shinyhappyrainbows

Let that headline sink in. 1296 people died on Australia's roads between April 25, 2024 and April 25, 2025. Divide that by 365 and you get 3.5 (and a bit) people killed on Australia's roads every day. This is like tolerating manslaughter. For perspective, the Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS) records that 409 people were murdered in 2023. Fewer than a third of the roads deaths figure. As far as I can tell, from daily media consumption, murder rightly draws public ire yet there's almost no outrage at the senseless deaths of people going about their daily business. This is fucked up! Murder certainly warrants public action, police work, active justice. Why do deaths, caused by weilding 2 tons of motor vehicle, weilded with compromised care or attention, draw media attention only for the spectacle of wreckage? In nearly all car crashes, there is a liable party and a victim. Where there isn't a victim, it's nearly always 2 or more liable parties. Where is the outrag...

having now ridden a hub drive for a year and now a mid drive recumbent trike for a month or so (actually a front drive because the trike's bottom bracket is out front), I'm starting to get road experience of the benefits and problems of both. One of the biggest claims made for mid drive is better centre of mass - bollocks. the rider is the largest and highest positioned mass on either an upright or a recumbent. Another factor in center of mass is rotational momentum, and here, a mid drive wins on an upright bike, bumps lift the mass of bike and rider through a shorter "lever." On a recumbent trike, a bump lists the mid drive through a short lever (the trike's wheelbase) vectored back to a lever longer than the trike's wheelbase by a factor of nearly 2, the distance between the pedal bracket and the back wheel. All the center of mass arguments for mid drive ignore the rider's mass and, again, on a recumbent, the rider's rorational moment is reduced but...

I have just learned that Soundcloud are planning to introduce a policy allowing AI to train on all the music therein. Being politically opposed to training AI, even for pure academic research, without the express permission of the artist/rightsholder in such works and without payment of a royalty for each instance of such use, I have summarily deleted my Soundcloud account. I strongly advise artists of any field and genre to do likewise, should their gallery site, repository or similar medium require acceptance of such terms. Training AI without paying the originator is possibly the BIGGEST cultural theft in history. If the ceators are not paid, that is piracy, by capitalism's own definition. I stand against the AI industry's "one law for them another for us" attitude to payment for access to human culture. Meanwhile, following my Soundcloud deletion, I decided to refresh my knowledge of my Bandcamp account terms. Big sigh of relief! Bandcamp stand against, and make...

I can code a little, basic Arduino. C/C++ basics, can create a custom library with a bit of online guidance, can code an imperative microcintroller sketch in the simplest of C, without much need for references to how-to pages. Brain's getting old and glitchy, no patience for learning, struggle with the whole in-crowd culture of the programming world, where even "beginner" tutorials assume higher than my level of understanding. That I've successfully coded anything, let alone, say, a MIDI controlled robotic drum kit. (Still got to finish that, but no room in the "secret lab" right now.) Languages like Go or Rust look doable, but see above for "culture," while the whole javascript world seems designed by people deliberately trying to make it impossible for beginners while teasing us with statements like, "JS is easy!" Yeah, pig's arse. Now, before we go further, if you read further than this paragraph, "The Contract," you are...