Depends, public transport outside of London is often a complete joke in the UK. I switched to cycling after getting pissed off at a bus that came once every hour and a half, was often 30-40 minutes late and occasionally didn't bother to turn up at all.
Yeah, I think I'd be utterly "half a bottle of gin a night" miserable working in the average corporate environment. It's hard to put my finger on the precise reason, but that kind of environment just has absolutely zero appeal to me even though I'd be earning a fair bit more.
Money's nice, but not hating your life is nicer. I'd make a rubbish Sisyphus.
It's even worse in the other direction; I used to go from Oxford to Aberystwyth quite often and Arriva Wales were truly appalling. They only ever ran two carriages for part of the route despite Aberystwyth being a university town so even when the Biblical unreliability of the trains wasn't a factor you were inevitably crammed in like cattle for the slaughterhouse. I've heard things are a bit better now Transport for Wales has taken over.
Beeching's axe really did a number on Wales, the country is effectively cut in half by rail and travel between North Wales and Cardiff takes a massive 3+ hour detour across the border to Shrewsbury. Reversing some of his cuts and reopening the Aberystwyth to Carmarthen line has been seriously talked about in recent years and I think it would be a very good idea. Beeching's cuts were extraordinarily myopic and allegedly the government of the day was in bed with road haulage companies who had an interest in hurting the railways. At any rate I hope his route to the afterlife involved a tediously indirect detour via limbo and purgatory!
Welsh place names can be brilliantly literal, Aberystwyth for example is "mouth of the river Ystwyth". Llanfairpwllgwyngyll... means "St Mary's church of the pool of the white hazels over against the pool of St Tysilio Gogo" but the name was completely contrived in the Victorian era to promote tourism to Anglesey.
I've been realising this recently, while I'm a professional programmer I only ever really learned the maths I needed for my degree and even then most of that got forgotten after I graduated beyond what's necessary for my day-to-day work. I did a bit of ML at university and I've been meaning to pick it up again but wanted to avoid half-arsing it by just learning the libraries rather than the underlying mathematical principles as well. One of the mental hurdles has been getting over this idea of "ML maths" as this black box, I've started with some linear algebra courses and while it's very interesting in its own right, it's also showed me I have some pretty enormous gaps in my knowledge!
Next time I'm between jobs (hopefully won't be for a long time) I'm going to revisit maths as its own thing, I really want to get my calculus and trigonometry up to scratch as well as things like linear algebra and statistics. It's interesting how quickly it leaves your head too, I did pretty well at university with ML but having not exercised those muscles so much fell out the instant that exam timer hit zero.
> having not exercised those muscles so much fell out
I had the same experience - I learned enough to pass the tests and then forgot everything as soon as the semester ended. I picked it back up out of genuine interest years later and it was amazing how much I retained now that I was actually studying because I wanted to rather than because I had to. You might also be surprised how much you actually do remember, hidden just under the surface of your consciousness, if you do go back and try to remediate on your own.
I think it could be more valuable to find a problem you find interesting and see if there is a model in the literature that you can use / implement starting with the most general/available and specializing if necessary. Most of ML work is, as the article alludes to, collecting and managing data.
Obviously this isn't going to be affecting a huge number of people in 2021, but if you listen to AM radio (I'm a bit of an anorak for Radio Caroline so I've been trying to pick that up) it's amazing how much interference modern devices give off. The monitor I bought last month absolutely wipes out 648 kHz, and Apple's Magic Trackpad 2 is a pretty bad offender as well.
This is something that never seems to come up in discussions on Scottish independence interestingly enough. I guess it'd be like Ireland and Northern Ireland where both jurisdictions use a common electricity market, unless politicians on either side throw their toys out of the pram which is highly likely in my opinion.
Cheers for the heads up about OFDM, I hadn't heard of that before! I wonder if that 18 kHz I've heard is per channel ie the sum and difference channels are both 18 kHz?
I don't want to add a remote control to my life, the "smart" bulbs are better because I can control them with my phone, watch, and any other devices I might get in the future.
Not to mention, I have ~10 of these bulbs. Can't imagine how a remote control would deal with that. They also aren't connected to the internet, they are controlled by a hub that only has local network access.
