When I was a teenager I had a bad wipe out cycling off road doing about 30mph that resulted on me landing on my head. I was knocked out, swallowed my tongue, and if it wasn’t for my friends stopping myself from choking to death I would have been dead, as it was I had a concussion and an overnight stay in hospital. But if I had not been wearing a helmet I would have been dead on impact. I think its pretty telling that all my friends invested in helmets after that.

Even in non car areas you can fall from relatively low speeds and have a bad time.

What I do not like is that a significant number of other road users are more likely to see you as less human for helmet wearing than not: https://road.cc/content/news/cyclists-wearing-helmets-seen-less-human-301661 This has a negative impact on how they treat you on road.

Yeah if you really want buckling just get them, nothing else is exactly the same.

I used to default to box jades but switched to a stiffer click bar from Spirt as my default but now I prefer clickies. I am not sure if you can still get the bars from Spirt as its been a minute since I last ordered from them and I know they had a few issues with fulfillment.

I find box switches with the click bars at the stiffer end to be a more sharp tactile bump than alps and louder, more tactile than anything under the ambers, which they are about the same as. If thats what you are after they are a decent choice but I prefer clickies as I mentioned. Neither are exactly the same as the alps switches and I prefer the sound of the alps, although they can be scratchy.

If you want buckling springs I would just get those and put up with the layout, as you say, nothing else is going to be exactly the same. I find alps and mx switches more predictable typing experience but lack the same feel and are just not as loud in the same way.

Blue or Amber Alps would be my pick if you can find a board in the layout you want that supports Alps. I strongly recommend trying them before you invest, whites used to be cheaper than blues, so if you might get lucky with preferring whites and save some cash.

Zeal Clickiez are probably the closest to what you are going to get out of MX that I have tried, although I had to spring swap to get the feel how I prefer. They are not cheap especially when you add in new springs.

You can always ball bearing mod the MX switches to add in some extra thocc.

Simplest way is a Windows VM and screen capture in the OS running the VM. Obviously next step for Microsoft is to detect and block Windows VMs, good luck to them with that.

Blues aren’t even good clickies and I’m surprised such a man of culture hasn’t gone for alps

Buying less and buying for life as a priority when choosing purchases. It’s had a knock on effect thst I try to buy bespoke from small artisans as they tend to be higher quality and it supports small businesses rather than megacorps.

But elon burned it down before he realised

Its also that he started meddling in car design, manufacturing, and roll out of his charging stations even before he went full nazi. Without exception, every recent decision hes made for those three areas has been fucking awful.

The cars have never been comparable build quality to established European (ICE) cars available for the same money, but somehow build quality has gotten worse. Then there are the just plain dumb design decisions hes forced, such as the yoke being the only steering wheel available for one model, till dealerships pushed back to at least offer a round wheel as an option. Indicators as buttons on the wheel. Gear select (yes its technically direction selection in an EV) on the big screen with no physical controls, some cars don’t even have a dashboard in front of you, speed in on the tablet. 100% of everything to do with the cybertruck.100% of everything to do with his self driving system, no lidar is the dumbest hill he will die on.

Manufacturing its been a constant push to reduce costs at the expense of quality, failure to deal with systemic racism, labor law violations (particularly in Europe) and a ramping up for cybertruck production for demand that just was not ever there. They had to discount the dumb thing almost day one.

Charging stations he fired the entire team for the only thing that made Tesla unique in 2024, then hired a bunch of them back as he realized he fucked up. Instead he should have been doubling spend on chargers as this is the path to EV adoption, especially of Teslas, and other manufacturers in the US were lining up to pay him to use the charging standard, it could have been a significant revenue stream.

The icing on the cake is that they have failed to develop new models and people are sick of the old ones. Experienced manufacturers know that the majority of their line up needs refreshing every few years, Elons failed to do this.

The guy couldn’t manage a Banana stand.

