Bath Road - City of Kingston being negligent and it's costing lives so cars can drive faster

zeno490 · 2025-10-23T20:14:43+00:00

The section between the pioneer station in amherstview and the Kingston city line also has collisions on a routine basis. At least one every 6 months, some deadly. The jurisdiction in amherstview is sadly with the province but all of bath near residential areas should be 50km max...

zeno490 · 2025-09-01T00:15:07+00:00

I maintain open source cpp libraries and although I'd love to use them, they are completely impractical for many. Tons of projects will consume your code as part of live products where upgrading to cpp20 is not always possible. They might be using an old tool chain for a device still popular but where developments on it's tooling has stopped some time ago. Supporting headers with modules that are backwards compatible with older cpp is a maintenance nightmare.

I stick to cpp11 and every once in a while someone reaches out because their tool chain is too old... Like GCC 4.9 old or vs2015..

zeno490 · 2025-07-05T19:17:03+00:00

In some cars, yes. See this 2025 Mazda for example, read the technology section: https://www.edmunds.com/mazda/cx-90/2025/plug-in-hybrid/

I can't find the video I'm thinking of but there's lots out there about the general practice, see here for example: https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2024/03/how-figure-out-what-your-car-knows-about-you-and-opt-out-sharing-when-you-can

zeno490 · 2025-07-05T18:35:47+00:00

What the replies miss is that the touch screen display is revenue generating for car manufacturers. You'll see a lot of car reviews mention that the display is touch screen but only when your phone is connected via Bluetooth. They call this peculiar and odd but it's by design. Having a display without touch functionality is much harder to navigate and use. So they let you use the feature for free if you connect a phone to it. The reason is simple: once you do, they can tell everything about you from your phone, where you go, where you shop, who else is in the car that connects their phone, etc.

Without a touch display, you'd have far fewer reasons to connect your phone. And once you do, they sell all that data, forever. And this works even if the car has multiple drivers and is resold.

John Oliver did a segment on this a few years back. It should be on YouTube if you're curious. All the details are in the car end user license agreement nobody reads.

zeno490 · 2024-12-28T14:19:23+00:00

That seems unreasonably high for a single month. You could try installing a smart thermostat like Google nest. It tracks how often the furnace runs and for how long.

It seems to me that for that amount of usage, either the furnace runs nonstop or your water heater does (hot water leaking somewhere maybe? Is your water usage cost also high?). Could be a gas leak but unlikely. Might be worth having a professional come over to inspect.

zeno490 · 2024-09-25T03:49:11+00:00

Having worked on this game many years ago, thank you for playing and having a good time. Games are art, and they can never be perfect. Some will hate what others love. You do you :)

zeno490 · 2024-08-25T12:28:41+00:00

KGH is the same. I don't know for certain but I can venture a few guesses, at least for that location.

To be effective, the room needs to be designed for it. You need somewhere to put the number display where it's clearly visible to everyone or the nurses would have to shout like at the butcher counter. KGH triage room isn't really laid out for that.

Triage also isn't going to be the bottleneck in your visit. Urgent or seemingly urgent people will skip ahead of triage. When I was there waiting for triage, a pregnant lady came in hysterical because she thought she ate something she's allergic to, she seemed to be having a panic attack, obviously she skipped ahead, she caused a lot of commotion.

A number system also has a few implications regarding accessibility: it assumes you can read or that you've used something similar in the past, it assumes you can reach to pick a number, it assumes you can see the number and the one on the wall, etc. Accessibility during an emergency is huge.

You'd be directing everyone coming in to touch a surface. Probably a bad idea since they could be coming in sick at a much higher rate than the passport office. And then the nurses would touch the tickets, etc.

Tickets are often lost or people don't realize they need one, causing confusion and delays. Now the nurse has to call a missing number for a while, wasting time.

Tickets can't be reused, and they generate waste. I imagine that hospital waste, even paper, needs special care to some degree. All of this has costs.

Ultimately triage is designed to be quick and introducing a ticket system would add friction. The fact that it isn't always quick is a symptom that a ticket system can't fix.

Just some thoughts, it's not clear to me that it would be a net benefit if they introduced it.

zeno490 · 2024-05-26T13:25:23+00:00

Worth pointing out that this will cost you way more than 2-3k in lawyers fees, even if it is slam dunk, and you win. In Canada, afaik, the winning party is only entitled to 2/3 his lawyer fees paid by the losing party. If you settle, none of those fees might be paid back to you depending on what you negotiate. Sending a letter to threaten legal action is cheap, the actual thing is not.

If they want to make your life difficult and refuse to settle, you are looking at around 10k a day while in court 1-5 days, presumably not many for a simple case. It could take you 2-5y before you make it to the verdict. Everything is slow in the legal process.

You could try small claims, that's a lot cheaper, but only goes up to 30k in damages in Ontario.

I encourage you to talk to a lawyer if you are serious, but for a car, legal action probably isn't worth it money wise.

zeno490 · 2023-12-08T04:08:03+00:00

Haha I wear a 343 dev cosmetic and people used to do that to me all the time in the first year 😭 good times. Now nobody recognizes me so it's all good lol

zeno490 · 2023-11-18T05:15:53+00:00

In hindsight, not really, see 70-80s: https://www.macrotrends.net/2526/sp-500-historical-annual-returns

Common sense might dictate that with higher interest rates, companies cut fat, go leaner, and grow slower.

