Zagorath

I think tldr are slightly off the mark this time. Most of the points they made are correct, but there are really important extra factors they've missed.

Labor, our centrist party (centre-left, within Australia's Overton Window), did extraordinarily well at the last election. This was due to a range of factors, but one of the biggest is that the LNP/Coalition/Liberals & Nationals, our right wing (centre-right) shifted further to the right than normal, and ran a very Trump-style campaign, which did not endear them to the Australian populace in the way it did in America.

And that happened because in the previous election, the LNP lost almost all of their more moderate candidates. Some to, of all things, the Greens (centre left in reality, left in Australia), and many others to a group of independents who are largely right-wing on economic issues, but take a strong pro-environment, anti-corruption stance, known as the "teal" independents (for the blue of the LNP mixed with green). So all that was left of the LNP was their far right.

This most recent surge in the far-right One Nation's polling has less to do with anything happening in Labor and more to do with the continuing collapse of the LNP. Their leader has been absolutely incompetent, frequently trying on extreme positions, opposing for the sake of opposing, including backflipping in order to oppose even after Labor conceded some points to her.

The fact that the coalition is a coalition hasn't helped this. The Nationals are the more extreme wing, particularly when it comes to the environment (counterintuitively—you'd think the party of farmers would care more about the environment). And the two parties have been publicly butting heads, increasing the sense that they are in disarray, which is the primary cause, in my opinion, of One Nation's rise.

Yeah I was quite surprised when the episode ended. I think this is the first time this season an episode hasn't neatly lined up with over run?

I'm usually team "whoever's running right now", so this great for me.

Oh, I used HA to mean high availability. I was not aware people also abbreviated Home Assistant.

Sorry for the late reply. I'm just disorganised and have way too many unread notifications.

LXC containers sound really interesting, especially on a machine that's hosting a lot of services. But how available are they? One advantage of Docker is its ubiquity, with a lot of useful tools already built as Docker images. Does LXC have a similarly broad supply of images? Or else is it easy to create one yourself?

Re VM vs LXC, have I got this right? You generally use VMs only for things that are intermittently spun up, rather than services you keep running all the time, with a couple of exceptions like HomeAssistant? What's the reason they're an exception?

Possibly related: your examples are all that VMs get access to the discrete GPU, containers use the integrated GPU. Is there a particular reason for that distribution?

I'm really curious about the cluster thing too. How simple is that? Is it something where you could start out just using an old spare laptop, then later add a dedicated server and have it transparently expand the power of your server? Or is the advantage just around HA? Or something else?

Sorry for the late reply. I'm just disorganised and have way too many unread notifications.

That and Ben's obsession with the apples were absolutely hilarious.

I think the cynicism is unwarranted. They've always been fairly transparent with the audience on the Layover, and they'll regularly talk about how the optimal play for game strategy and for audience excitement are in conflict and how they resolve it.

In this case, Sam gave a pretty convincing explanation of how he ended up where he did.

Just re the spoilers, the syntax is

    
::: spoiler [visible text]
[Hidden text]
:::

I think that the "spoiler" needs to be all lower case like that.

Geez on the evidence they've shared here, Rockstar has so obviously fucked up.

The best piece of evidence in their favour is that employees discussed, in a space open to former employees and an external union representative, that the number of people allowed on leave at a time is heavily restricted because they need to be able to get 32 people together at once to test an online game feature. Rockstar claims this reveals information so sensitive their barrister wouldn't even read that part out in court, only in written submissions. The idea of "an online service that can support at least 32 users" is TOP SECRET and worth insta-firing 33 people with no hearing, according to Rockstar. As the video points out, it really feels like they've trawled through the evidence to find a post-hoc justification for the firings.

Hmm, perhaps I've used the wrong terminology. I know I've used the term loosely in the case of Sydney, which has 30 separate Local Government Areas (LGAs) in the metropolitan area, only 12 of which are called "city".

When I said city council, I meant all 30 in Sydney. And in London I meant all of the equivalent. From Enfield to Croydon, from Hillington to Havering.

That's an interesting way of looking at it, but I think it's worth pointing out that there are key differences between Australian states/Swiss Cantons/Canadian provinces and the UK's regions. In a federation (or confederation), the sub-regions are the original basis of power, and they choose to give up some of their powers (chiefly foreign policy) to the federal union. The UK's regions are much more similar to Chinese provinces, in that the national government holds all the power, and chooses to delegate some responsibility to lower levels at its own will.

This is not meant as a value judgment, by the way. I have long argued against the amount of power states wield in Australian politics, and would prefer more decisionmaking be turned down to the local level. Preferably in a structure that involves more genuine consultation (as opposed to "consultation" as a box-ticking exercise) with local residents, and with much smaller local governments than the mega-council that BCC is. At the same time, some of the other powers that the states currently have would be better off lifted up to the federal government. It's not about federal governments with the power that states have being better by any means. Just that they're very clearly different, and that the UK is a unitary state, where the sub-regions are more like Chinese provinces than like Canadian provinces, despite the implication of the name "state" being that they actually sit between Canadian provinces and France on the spectrum. (If the spectrum goes from Chinese provinces, to Canadian provinces, to the country of France, Scotland sits between Chinese and Canadian provinces, closer to the Chinese province, but the name carries the implication that it is close to if not the same as France.)