That its being co hosted will backfire on the US. If it was just the US and nobody turned up they can and will blame football for that rather than their own idiocy, but because Mexico and Canada are also hosting matches if they get great attendance then its clearly an issue with the US.

If you want to go, go to the matches in Mexico or Canada, spend your money there.

Did somebody get upset at Williams performance over the weekend? Honestly, some of the closest racing we’ve had in years (just don’t look at McLaren this year) is because of the cost cap.

It used to be printers but I switched to a Brother laser printer about five years ago and its been trouble free while having reasonable print costs. You can even force it to print on empty for a bit longer, although you shouldn’t push any laser printer too far on empty as you can wreck them.

Toasters are my big gripe. Its been proven that they have massively reduced costs at the expense of longevity and toasting efficiency from what we had decades ago. I have an expensive toaster (from Sage), and I have still had to replace micro switches on the buttons. While it does a better job of even browning than a cheap toaster its still far from the level I expect.

I would buy one of those expensive Japanese toasters or a commercial toaster oven but I do not want that much counter top taken up by it. I would rather just cook my toast in a cast iron pan now, far better finish.

The only positive is that the drivers aren’t blaming each other and are agreed about it being the pitwalls fault

Yeah sadly so much of the keeb space is locked within

I’m sad to say best way to find the ones close to you will be your local keeb discord, as painfulas discord is. UK it’s limited to prototypist meet ups or the main UK discord.

2x32"@4k@60hz. They are for work primarily so I want a ton of real estate and use Sway to manage that for me.

I would love to upgrade to the same size and number but OLED with a higher refresh rate, may be next year.

Yeah its a super paranoid process, I would just rather take a traditional person exam

Question difficulty makes no difference whatsoever with proxying, these are already long form questions in the main. The whole point of it is you are paying somebody else to take the exam for you, either directly by something like screen sharing or indirectly by relaying questions and answers. The AI voice assistant is another form of this, its higher risk as LLMs aren’t always right but its still proxying.

I personally know of half a dozen people who used Cheggs to indirectly proxy their engineering degree exams as they weren’t proctored and had 12/24 hour exam window. The uni was meant to require an in person defense of similar questions from anybody getting unusual results, something people who cheat simply cannot do, but because they had done it the whole way through they never triggered the flag. This is why proctoring is so important.

One of the reasons so many companies use Pearsons for their exams is because they have centers everywhere, they are by far the largest. If you cannot do it online then you have to go to your nearest center. Simply too much cheating is attempted otherwise. As always the actions of a minority ruin it for everybody else as rules have to be put in place.

Yup, exactly that. You are not allowed to proceed if you have additional devices including your mobile visible during the setup phase, you have to sweep the area with your webcam so they can see. When the exam is proctored if they see a phone or anything suspicious that you introduced into the frame you are generally fucked and have to go through a review.

Pearsons run a lot of different exams on behalf of a lot of different companies so the rules change depending on what that company wants and will pay for.

I know of one that you have to connect with your webcam and again with your phone camera so the phone can capture from behind you.This is one is live proctored by a real person throughout, it is pretty damn expensive so its not the norm. Many are just at the start and end, with AI triggers and random sampling to find cheaters.

I know of another than limits how many screens you can have connected to just one, this is principally to reduce the chance of a IP KVM being used for proxying. Its trivial for the software to detect how many displays are connected, same with number of HID devices.

I think you are underestimating how much cheating is attempted with these, and how much they have already been through the loop of being able to detect it.

So these costs do not appear to include the often massive marketing costs that can run into tens if not hundreds of millions for big blockbusters? Unless I am missing something.

Yeah making it optional for them to turn on because they are still entitled to privacy even though they are children is the key to building trust. Them trusting you as a parent is the most essential thing here, there is always a way around something, you want them being honest by choice rather than sneaky or you forcing “honesty” by coercion.

We always did that from when the kids were younger and my now adult daughter still chooses to turn it on when going on dates.