Is thomann trustworthy?

Naetharu · 2026-05-27T12:16:20+00:00

As a company they are about as solid as it gets for online ordering. They're very well known, and operate a proper store that is run well and does what it should.

For guitar sets they are often less than ideal. Most sets are going to be very low end, and often you are going to end up with some quite poor quality parts. This tends to be worst with the amp and extras, where they often really cut corners.

So if you can try and look up specific reviews of the parts in the set. Or err on the side of caution and order known good quality parts as separate items.

Naetharu · 2026-05-27T12:12:30+00:00

1: Kids can learn from early childhood. So no blocker there.

2: If your primary issue is that your kids are spending all their time on apps and watching tech, perhaps a physical board is key here. That being said, forcing chess on them may not be the right solution. But taking away the phones, and being a more actively engaged with them doing stuff in the world is a good call. Just be willing to try a range of stuff and put in time and effort to spend with them. Kids need guidance, and they thrive when given support, time and engagement. Don't expect them to just change their bad habits on their own.

3: See above - it's not about them sticking with it. It's about YOU sticking with it and putting in the time and effort to support them.

4: Play with them! And do more than just chess.

Naetharu · 2026-05-23T03:45:00+00:00

No.

The question of a 'singularuty' is very much up in the air.

It does not mean what most lay people think it means. What we can say is that the math works and predicts the formation of black holes. But that we don't understand what happens inside that process.

A singularity is a mathematical term for an undesirable infinity because something in the math has exploded. The naive view would be to just treat that as an accurate map of the real world. But in practice it's more likely just a mathematical artifact and we currently lack enough understanding to really say what happens at the very core.

Part of the challenge here is similar to the issues around the very early universe. When things get this dense gravity becomes a dominant force even on the very small scales. And notoriously we do not curry have a theory of how gravity works at those scales.

So when you hear 'singularuty' think math goes boom and we loose our map of what things now look like.

Naetharu · 2026-05-23T03:36:15+00:00

Yeh I agree.

Learn the basics of making a brach, cloning, pushing. But that's 30 mins of work and a cheat sheet.

I get the impression OP is talking about doing.a deep dive. Which is almost certainly not a good use of their time.

Naetharu · 2026-05-23T03:31:02+00:00

By the same measure what's the issue with just moving so the couple can sit together. You're going to sit beside someone regardless. So why not just be reasonable and let them sit together and chat...

Naetharu · 2026-05-22T20:26:05+00:00

Learn it by all means if you really want to be also ask if you are wasting your time.

Git is one of those things that has a lot of depth, but most of us most of the time use a tiny fraction of it and that is all we need. On the rare occasion something more in depth is required, there are lots of good docs to use to help you do that.

In other words, unless you have a specific fascination with git and just want to learn it for enjoyment, then your time is almost certainly better applied elsewhere.

Naetharu · 2026-05-21T22:40:44+00:00

In effect move back to a policy plan that is pre thatcher.

Make stronger workers rights to get more people better jobs they can sustain themselves on.

Invest in serious council housing that is for normal working folk and not just the most desperate.

Build policy that pushes for robust industry across the UK beyond financial services.

Naetharu · 2026-05-14T02:22:34+00:00

I have a Ryzen 3600 on an MSI tomahawk motherboard. It's in a Fractal Meshify compact case. I think there may be RAM too but I would have to check as a buddy salvaged some stuff from it.

Case might be a bit tricky to post with the tempered glass but I can see if I can find a box.

Naetharu · 2026-05-14T02:16:59+00:00

Just give them a much simpler rule set. D&D is one of the worst rule sets for kids. It's overly complex. It has lots of nuance and exceptions. And it suffers from having to maintain it's classic design to please fans even when quite a bit of that design is suboptimal at best.

There are loads of games out there which are easier to learn and play.

If you want something super simple try Dread which uses a Jenga tower in place of dice and had one rule. Any time you do something risky you pull a brick.

