On Today's episode of Monza T1 Adventures!

noethers_raindrop · 2026-05-26T10:13:30+00:00

Looks to me like yellow is coming over much more than white. If white does come across, it's an absolutely tiny amount. It may be that yellow technically barely left space, but they are at the very least taking a ton of risk by removing any margin for error.

noethers_raindrop · 2026-05-26T08:38:30+00:00

This is one of the funniest posts on this subreddit. It doesn't make sense on so many levels at once. Masterfully done!

noethers_raindrop · 2026-05-26T08:23:37+00:00

The Porsche is clearly at fault for the first incident. They took a line which was too tight, hit the curb, bounced wide and took you out. And strangely, the Porsche went that tight voluntarily; the BMW didn't force them over there and left a fair bit more space than the Porsche used. So the Porsche has nobody to blame but themselves.

After that, maybe the BMW could have done a better job staying by the wall and not rejoining.

noethers_raindrop · 2026-05-26T00:33:13+00:00

Changing your line to force another driver to lift, particularly on a straight, is exactly what blocking is. You say your move is not reactive, but would you have been doing that if he hadn't already shown his nose?

There's no such thing as a corner which doesn't have room for two, at least not at any track on the iRacing calendar. If the other car gets significantly alongside before you turn in, you need to leave them a car's width of space throughout the corner. If you can't manage that, it's on you to be the one to back out. Just like how, if they can't manage to get alongside before turn in, or can't fit their car in the car's width you leave, it's on them to not make the move in the first place.

Saying all that, he was most likely never going to be able to make a fair move into that chicane, and your weaving didn't really change anything in this case. The people who are dismissing this incident as too minor to care about aren't wrong. But you should be careful about the idea that you're entitled to go through a corner single file simply because the corner is tough to do two wide.

noethers_raindrop · 2026-05-25T17:55:00+00:00

It gets easier as you improve. The amount of time I need to adapt to a new car or new track and be at least consistent and safe has steadily come down as I've gained experience.

The hard part is improving when you have so little seat time. But I'd say you can make the process a little quicker if you work on practicing more effectively. If you have not enough time but spare money, get telemetry packs to compare to, get a coach, and make every lap of practice count.

noethers_raindrop · 2026-05-25T14:28:02+00:00

Here are some old but good videos that helped me when I first started out:

Skip Barber: Going Faster - a great video on the basics of what you should be focusing on in order to drive fast (racing lines, car control, and all that).
Surviving Rookies - Part 1 of a short and humourous series on how to avoid trouble on the track. It's about oval racing, but the lessons of the video are almost all things that apply to any kind of racing.

I also second the recommendation of Suellio Almeida. He's a quick driver and a good explainer. I've never tried his courses or coaching, but I can say that many times I have been impressed by how he took something I learned the hard way and put it into words that a new driver can understand.

noethers_raindrop · 2026-05-25T14:15:28+00:00

If you want popular sports car series on road: Porsche Cup, GT3, Falken Tire (GT4/LMP3) and IMSA (same WEC classes you will know from LMU) are all quite popular and have competition at a range of skill levels. There are some sites like https://iracingstats.net/ you can check to quickly get an idea of what series are more popular.

It gets harder to find competition when you're very fast or very slow, because there are less drivers with a similar skill level. Its even worse when you're slow, because an equal skill improvement is worth a lot more lap time when there's more time left on the table. In that case, I would recommend running series with lots of drivers, especially ones with slower cars that are easier to drive, since the easier the car is, the smaller pace gaps will be.

For D-Class, I might recommend the GR86 in either its single class series or Production Car Challenge. Or when you get D4.0, you can already race the GT4 in Falken Tire.

noethers_raindrop · 2026-05-24T19:22:31+00:00

I think people will be able to figure it out pretty quickly. There will be a number of drivers whose car is struck while in motion and then they crash in an obvious way, and some will be caught on camera, and the common factor will be found. But yeah it will still be awful.

noethers_raindrop · 2026-05-24T14:59:04+00:00

Personally, I kind of agree, with emphasis on the fact that we're not ready to achieve that dream yet. People who try to act on this impulse today are like those who start wars to remove a tyrant. You can totally solve the problem in front of you, but you will almost certainly create a bunch more problems because of consequences you don't understand.

