recipient will usually end up being grateful for having avoided a mistake. They might even start to look for your and ask advice in the future. And if you keep doing that, he might even consider you a nice person or even a friend.

An arrogant and condescending approach will only do harm, even if you are factually right.

You’re correct. I got caught up in explaining the overall concept. 😅

My personal interpretation is that the Chinese companies are now feeling the competitive pressure after their golden years and are scrambling to get their products on larger markets, while said market ( better affordable EV) still promises some margins.

Everyone wants cheap cars, but that’s not what this is about. This is about fair and competitive markets and products.

China heavily subsidizes their car industry. Actually everyone had been doing that, but currently China is doing it more.

Subsidies become a problem when they don’t serve to make necessities affordable in-country, but are used to boost sales in foreign countries, while hurting their local industry.

Now you might conclude that “why don’t we just subsidize or own manufacturers more as well so cars get as cheap as China’s?”

Well, where do you think the money for subsidies comes from? Taxes. So in the end, it’s just another scheme to make the general public pay for things that only part of the population needs, and it reduces pressure on manufacturers to innovate, leading to stale products. Which is a big reason why Western car companies are not competitive: the West has done exactly what China is doing now. We have subsidized the car industry massively in order to push or products into the global market. Those subsidies were considered worth it, because it created a trade surplus, effectively meaning wealth is transferred from the global market to mostly the car industry leaders, and a bit of it trickling down to workers as well.

After a while, the subsidies lead to corruption, inefficiency and lack of innovation, and the bubble bursts. That’s how you get histories like Detroit. Equivalents exist in almost any Western country.

A means to protect against subsidized products ruining the local markets is to impose tarrifs. The US has many of those, not only against China, but also against EU companies, especially in the car market. See chicken tax. American car manufacturers were so far behind after decades of heavy subsidies they couldn’t even compete with European cars ( and apparently still can’t, given that the chicken tax and similar tariffs still exist). In the end, tariffs run the same risk as subsidies: over time, a protected market means the industry can get lazy and keep selling the same, because competition is forced out of the market. Tariffs and subsidies are never a viable long term solution. Both can only serve strategic purposes: either providing actual essentials to ones population or nurture change ( eg subsidized regenerative energy build up) that only exist for a limited time. Tarrifs can be used to protect strategically important industry: e.g. military or technological cutting edge tech where you don’t mind paying extra for the privilege of maintaining in-country know how and manufacturing abilities.

That is actually a really bad rule, though you probably are only joking.

There are many examples of short, but very valuable code. Just think about anything math or physics related.

A totally new or even just a very efficient implementation of an already existing algorithm can be gigantic if others need to build upon it.

And many licenses are verbose not because they are complicated in intent, but merely because they need extensive legalese prose to cover against many possible avenues of attack.

https://choosealicense.com/

Very simple guide with in depth examples if you want further clarification.

What’s your source on the reverify thing? I use matrix a lot, and this hasn’t been an issue I ever experienced anymore since they introduced cross-signing a couple years ago.

Same goes for the common clients such as element. It has been clunky in the past, but after the past major overhauls ( also years ago now) everything has been silky smooth for me, if not better than others. The one thing left I prefer from Signal is the one-time photo share.

Matrix is great, clients are great too, only the server part still is annoyingly complicated and messy. Would only recommend that for tinkerers, on that case it’s a great path to learning about the complexity of addressing lots of security concerns that others gloss over.

Edit: to add - there’s a reason why the French government and the German military decided to build their secure internal IM infrastructure on Matrix. Obviously they are hosting their own private network, but if the concept is good enough for European government and military, it is an indicator for quality especially in terms of security and privacy.

Antlion itself an official wireless modmic, but it’s a staggering 150 bucks, was cheaper a could years ago… On the upside, it’s pretty much a lifetime purchase and really good quality. But it’s definitely overpriced.

If your budget is lower, you can look at lavalier mics or wire mics. Those are the kind that TV/ video guys usually wear. Lavaliers are simply tacked to the top of your shirt, while the wire mics are super thin wires that you wear under your actual headset. Both are light, have good audio quality and nur importantly are available at much wider and fairer price ranges, as they are less of a nice. Lav mics can be as cheap as ten bucks.