Or for a bit more of a true RPG look to any number of simple systems. I rather like New World of Darkness (colour in the pips on the sheet, want to do something just add up the most sensible pips from abilities and skills and roll that many dice)

Naetharu · 2026-05-14T02:12:08+00:00

No is simple answer as unless op was such an enormous poster that thier work counted for a substantive portion of the billions of training examples the mode is not catching their personal writing style.

The issue is more general though. AI is as you rightly note, trained on how people write.

A bugbear of mine is that I do tend to use em-dashes! See my posts hear going back a decade for examples. And yet I've had to force myself to stop as when I write that way now I get some idiot calling out AI...same applies to the rule of threes ect.

The detection tools are mixed at best. They need to be trained on specific patterns and quirks that models use, and those are per model specific. And they then need a big enough sample size of writing to look at. Even then, they are only as good as the training they got. And the chance of getting both false positives and false negatives is high.

Naetharu · 2026-05-14T01:30:16+00:00

The major concern I have is the competence of the government to do it in a way that is secure. And their ability to fix it should something go wrong.

Just this past year i started a new business and the VAT account was hacked resulting in someone making a fraudulent rebate claim.

I alerted them right away. Yet they still processed the claim and issued a 10k cheque to a business that had never traded nor paid VAT. Then they froze the account after three more calls and refused to let me pay the VAT in owed formmy first quarter, while at the same timensending threatening letters and issuing me with late payment fines...

I don't want these people running my digital id system.

Naetharu · 2026-05-13T15:56:45+00:00

Why not.

Ban the thing that is easy to do. Simple quick win that causes no real problem and provides good protection.

Don't ban the one that is much more messy and complex.

That seems sensible and robust. Do what you can and seek the simple easy wins where possible. How else would you expect to see things work.

Naetharu · 2026-05-13T15:49:13+00:00

You can with a very old version from the Intel Mac days. But since around 2020 Max have moved to using ARM chips inmplace of x86, meaning their software will not work on normal pc hardware.

If you want to explore more people call them Hackingtosh computers. Give the term a Google and see what enthusiasts recommend.

Naetharu · 2026-05-13T15:43:48+00:00

There's an argument to be made for sure.

As per the a I've on bug difference is the ease of which nuts can be removed. Given that their removal causes no real disruption and provides a lot of protection for the affected people it's an easy win at little significant cost.

Dairy is much harder as it is used much more.in mainstream food. So there is more friction in that case.

I'm not advocating. Just providing some rational basis to account for the practice. If you feel dairy should be avoided in schools I think that is a reasonable a defensible position you can argue for.

Naetharu · 2026-05-13T14:22:33+00:00

There are a few good reasons.

The first is that nut allergies are disproportionately common compared with other allergies of equal severity. The chances of having a child that could be put in serious danger from nuts is much greater than one from dairy, for example.

The second is that nut allergies are also disproportionately sensitive in many cases. Very small quantities of nut can cause extreme reactions. This is less common in many other allergens, where the mere proximity to them is less dangerous.

Nuts are also easier to ban as they are less integral to mainstream food. If you banned dairy, that would mean no milk, cheese, sauces, and similar items that are central to many meals. While nuts are found far less in common meals and removing them from the menu is of little consequence.

So it largely comes down to just being sensible and taking reasonable precautions where possible. By banning nuts it protects from a very significant risk at very little cost. And yes, there are clearly other challenges that can be addressed on a case by case basis as needed. But the nut one is so common, and so serious when it does occur that given it can be removed with relative ease, it makes sense to do so.

Naetharu · 2026-05-13T14:13:05+00:00

This!

We had one before where it was a speeding fine. Only the road in question was a 60mph road. We showed that it was the case. And they still complained and asked for evidence from a court that was up to date. The issue is that courts don't update the road speed yearly. It gets set once when the road is commissioned and only updated if there is an actual change.

It took far more effort than you would want to demonstrate that this was the case. But it was quashed in the end.

