gnu

The design of the front forks also assists with stability - having some rake and trail means the front wheel has a tendency to self centre (particularly at speed).

Without modern metallurgy and and the associated industrial manufacturing base it's a lot harder to build a single mill to effectively use all the potential energy. A multiple mill setup like this allows you to extract most of the energy without reaching the limits of how much force you can put through machinery made of wood (the shafts and bearings are likely also wood, not just the wheel buckets), stone, and low strength metals.

Reading the news while having breakfast, though it's now on my laptop instead of the newspapers I started this habit with.

Learning on a transmission with >6 speeds is hard mode, they do take a little more thinking with the gear pattern than in a car. Synchro versions are not that hard if you're used to a regular manual but adding another thing to learn is not ideal when starting out. If it was a non-synchro variant then good luck getting someone to pick that up without a few solid hours of learning time.

If you were being taught by someone used to heavy trucks it makes sense why they didn't tell you to push the pedal right in - on many (all?) non synchro transmissions pushing the clutch all the way in brakes the input shaft and if you're moving you then have to resynchronise it with the gear speed in order to get into gear.

Note you don't actually have to push the clutch in all the way in a car either, all that really matters is getting it past the point where the clutch is fully disengaged. After all the clutch plate is either touching the flywheel to some degree or it's not touching, once it stops making contact pushing it further away doesn't make a difference. When first starting out though it's easier to just push the pedal all the way in - save thinking about finer details until you're comfortable with the basics.

It's the first floor above the ground level (or the first floor that you have to start calling a separate name, because if everything is single level you don't need to specify a floor).

If I'm doing a small shop I'll take a bag in, fill it up as I go, then everything goes out at the checkout and ends up back in the bag. I've never had anyone care about this and I've been doing it for a few years now (ever since the old plastic bags got banned in my area).

The ACT does get a bit cold in winter, but I feel like it's closer to England than Finland (if England was drier and actually got hot in summer anyway). We are after all talking minimums of -5 or -6 for the coldest days in winter and snow normally only settling on the tops of the nearby mountain range (and temporarily at that).

I think the main problem with searching for fediverse posts is not that they're not indexed but the lack of a singular tag to append when you want to search for them. To search for reddit posts it was easy because you could put in your keywords and stick 'reddit' or 'site:reddit.com' onto the end, but now there's too many domains to keep track of and you can't rely on appending 'lemmy' pointing a search engine towards all Lemmy instances, let alone kbin/mbin instances.

Apart from family and my own number about the only one I can think of is the Reading Writing Hotline (1300 655506) due to the sheer amount of their radio ads I've heard over the years while driving around.

Even within family I've only got one left that actually works though - Dad hasn't changed his mobile number since circa 2000 but Mum did at one point and I never remembered her new one.

I do like Whirlpool, an Australian forum primarily centred on technology. It's still active despite the general decline of forums, has a lot of useful info to turn up in searches, and I appreciate how it has remained clean and fast without the visual clutter and wasted data of modern web design.

I've found a plunger useful for a sink occasionally, a bit of back and forth plunging can loosen up a hairball or break a layer of fat/soap scum. On the other hand I've never needed to use a plunger on a toilet - I don't know how much of this is exaggeration on the internet but Australian toilets don't seem to have anywhere near the amount of issues the American designs do.

It'd be interesting to see how much this changes if you were to restrict the training dataset to books written in the last twenty years, I suspect the model would be a lot less negative. Older books tend to include stuff which does not fit with modern ideals and it'd be a real struggle to avoid this if such texts are used for training.

For example I was recently reading a couple of the sequels to The Thirty-Nine Steps (written during WW1) and they include multiple instances that really date them to an earlier era with the main character casually throwing out jarringly racist stuff about black South Africans, Germans, the Irish, and basically anyone else who wasn't properly English. Train an AI on that and you're introducing the chance for problematic output - and chances are most LLMs have been trained on this series since they're now public domain and easily available.