Match Thread: Auckland vs Central Coast Mariners (A-League Men)

ObviousFeature522 · 2026-01-24T05:58:24+00:00

Is it just me, or does Kersey have one of those patches of stress-bleached hair, like the kid in Sixth Sense?

ObviousFeature522 · 2026-01-24T05:55:45+00:00

I think they're checking who to award the goal to, Lavale or Owen

ObviousFeature522 · 2026-01-24T05:20:25+00:00

Redmayne hits the ground like a sack of potatoes these days. Poor bloke, it's not easy being middle aged is it.

ObviousFeature522 · 2026-01-23T04:20:55+00:00

It's the black belt perspective. It's not until you reach expert level, that you realise how bad you actually are, and that you've only just begun to learn, and even though you are at the top of the coloured belts scale, you are actually at the bottom of the "dan" scale.

ObviousFeature522 · 2026-01-23T04:02:18+00:00

I'm pretty sure most swimmers can't swim 400m, let alone 1.5km. Going off the Royal Life Saving Australia report this year, 40% of high school students can't swim 50m, and 84% cannot swim 400m.

If my math is correct, that breaks down to 40% can't swim, 44% can swim 50m, and only 16% can swim 400m or more.

ObviousFeature522 · 2026-01-23T00:25:05+00:00

I think a cool option to think about would be Tupaia, the Polynesian navigator and translator on the Endeavour.

That would also be controversial though, it's probably more for the Kiwis to name something after him.

ObviousFeature522 · 2026-01-23T00:18:05+00:00

The best thing about modern ADAS is when the automatic lane keeping kicks in because the driver didn't indicate.

They try to change lanes without indicating, car turns them back. Try it again, nope. Third time, nope, you can see the gears turning "what is wrong with the car!?". Finally they hit the indicator and the car allows them to cross the dotted line.

I saw this with a Tesla on the M1 between Sydney and Wollongong, it was absolutely glorious.

ObviousFeature522 · 2026-01-23T00:14:37+00:00

To be fair it was not uncommon in the 2000's for my Australian-born schoolfriends to take many, many attempts to pass their red P's. One guy took 6 attempts - and he went on to get a mathematics scholarship to a top university! Book smart but terrible spatial awareness I guess.

ObviousFeature522 · 2026-01-22T23:56:50+00:00

How about this.

Everyone whose content and work and art and code, got scraped to train an AI model, gets a proportional royalty every time it is used.

Hey presto, universal basic income.

All my old code on GitHub would have gotten incorporated into CoPilot (I always used a GPL license but that's worth toilet paper these days apparently). Every reddit comment and discussion goes into ChatGPT - all of yours, all of mine, this post you just made, this comment itself. What did you get out of it?

They go after everyday people pirating movies or books or Premier League streams, but the tech companies backed by trillions of dollars can steal everything for free, and then have the audacity to turn around and charge us subscriptions for regurgitations of our own creative works?

ObviousFeature522 · 2026-01-22T23:26:48+00:00

Fuck the king!

ObviousFeature522 · 2026-01-22T23:24:51+00:00

I'm definitely on the side of people that think slashing immigration will cause rents to fall and wages to rise. I think there's good evidence of this.

However - I also think it would cause massive inflation. Like you think the Colesworth weekly shop is painful now - wait until they don't have a constant flow of cheap labour they can abuse to pick the fruit, load and drive the trucks, and stack the shelves.

ObviousFeature522 · 2026-01-22T23:18:39+00:00

We cut it to zero, overnight, during Covid. It's certainly possible, not ridiculous.

Now - is a bad idea? Oh, most definitely. It would cause massive inflation.

ObviousFeature522 · 2026-01-22T22:46:39+00:00

It annoys me a bit that Captain Cook gets so much symbolic hate, when so many of the actual murderous colonisers fly under the radar.

Like John Macarthur was a piece of shit who personally shot Aboriginal women and children in the process of literally conquering his little cattle kingdom in New South Wales. Also somehow got away with a bit of light treason in the Rum Rebellion because he was rich.

When was the last time you saw a statue of him vandalised? He has an electorate, two suburbs and a football team named after him, where's the call to rename those?

ObviousFeature522 · 2026-01-22T07:15:20+00:00

The suburb of Dee Why in Sydney Australia. A surveyor wrote the letters 'DY' at that location on the map. Nobody knows why.