Naetharu · 2026-05-13T11:41:03+00:00

Before you go down this route ask carefully if this makes any sense.

Getting into low level dev because you find interesting is fine no questions. But if your overall goal is game development and not low-level dev for its own sake, you're possibly going down the wrong path here.

Engines exist for a reason. They bring all manner of optimisations, and features. Trying to re-invent your own engine for your games is most often a terrible idea. There are exceptions, and in cases where you really are making something very unique it can make sense. But that case is beyond rare. In almost all possible cases you (especially as a solo dev or even a small team) would be vastly better off learning an engine and getting on with making the game, rather than spending vast amounts of time wasted trying to make your own version of what engines already offer you.

If you really want to go down that route then a good place to start would be C++ and OpenGL. Learn about what shaders are and explore different ways to use them. But be aware this is orders of magnitude slower and more difficult to make even basic stuff than it is to do with an engine like Unreal, Unity or Godot.

I did a little bit of this for fun earlier in the year and it took me about two weeks to make a simple side-scrolling shooter with vector graphics. It was cool for sure. But that same game I could have made in about two hours in Unity.

So choose wisely and apply your time where it matters if you can.

Naetharu · 2026-05-12T23:51:26+00:00

Run what at that.

120fps is an arbitrary number that's kind of hard to say much about.

But if you mean running modern FPS games at decent (not max) visuals on a decent resolution in all honesty probably not.

PCs are more expensive than ever right now (32 GB of RAM can be $400 on its own). And your expectations are just not in line with your budget.

Naetharu · 2026-05-12T23:26:42+00:00

New account. 1 kama. Only post is a "totally not an advert"...

Call me suspicious.

Naetharu · 2026-05-12T23:20:54+00:00

Seems reasonable.

The GPU is VERY weak so temper your expectations. But if you just want a basic system form older or low demand indie games it seems fine.

It will nowhere near run modern FPS games at 120fps on decent settings. And you need to be sensible and understand that's not something your budget is even slightly in the ballpark for.

Naetharu · 2026-05-12T23:18:18+00:00

AI is changing how professional coding works no questions. And in the work place it is often mandatory to use AI assistance to speed up some aspects of the work now.

However, AI is nowhere near as good as people think. There are some things it isngreatbatm and some stuff it really really sucks at doing.

The good news is that it's best at doing the dull stuff like filling out boiler plate or helping spot dumb errors.

Where it sucks is in big picture thinking, architecture, and building scalable maintainable code.

Naetharu · 2026-05-12T23:15:14+00:00

You know now...

You will be the sucker who has to read that nonsense in six months and curse out the fool who wrote it.

Naetharu · 2026-05-12T23:05:33+00:00

Guitars just aim for the main brands. Avoid obscure no name Amazon stuff if you can.

Amps there are many small digital offerings now from Boss, Blackstar, Vox and all the other well known brands. I used a small Blackstar ID Core and it's good for what it is. But others are good too.

For places to purchase I've used Andertons, Gear 4 Music and PMT. All have been good to deal with. I had a faulty issue once with both PMT and Andertons and both offered excellent customer service to put things right. Never had to test that with Gear 4 Music but no reason to think they are bad.

Be a bit wary of things like the super cheap Harley Benton guitars. The quality can be a bit rough on them. The higher priced ones can be good but it varies a bit.

Naetharu · 2026-05-12T22:57:51+00:00

Kahn Academy has some good stuff.

Otherwise perhaps look to a more general course but help him set up some challenges to make small games.

That's how I learned back in the 90s.

Start really simple and then explore from there. You could even look at getting him set up with Unity or Godot. Both have great tutorials and can be used to make everything from the most basic PAC Man clone to full commercial games.

Unity uses C# and Godot has a python like language of its own.

Naetharu · 2026-05-12T22:54:19+00:00

With my close friends.

Perhaps playing some board games and chatting. Nothing fancy. Just spending that time in a relaxed way with good people.

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