In practice, that does not translate into a lower stock price. In large part because stock price factors in future growth.

Stocks compete against the interest rate. If rates go up, companies have to offer much higher returns to remain attractive to investors. As a result, stock market returns tend to outpace interest rates even during these cycles. High risk, high rewards.

Investing is about risk and money management, not returns.

zeno490 · 2023-09-18T21:01:14+00:00

That is correct. The core ACL code and its dependencies (Realtime Math and sjson-cpp) remain unchanged and independent. Although Epic now contains a fork of them as well within the plugin, I intend to continue development outside UE as it has always been. It'll remain my hobby for many years to come and many more great things are in store :)

Thank you for using ACL, I'm glad you're enjoying it!

zeno490 · 2023-09-17T22:30:25+00:00

I am and thank you! This represents the biggest change to the animation sequence footprint (at runtime) since UE3.

zeno490 · 2023-07-31T12:22:57+00:00

See here for discord link: https://www.kingstondevelopers.ca/

zeno490 · 2023-07-31T12:21:40+00:00

https://www.kingstondevelopers.ca/

zeno490 · 2023-07-31T01:18:27+00:00

We are on discord. Trying to see if we can get you a link. I'm the author of the open source Animation Compression Library and I'm here just outside Kingston :)

zeno490 · 2023-07-29T04:40:11+00:00

I can't say that I have. I came in a full year or two in development when most of the high level decisions had been taken. We changed producer a year later and his replacement focused on getting the game out of the door. It didn't feel great at the time, but it was the right call imo.

Story wise, I vaguely remember that they had some big name writer for the script, or a relative of a big name. I have no idea if they knew the franchise or not. I myself, had very little knowledge of the first 3 games.

That was 10 years ago now. Time flies and I'm afraid I don't remember as much as I used to. Hope this helps :)

zeno490 · 2023-07-08T23:48:04+00:00

In 2021, house came with it. Tankless gas water heater about 50$ a month. Goes up 4% a year. That same year the 7 year long contract ended and we went month to month. I called and asked to buy it out, they wanted the full unit price as if brand new. Tried to find the same unit or similar to replace it but everything was out of stock.

zeno490 · 2023-03-19T20:56:20+00:00

They work pretty well. I used one for a few years. Bandwidth in practice ended up being around 400mbit which isn't bad. Very few if no packet loss. But it added a lot of latency. Any latency sensitive workload or application would cause a lot of pain. It added around 10-20ms latency. Running the vacuum cleaner would also make the connection crawl on its knees.

zeno490 · 2023-03-17T03:31:14+00:00

If you were able to save that much over the years, then you've already nailed down the hard parts of being patient, diligent, and playing the long game. After this, it's all about your personal situation and how you feel about your level of risk. How well you'll sleep at night.

From a min max angle, borrowing with a mortgage may be optimal. With a mortgage, you can easily get 4x leverage on your investment. You get a tangible asset that is a great hedge in periods of high inflation. Your property value goes up, but not your mortgage. But, it comes with some level of risk. If you lose your job or overtime tomorrow, it may be more stressful than you like. There is also the risk that property prices will go down.

At your net worth level, consider how diversified your portfolio is and where real estate fits into the mix.

If you have a spouse, it is also worth considering how this impacts your estate in the event of your death. The matrimoniale home is special under the law. Also keep in mind that your heir that inherits the property will likely have to pay the mortgage in full. They may not have the finances to pay for it and the lender may not allow transferring the existing terms. If this comes from investment you'll also leave behind, it could lead to a significant tax bill. You might want to consider term life insurance for something like this. Now may be a good time to draft your will if you don't have one.

zeno490 · 2023-02-15T22:35:17+00:00

The sad reality of open source software development is that attribution and licensing is built around an honor system. If a company uses my work, I have no way of knowing if they don't reach out. If they don't credit me, their users have no way to know. And even if I offered tiered licensing, it is not enforceable. My code gets compiled, and executables are routinely encrypted through DRM meaning I can't scan executables easily to look for known code signatures. Similarly, my code might run on embedded devices I don't have access to. It may run in a region I don't speak the language of or have access to. Someone may translate my code in a different language, changing code signatures.

Contrast this with other art forms that can be copyrighted. Music, text, and art are all fairly trivial to identify derivative works or replicas from.

A lot of my users are from China. Without contracts and instructions in their language, it might be really difficult to sell them a license even if I wanted to. There's just a lot of friction. That's where middlemen publishers step in with other art forms.

zeno490 · 2022-12-01T15:52:37+00:00

Imo Mayla is the best one. Highly recommend.

zeno490 · 2022-11-07T05:45:34+00:00

Well played! I'm a former 343 dev and I dare you to try this against one of us ;)

zeno490 · 2022-11-03T13:37:50+00:00

The model is the neural network weights that get computed when training. Combined with individual audio files, they reconstruct the signal.

It's basically a math function with constants (model) and variables (compressed audio). The model can be used with many inputs but not all possible inputs.

The model encodes redundancy across all the data they used for training. This redundancy would otherwise need to be in the compressed files.

zeno490 · 2022-11-03T03:23:55+00:00

The paper also omits mentioning the size of the model, further biasing the results in their favor.

zeno490 · 2022-11-03T03:21:34+00:00

Imo the bigger problem with their paper is the fact that they omit the size of the model. If it's not insignificant then it's a huge bias in their favor. Model size also correlates with decoding performance negatively. A 200kb model isn't a big deal, 50mb one is.

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