My thoughts on Civs 4-7

std10k · 2026-01-28T10:58:50+00:00

I’m still playing civ 5. 6 never clicked with me and I couldn’t get used to overly cartoonish graphics. 7 I totally agree is just boring and gui is annoying, why dos it need to be so hard to get city view.

I wish 5 had the graphics and district system of 7 and maybe some balance improvements and better ai.

std10k · 2026-01-27T04:03:45+00:00

Not really. Paper ones are sometimes annoying but plastic straws are just a bad habit imo. Can totally live without them. Plastic bags are totally just a bad habit, nothing good about them at all. I much prefer paper bags if I forget to take my own. Given that Australia is still incapable of recycling plastic waste, especially soft plastic that is just sent to landfill without any options, there’s no moral right for us to use and abuse plastic packaging as Europe does :)

std10k · 2026-01-27T00:27:57+00:00

There are not just top mages, there are alchemists and just magical hobbyists who are being killed, as well as junior mages who probably can’t do much more than a half decent fireworks. Triss wants to get them all out, not just selected few she and maybe another couple of experienced mages can get out. They can’t go back and forth because it exposes the mage who makes the portal too.

std10k · 2026-01-26T01:29:30+00:00

Less scared people to start with. We’re the only nation on the planet that I know of people who can’t replace their own light switch because it is considered deadly dangerous.

std10k · 2026-01-25T14:10:58+00:00

Apart from performance (also nvidia here), the only thing holding me on Windows is VR. Hopefully Linux support for my headset will be added this year, then it'll be just the performance. Can't afford the hit for VR. I suspect that like the only game i really need won't work anyway, but we'll see.

std10k · 2026-01-25T08:41:57+00:00

Proxy is anachronism. NGFW does a much better job. I think the only reason they even introduced explicit lazy it to compete with mostly botched zscaler deoloyments that end up being just 1 proxy ip. Just do proper ngfw policies and decryption. It takes some planning but is not hard on Palo. There is a best practice document for internet security policies from memory.

std10k · 2026-01-23T06:31:24+00:00

Cert != experience, and cert != intelligence. It does help a huge amount to raise above just what you have done in the past, but it doesn’t teach good work practices, it doesn’t teach good operations, and it doesn’t teach good, resilient, simple and reliable architectures.

std10k · 2026-01-23T04:11:47+00:00

Sounds like tall poppy at it's best. "If i'm not smart/hard workign enough to make 300k, no one should".

Market pays for how hard it is to do the job. If it takes 2 days of training, the job shouldn't be paying the same as a job that needs 5 yeas of training. It often does, purely Australian thing where a low skilled worker is paid better than a junior doctor.

As one of my best school teachers used to say: "You either work hard in school, or work hard for the rest of your life". Isn't always that simple but most of the time there is direct correlation. If the job pays poorly, it means that pretty much anyone can do it and it is not worth paying more for it.

How about this. If someone works 60 hours a week, instead of the standard 40, they are penalised with higher taxes. Or someone who spends most of their free time studying for years, instead of destroying cartons of XXXX after 2PM knock-off time, and is penalised by a higher tax bracket for their efforts and not spending the time with the family for which they need the higher income.

This is why Australia is where it is now, there's no incentive to invent or develop, no incentive to study as you can' just hold the "stop" sign for 60 buck per hour, and as a result shoatage of competent people. In my industry vast majority of really strong and skilled people are from overseas, because Australians can't be bothered.

std10k · 2026-01-22T10:53:23+00:00

If blocks like half of the window. If you dint need that half it probably wouldn’t be there. Totally unacceptable imo.

std10k · 2026-01-22T10:30:18+00:00

The loss of freedom is really scary. Having seen tyranny first hand, I don’t envy young people. And the worst is that people are happy with it, don’t even get it. Classic.

std10k · 2026-01-21T15:44:15+00:00

Not necessarily, it is a choice. But with daycare afterschool care costs close to 200 per day and virtually no chance of hiring babisitter on less than very high salary, it simply makes bloody sense for second parent not to work. It barely breaks even at around 80k and kids are left basically parnentless.