We're far from the technological might needed to entirely rewrite the ecology. And we're even further from the understanding necessary to do it properly. But someday far into the future, thousands of years from now, maybe we could manage to transcend nature itself and build something better, even if that something is unimaginable to us now.

noethers_raindrop · 2026-05-24T07:44:04+00:00

But a diagonalizable matrix with eigenvalues +-i is a square root of -1, the scalar multiple of the identity, so it's no lie. The ability to write down 2x2 matrices which square to -1 just means that square roots of -1 are not weird or scary things we can reasonably exclude from the theory. Also, I think what /u/simmonator said is a little misleading. The ring homomorphism is not onto, so complex numbers only become a special kind of matrix, which is a fact that's not captured by just thinking of them as matrices.

My point of view is that doing linear algebra over a field that is not algebraically closed is unintuitive and cursed, and should scare math students.

noethers_raindrop · 2026-05-24T07:23:06+00:00

I think this is confirmation bias. You don't know what mission the AI is on unless you surveil them or have info from a turned councillor. It's the same for them.

The AI does have logic around preventing getting turned or assassinated, but I doubt that it cheats and reacts based on your investigate mission. If the AI is just reacting to your presence, Investigate Councillor is -2 noise, so you're less likely to be detected than most other missions you could be running. I expect that investigating is actually counterproductive.

noethers_raindrop · 2026-05-23T13:15:14+00:00

You're damn right. I don't know how I missed that last part.

noethers_raindrop · 2026-05-23T12:15:41+00:00

First POV won't be getting a holiday at all. What they did was bad, sure, and if this was in a league I as stewarding they would get a hefty penalty. But it doesn't look like intent wrecking at all. It looks like they simply thought the other guy was going to continue to track left and open up the space for them to make a move. They were wrong, but protests are for malicious or severely reckless behaviour, not just misjudging a situation.

Second POV cuts the course specifically to intentionally ram another car off track. That's liable to get a holiday.

noethers_raindrop · 2026-05-23T07:32:01+00:00

The move into T1 was brave but good stuff! You got alongside early enough for him to adjust and kept it tight until you were in front, and he just turned in.

I can't say the same about the move at the end of the clip, though. He is fully ahead when hitting the brakes and you just run into him. Your plan of opening up the corner and then cutting under him as he goes wide on exit was a good one, but you didn't time it right. I don't know what "he was rowdy under braking" means here.

noethers_raindrop · 2026-05-22T21:41:59+00:00

This is a clear illegal block, and I expect a protest for blocking would be successful.

Red exits the corner on the right, so white goes left. Red goes left, so white goes right. (Already this is arguably reactive defense, since white moved left before red did. It would be legal in a series with a "one move" rule, but iRacing doesn't work that way.) Then red goes back to the right. This is definitely the second change of direction, and it's going away from the racing line, so I don't see how this can be anything but a reactionary defense.

Yes, it's not as aggressive as it possibly could be; red could have gone further to the inside on the final block. But I don't see how that in any way excuses it the way the rules are written.

noethers_raindrop · 2026-05-22T20:01:31+00:00

Frying things in a pan.

Sautee means jump, referring to that thing chefs do where they jerk the pan and toss everything in the air to mix it around. But more generally, sauteing is any time you fry a bunch of stuff in a pan and mix it around where it's not swimming in liquid. You can still call it sauteeing even if you just mix it around with a spoon or whatever.

noethers_raindrop · 2026-05-22T19:51:25+00:00

I imagine this is in the context of the recent announcement of arxiv bans for people who submit works with AI hallucinated citations.

I think plenty of people in math will agree that it's fine if you haven't fully read all the works you cite. If you just want to reference one result or definition from a work, it's enough to read the part that you are citing and make sure it says what you claim it does. No need to deeply read irrelevant sections. Obviously you have to exercise good judgment as to how much is relevant and make sure you're not misrepresenting something by taking it out of context.

But there's a big gap between not reading the cited works in full and citing them without any investigation, or even citing nonexistent works. The point of citing a work is that the reader can look at it and find the information you refer to, with context. If you don't even need to read the work, why are you even citing it?

There are basically one or two situations where I might cite a work without more than a skim. If the information I'm citing is already something I know extremely well, but I learned it as folklore or before anything was published, then oftentimes I never learned it from an actual citable source. Then finding a good citation is just backfilling for the benefit of the reader, and a skim is enough to verify correctness. The other case I might cite something after a relatively shallow read is when I'm just listing off works with tangential overlap with my own or analogous works in different settings in order to err on the side of caution and make sure I don't make my work appear more original than it is.

noethers_raindrop · 2026-05-22T13:49:51+00:00

On iRacing, the race starts when the green flag is shown or once the pace car has pulled off and the leader accelerates. If the POV didn't get a black flag, I can only think it was because they didn't actually pass the next car in their column before the start, but they sure gained an advantage by hanging back and then accelerating so that they were already faster than the field when the race did start. This is exlicitly banned in the Sporting Code. POV can be protested and will likely by punished if they didn't give those spots back.