I have invested lots of effort and research and sadly money over the years into this specific question. And nowadays my recommendation would be: keep it simple.

That means: get a headset that is well reviewed and uses a wireless connection. Do not use Bluetooth. Bluetooth has good quality now, but no matter what perfect settings you use, you will have a noticeable delay, which is especially noticable during hectic gaming voice comms. Some headsets with a dedicated wireless receiver ( usually a small USB dongle) offer BT as an extra option, which can be great if you want to use it for listening to music or doing occasional calls while moving outside while linked to your phone.

Second tip: don’t get a combined all-in-one gaming headset. They can be good, but are always overpriced für what they offer. Marketing ftw. Instead get a good headset and get a simple separate mic. Modmic or any derivative works.

Overall, you’ll get tremendously better quality for significantly less price. The sheer amount of options for good “generic” headphones is immense. Added bonus: because the two are separate, you can swap one out when it breaks. Especially the addon microphones have a tendency to last decades, unlike the headsets themselves, which suffer more immediate wear and tear.

That alone sadly is not even the issue. Only when stealing from the government comes in, you can expect to actually get prosecuted.

Trying to pawn off the expenses on your company balance and committing tax fraud, then paying off people to not tell about your tax fraud, that’s what gets you.

Don’t forget Yemen. I know, it’s a measly 350 000 dead so far, which apparently rate much less than Israel-Palestine conflict losses.

It was unusual in how far south it was visible in many regions of the world. It’s been roughly 50 years since the last time that happened. Obviously the subjective impact depends a lot on where you live. Some see it every year, others only will get the chance when the Sun explodes and strips away our magnetosphere entirely. Which hopefully will not become a centennial event.

Absolutely true, but that still does not make phev the universal solution to climate friendly transportation :) .

It’s more of an awkward stop gap measure. It’s expensive and complex to make and maintain (!) and only really profitable for manufacturers due to subsidies as well.

That makes no sense. The electric motors are an entirely different, separate system from the ICE. As such, using the e-drive will not heat up or spin the pistons in the ICE at all.

The ICE is only connected to a generator to charge the battery while driving, thus providing extra charge for more range and/or peak torque/speed.

I wasn’t talking about auto stop/start at all?

It also has no bearing on what I was talking about. Start/stop automatic triggers when the vehicle is stopped, but only if the engine is warm already. This is exactly for the same reason as I pointed out above: starting a cold engine is bad. Starting an engine that is already close to its operating temperature takes very little effort and puts very little strain on the system.

Even if used “properly”, plug-in hybrids are a bad idea:

They are more complex than either a pure ICE or electric vehicle would be.

When used properly, the ICE plug-in will only activate during high load phases, e.g. highway travel. However, the engine at that point will be effectively cold-starting. Not only is thus the least efficient phase of generating energy from fuel, it also means the engine oil is not warm and fluid yet. This necessitates more expensive, less durable low viscosity engine oil. Also, engines deteriorate much quicker during irregular usage, especially during cold starts.

There’s really no upside except getting government subsidies whenever the lobbies manage to get their Plugin-Hybrid qualified for it.

Maybe we should turn this idea around? I know tons of healthy rich old people that have nothing better to do than bicker and complain, how about we force them to do a free full year of community service? Why is their time and energy considered more valuable than the youths’?

And maybe it would humble those wealthy nepo pieces of shit, and likely resolve the social issues that people complain about.

Currently, just barely under half of Germany’s population is overweight.

That’s only ten percent less than the USA, which sits at 57%.

And yes, it causes massive health problems, staining the healthcare system.

Still a couple deal breakers for me, though most stuff otherwise runs fine. No HDR support. Sucks if you have a great monitor but can’t use it. No nvidia broadcast. Necessary for my mic+speaker setup, common alternative such as noisetorch are convenient, but don’t even come close to echo filtering quality from the speakers. Yes, that’s super subjective obviously. Performance tends to be noticeably to only slightly worse on max settings with nvidia on highly specialized, very demanding games. Some anti cheat tools struggle with compatibility modes.

We’re getting there, but it’s tough with nvidia not caring. :/