It's true, N. American vehicles seem to have misaligned lights a lot more often than European ones. N. America headlights also have a different cut-off pattern (non-existent?), which maybe is partly to light up overhead road signs, whereas European headlights have a very distinctive horizontal cut-off with an up-sweep to light the edge of the road better. This is why, for example, UK drivers put stickers on their headlights when taking their cars to the continent: it covers the up-sweep so it doesn't dazzle on-coming vehicles.

Thatâ(TM)s not true. The UK is a G20 country and doesnâ(TM)t have a federal system, let alone a federal government. The UK governmentâ(TM)s Department for Education is only responsible for England; the governments of the other UK nations are responsible for their own education.

I've also noticed that Teslas don't have blind spot protection lights in their wing mirrors. I guess Tesla has invested so much in their other tech that they want the driver's eyes on the in-dash display rather than up at road level physically watching surroundings. When I'm cycling in London, I'm often faster than cars and one of my defensive tricks coming up the inside of a vehicle is to look in the wing mirror to see what they driver's doing in case they're going to make a sudden unsignalled turn, and so I notice these lights.

Youâ(TM)re comparing a runny turd to a floating turd. Theyâ(TM)re still both turds.

Donâ(TM)t they all do that? I rent a lot of cars, and canâ(TM)t remember a car with a reversing camera that didnâ(TM)t have guides that adjust with the turn of the steering.

Why doesnâ(TM)t it surprise me that youâ(TM)d do something passive-aggressive? Pointless too because your mirrors are unlikely to be bothersome. But, you say itâ(TM)s a hassle, which suggests your attention is distracted from the road and worse, youâ(TM)re trying to dazzle somebody else, which of course could result in an accident.

I like to be able to look through the window of the car in front so I can get a better view of the road ahead. I canâ(TM)t stand being behind vehicles that block the view of the road.

IIRC, both Netscape Navigator and Netscape Communicator were free for personal use and at a cost for commercial use. I don't remember paying for it or having trouble acquiring it, whether it was the browser with the pulsing N at university or Communicator at my first job. Maybe it was an honesty thing at download or install time?

While the four hottest days on record have occurred in the last seven years, with one of them just reaching 40 degrees, it's a bit of a stretch to say that the "UK now routinely sees 40C summer peaks".

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

It's also a bit of a stretch to claim that there are "long stretches above 30C". Last year was considerably above average with 14 days, which came in two or three periods at least (I don't remember, but it wasn't one go). It certainly feels hotter than that, especially with buildings that are insulated for winter and don't have A/C or if you're down on the Tube.

https://www.extremeweatherwatc...

I do agree with you though, that person did write a lot of drivel!

I know software estimation for even small to medium projects can be bad, but what is it about government projects that makes it so hard? Low balled estimates to win contracts? Lack of appropriate project management experience and oversight?

If you think that is bad, see the estimates to restore the Palace of Westminster (UK's Victorian parliamentary building): £15-40 billion and up to 60 years. I saw somewhere that they expected the costs to balloon by 40-60% before VAT and inflation. It's currently costing nearly £1.5/week just in maintenance.

https://www.theguardian.com/uk...

Wasn't Crossrail something like 30% over budget and several years late? Maybe that's not bad for the construction industry ;)

How do you do that?

You can run x86 builds of Windows in Parallels on Apple Silicon? I didn't know that. I didn't think that was possible because it just offers virtualisation, not emulation. I thought you had to let Windows on Arm do the emulation to run x86 Windows apps. Also, isn't Parallels just a wrapper around Apple's virtualisation framework these days anyway?

Adobe Premiere Pro was a launch day application for Apple Silicon. That doesn't happen by accident with Apple's level of secrecy. Apple made sure the ecosystem was seeded with flagship products that worked well.

Anybody doing special hand optimisation for Arm processors has probably spent years optimising for Intel chipsets as well, so you can't really call bullshit on that.

Indeed, Apple have popped up and offered us some advice to improveme our SIMD optimisations that we'd done for Arm/NEON, and found an extra 10% speedup. Those optimisations are good for all Arm systems though, whether they're on-prem Ampere Altras or Amazon Graviton instances. And believe me, we've spent years tuning threading, writing better C or C++ code and hand writing Intel assembly or utilising compiler intrinsics coupled with some expensive profiling tools to find the code hotspots. In most cases, the Arm optimisations were done quickly because the hard work had already been done.

The Amazon Graviton instances are now getting pretty with higher numbers of cores. I don't have recent benchmarks, but Graviton = v3, they were always cheaper than the Intel and AMD machines, but very performant.