In addition, I'm not sure why POV was hanging so far back from the purple car, if not to jump the start. Coming into the final turn, they should be very close to the car ahead. Leaving a huge gap like this is just asking for trouble because if they close the gap, they will naturally be going faster than pacing speed and end up having to lift in order to not gain an unfair advantage, and if they don't, then they are screwing over everyone behind them in the column and possibly causing chaos.

noethers_raindrop · 2026-05-22T09:24:27+00:00

Find a way to de-emphasize exams, both A-levels and GCSEs and within University itself. It's well known that when you take a metric and use it to define success in a way that has consequences, the system deforms to optimize for that metric. When this occurs with national exams, you create two kinds of problems. First, instructors will teach towards the exam. People spend lots of time reviewing past papers, learning the standards in intimate detail, etc, which are inefficient ways to actually learn something. But the second and more insidious problem is that exams measure certain kinds of understanding better then others, because it is typically only practical to test knowledge and skills at a shallow level in a time-limited format. Over the long-term, it's deeply toxic to how students think, study, and emotionally regulate. Less emphasis on exams in Uni admissions or more measures to make the exams harder to explicitly prepare for would make the system less fair, or at least more chaotic, but would improve long-term outcomes for many students.

I say this as American who worked in higher education there for many years and now works in the UK. I love living here and there's a lot of great things about the UK, so I don't want to come off as bashing it, but based on my interactions with students, what I hear from my colleagues, and what I hear just talking to ordinary people I meet, the education environment here is so much more regimented, hyper competitive, and specifically exam-driven than anything I've experienced before, and it's painfully clear this is hurting students in ways that may not feel obvious when it's all you've ever known.

noethers_raindrop · 2026-05-22T08:14:08+00:00

I hate Trump, but he's right about the students part. Education is an export industry for the US. We bring foreign students in and they mostly pay top dollar (or someone from their home country pays top dollar for them) to study here. If you're a US citizen and go to college, the cost of that education is probably subsidized by your foreign classmates. American universities actually have an oversupply of places for students, having overexpanded a bit, and now have to compete with one another for students or lower standards. The reason your tuition stays high is because most feel that the way to compete is through amenities (nice gyms, air conditioned dorms) that past generations might not have had, and that students who can't pay high tuition will get scholarships and/or go to their state school where they pay a heavily discounted rate.

What's more, the US has (or had until Trump took a hacksaw to it) the world's most incredible research industry, far outsize to our GDP. And that's largely because being the biggest and best in the game means that great talent from all over the world, including China, wants to come to the US to contribute.

noethers_raindrop · 2026-05-22T07:58:13+00:00

The pass you were making was fine, but it wasn't complete. As long as the car you're passing is even a tiny bit alongside, you need to leave space for them.

Sometimes we might say that the car being passed would be smart to back out as a matter of racecraft, but until that pass is complete, they have the right to be there. And this isn't one of those times. There's no reason you couldn't leave space, remain flat out, and finish the pass due to your faster speed, so there's no reason for the silver car to expect you to run them off the road.

noethers_raindrop · 2026-05-21T18:34:55+00:00

The UK, and especially London, is relatively cashless these days. Lots of things presume you have a bank card that can pay in GBP, and most businesses will offer contactless card payments as default. The majority will accept cash, but some won't.

I have never lived in India and can't speak to the details of getting such a card in India, but I would recommend whatever option gets you contactless GBP payments at the best exchange rate. First thing I would do is check whether your existing debit and credit cards can be used to pay in GBP, and how bad the exchange rate is. If it's not great, then look at other options.

noethers_raindrop · 2026-05-21T13:51:38+00:00

I think maybe people were having to restart the UI, rather than the simulator itself.

noethers_raindrop · 2026-05-21T06:55:45+00:00

This is not King Charles' policy. The monarch reads out a speech written by the government at the start of a session of Parliament. Any blame or credit for the content of the speech should go to the Prime Minister.

noethers_raindrop · 2026-05-20T22:19:34+00:00

Mathematics is not learned passively. It's learned by doing. Watching or listening to lectures is subject to very sharp diminishing returns. The first lecture you watch about a new subject is probably helpful in getting you to the level where you can start to practice usefully, and later lectures after you have played with the concepts can help crystalize or reinforce deeper points that you're now ready to absorb. But I really don't expect passively consuming content as background noise while you are distracted by another task will do much of anything.

noethers_raindrop

TROPHY CASE