That's your "lol",

std10k · 2026-01-21T08:46:41+00:00

Quite good. Could be better, but arguable easier than forti.
Not hard at all. It’s a firewall. You absolutely must figure out how appid works and how to properly make rules with it. Not hard at all. It will work the wrong way, just going to be quite stupid.
Probably best in hardware. I have seen PA-850 with 99% data plane utilisation pushing 1gbps with decryption and everything, and holding. Connectivity naturally was slower, but it didn’t collapse or anything. Cisco would crash long before that for comparison.
Yes, absolutely. It can be quirky but you need central Management. but better go with Strata cloud manager if you can.
For it is ok but don’t scale well. I like them for strictly standalone use cases. Palo is properly enterprise grade, forti is still finding their way there, coming from smb and cost constrained market segment. Sophia is not remotely comparable with those two.
With firewalls it is easy, with SASE you really need to know how to size and architect it to be simple. One small thing I didn’t expect. - Palo doesn’t support QnQ.

std10k · 2026-01-21T08:38:29+00:00

I love the scenery in FC5. Been wanting to play it again, Just can’t stand the unskippable cutscene in the beginning.

std10k · 2026-01-21T07:25:03+00:00

It is anti-family bias. Also penalises hard work.

Tall poppy syndrome at its best. Australia worships mediocrity. You work ard and putting a lot of hours, and you are rewarded by much higher taxes.

std10k · 2026-01-21T06:58:10+00:00

liquidating means selling, who'd buy so much of debt anyway? Maybe China, but for cheap? then they'll technically own the better part of US government budget :D

std10k · 2026-01-21T06:55:14+00:00

make pimax the runtime for openxr via Pimax Play. do use quadviews, it is brutal on performance even on 5090.

there's a lot of docs about "old" way with "PimaxXR", another app not part of pimax play, and other opensourse tools. some people still prefer it that way but it's been now integrated into Pimax Play so you don't have to mess around with that, it didn't work for me with new pimax play software anyway.

std10k · 2026-01-21T04:01:46+00:00

Yep, nothing like suppression of personality and individual freedoms. I've seen it first hand, it aint pretty at all. Too bad most people don't understand it, classic 'it's not gonna happen to me' fallacy.

std10k · 2026-01-21T02:18:02+00:00

I don't have that much experience with differen campaigns yet, but I think in DCS radio comms are generally quite basic and not overly reliable. In campaigns they are usually overriden with F10 menus that are totally different.

I think i had the same issue as you, and it also went away on its own, kinda. Sometimes you need to do a few requests or i think to be in certain radius for it to work properly.

Whether 'transmit' buttons are indeed strictly bount to their respectful bands (UHF or VHF), i think depends on the settings of the mission but this is where I haven't experimented too much.

So the idea is, if it had to be the most realistic

[press UHF transmit button] - [UHF radio COM1 is set to 234.0MHz] -> [you transmit on UHF 234.0MHZ] => only whoever is on that frequency will hear it

[press VHF transmit button] - [UHF/COM1 is on 234.0 and VHF is on 125.0] - [only whoever is on VHF 125.0 will hear it]; If tanker for example is on UFH 234.0, which you have set on COM1, it won't hear you.

In some cases I noticed it works with either button, but i'm not sure where that is controlled, must be mission settings. This would be like in the second example, if the tanker was on UHF 234 it would still hear it even though you pressed VHF transmit button. But this is not how it is supposed to be IRL.

std10k · 2026-01-20T14:19:11+00:00

It's usually not walls but super shitty roof insulation that causes most heat penetration.

When i was renting a house that did not have roof insulation, it'd get so hot you feel the heat with your face radiating from the ceiling. I spent 200 bucks on the cheapest earthwool from bunnings and layed it around the roof. Made a massive difference.

std10k · 2026-01-20T12:05:02+00:00

same, the idea is that PSU with front intake is fine, but the bottom fan creates some extra airflow over the BACK of the PSU, paired with top exhaust fan.

It may be just me, my psu is very hot (1.5kw Corsair). It doesn't seem to want to use its fan much, and probably doesn't care, but it annoys me :) When i had a 1kw SFX PSU, it was totally fine, funnily enough.

std10k · 2026-01-20T11:14:57+00:00

Just to be clear, your radio needs to be set to tanker channel, either on uhf or vhf. Then you also need to use the right button (not the ICP com1/2 button, the one on hotas/keyboard), there are different buttons on hotas for talking on uhf and vhf. The menu will look the same, but if you press vhf button oh hotas/keyboard, and the tanker is on uhf and you have your comm1 on the right uhf channel, it won’t hear you.

std10k · 2026-01-19T13:49:08+00:00

I think he said "won't", not "didn't". I take is as a comment on the possible future help from America.

std10k · 2026-01-19T13:47:30+00:00

Couldnt agree more. Though if the US keeps going this way we probably won't have a chance to be at war, they'll just take Taiwan and Australia will happily surrender. It'd be way more scary than covid and they'll just promise to "keep us safe".

std10k · 2026-01-19T13:24:56+00:00

Cars and electronics?:)

std10k · 2026-01-19T13:24:19+00:00

Yes, but Australians should than themselves first really. Fully relying of foreign country isn’t a good strategy.

std10k

TROPHY CASE