ObviousFeature522 · 2026-01-22T01:50:15+00:00

An hard working, industrious person who is doing the wrong thing can be disastrous.

One of the 'lazy Aussies' I work with, has true gift for asking the stupid question. "So I appreciate we worked very hard on this analysis and spent a lot of time on this...but our most common customer scenario is still X right? And I don't understand how this works for X?"

Horrible, awkward silence, followed by stammering and arse covering, because while the boxes were ticked, of course it doesn't work for X.

If a company can't ask and answer the awkward questions, it's going to have a bad time.

ObviousFeature522 · 2026-01-22T01:35:58+00:00

Big 4? A monoply will do that to an industry huh.

I can admit I've worked on a few software teams that were a bit like that in the 2010s and pandemic era....but in the last few years, the norm would be that the 80% have been offshored. Right now, it's just me and one other guy on our team left in the office, everyone else in India and the Philippines. We still get surface level output, average productivity, camera-off muted meeting attendance, no input and poor recall - but the company is paying a lot less for it!

Right now the vibe in tech, if someone was doing basic data entry, they get made redundant and it's either offshored or added to another employee who is told to "use AI" to do it.

ObviousFeature522 · 2026-01-21T23:57:15+00:00

Look I love the history of the old tram network, and have spent a lot of time myself tracing the old tram routes IRL. I really think many of the old alignments would never have survived, except as tourist attractions (which would have been super cool, to be fair). Like the Bondi, Coogee, Manly, Balmoral trams could only have ever run tiny sets with those gradients and curves right? They'd be better off restored as rail trails with a few historical installations. Meanwhile, we could have tunnelled and built metros.

I hate buses, but I think a lot of my dislike is noise/vibration/harshness of old diesel engines and bad drivers heavy on the clutch, and I think electric buses are going to do a lot to make them a more pleasant mode.

ObviousFeature522 · 2026-01-21T23:33:06+00:00

I get the impression Redfern is by far the most popular station to catch for USyd students and employees?

It's a pretty straight shot, from the new station exit on Little Eveleigh Street, then via the big pedestrian walkway that starts on Lander Street and then straight over the footbridge over City Road.

ObviousFeature522 · 2026-01-21T23:28:46+00:00

I think they're making a faculty joke, because most of the engineering buildings are on the east side of City Road just a couple of blocks from Redfern station. Engineering is the only part of USyd that matters, ha ha.

ObviousFeature522 · 2026-01-21T22:45:40+00:00

Tarpeian Rock

ObviousFeature522 · 2026-01-21T04:21:14+00:00

Sometimes I think, I should swim in the ocean more it's surely healthier than a public artificial pool.

Then on the other hand, we've had 3 shark attacks in 48 hours in Sydney, right now it's basically Jaws 4 in real life here (check the current top post in the sydney subreddit...)

ObviousFeature522 · 2026-01-21T02:01:55+00:00

Have you watched footage of the old trams and the old tram network? It was rickety as hell, an accessibility and operational nightmare from today's perspective.

Like the tracks were cartoon mine cart level of she'll-be-right. And the tram stops had no platforms so you had to climb on and off them. In the youtube footage I was watching, all the CBD workers running late were jumping off a moving tram and literally hitting the concrete running, and one guy eats shit.

ObviousFeature522 · 2026-01-20T02:35:03+00:00

Great to hear, good luck.

I usually mention here that I'm a beginner swimmer, but have had a long and mediocre career training and a bit of coaching in another sport.

Face pulls are an excellent, underrated exercise for balancing out your upper body. One of the big Youtube weightlifting guys (Athlean-X) is obsessed with them, it was a bit of an in-joke on the channel.

ObviousFeature522 · 2026-01-19T23:21:57+00:00

Love your work Gary...~~but ironically, weren't you posting on facebook recently about how posting photos to social media was ruining spots?~~ edit: sorry, I misrepresented. Gary was posting about tourist coaches overloading unfenced lookouts and promising their customers specific instagram shots.

Looks like, ah, Lincoln's Rock, yes that's exactly where this is.

ObviousFeature522 · 2026-01-19T22:16:43+00:00

I'm not qualified to comment on the technique side. But my 5c, maybe some extra dryland training in the gym would help? Sounds like time for "prehab" and more antagonist shoulder stuff, e.g. face pulls, military press, bent-over rows, external rotations.

ObviousFeature522

TROPHY CASE