But it can overrule states in other areas, so in practice similar to the UK lording it over Wales or Scotland.

Westminster can overrule the very existence of Scotland and Wales as anything other than an idea in people's heads. Canberra cannot do that. It's not even remotely similar.

you seem to be confusing countries with nation-states

No. In fact, there's a better argument that Scotland, Wales, and England are separate nations than there is that they are countries. To quote a couple of helpful Reddit comments:

Nation has more to do with people than territory. It implies a group of people with a unitary identity based on language, ethnicity, or culture. Nations may or may not be sovereign (e.g. the Navajo Nation exists within the United States). A nation-state is a sovereign state that consists primarily of a single nation.

A nation is a unit of cultural organisation, defined by what the nation wants but often shared language, history, values, ethnicity, or a combination thereof (different nations are different).
A country is a nebulous concept often used to mean a nation-state, ie a state created to be the political side of a nation, an organisation in which the state and nation are congruent.

If they gained independence, the nations of Scotland, Wales, and England would then also be separate states, creating nation-states. As it is today, the UK operates under the idea that the "British" are a single unified nation (I've heard it called a "country of countries" before, but "nation of nations" would be much less of an obvious furphy), but nobody pretends they are actual states (in either the way France is a sovereign state, or the way Queensland is a federated state).

I also wonder what guidance the home game gives. Maybe someone here has a copy and can tell us.

I managed to find a rather poor-quality scan.

Administrative Divisions
1st Administrative Division
This is the biggest formal category of division. For the US, it would be states. In Switzerland, cantons, in Japan, prefectures.
2nd Administrative Division
[US -> counties, Switzerland -> districts, Japan -> subprefectures]
3rd Administrative Division
One more level down. In the US, Switzerland, and Japan, this would be municipality. Municipality borders can be occasionally difficult to define, so it's up to the seekers to clarify any ambiguity.
4th Administrative Division
Some places have no fourth administrative division, but many larger cities do. For example, New York City has boroughs. Zurich has districts. Tokyo has special wards.

Unfortunately, the advice in this section is less than helpful. It ignores different sizes of games. This is in the "matching questions" section, so questions like "are you in the same municipality as me?" I guess in the small or medium game you just ignore 1st and 2nd administrative division entirely.

In a London or Sydney–based game, I would probably use the city councils as the 3nd administrative division and suburbs for 4th, but maybe someone with more knowledge could address it better. (I'm not sure about "suburbs" for London. I'm aware that Australia uses the term very differently from what it means in America and Canada, but I'm not sure about the UK.) Here in Brisbane I can't city councils are probably too large (the City of Brisbane is approximately the same land area as Greater London, and Greater Brisbane, which includes 4 satellite cities, is supposedly 10x that area), so probably that electoral boundaries idea I had yesterday would be the best option.

Side note: they specifically describe Greater London or any "major city" as being their Medium game, with Small being "a single town, small city, or portion of a large city". If you wanted a small game, I suspect a single London or Sydney council would be too small, so you'd probably choose a handful of councils to play in, or base it around some local feature/cultural area.

There's also a "Borders" section within the "measuring questions" ("compared to me, are you closer to or further from...?"), which includes 1st and 2nd administrative division borders, as well as international borders. 3rd & 4th administrative division borders are not available for measuring questions. The same description of what these mean is listed here.

Bonus: I also saw answered a question that has bugged me for a while. How to do the Strava map, since Strava itself doesn't have a way (that I know of) to show the path without the streets.

this can be a little tricky to do; we have a few methods. One is to screenshot this on your phone, then use the drawing tools on your phone's photo editing app to black out everything but the street. Another is to put a piece of paper over your phone and trace with a pen/pencil/marker.

Not that it's very relevant. This question is only available in Large games anyway.

Australia gained its right to self-determination through the Constitution, which originates with federation in 1901. The UK retained some legal power which was whittled away over time, including with the Statute of Westminster and the Australia Acts. But as it stands today, Australia absolutely does not rely on the UK for sovereignty. It's its own country.

Being a federation, the states are sovereign, with their own constitutions, and they choose to give up certain powers to the Commonwealth. The Commonwealth cannot decide to take away their ability to govern independently on the issues that are not explicitly handed to the Commonwealth in the Constitution, nor can it overrule their policies in these areas. Meanwhile, even today in 2026, any law Scotland passes can be overturned at the whim of Westminster.

Or we can look at some other factors. None of these are definitive (there are counter-examples to each of them individually), but all add up heuristically to make the point. The separate regions don't have their own currency and can't set their own monetary policy (they "print their own money", but this doesn't carry the same meaning as when we talk about the Bank of England, Bank of Australia, or US Federal Reserve "printing money"; with Scotland it's far more literal—and nobody would deny that they do not set interest rates). They don't have their own passports, or maintain their own foreign policy. They're not in the United Nations, the World Health Organisation, or the Olympic Games. They don't maintain their own defence forces. They share a head of state, not just in the person, but even in the legal entity (in contrast with countries like Canada and Australia, which share the person as head of state, but are legally a separate Crown—a personal union, similar to what Scotland used to have in the 1600s, before the Acts of Union joined them into a single country).

Calling them countries is essentially just playing into a sort of historical nostalgia, or creating a way to provide some feelgood patriotism without encouraging actual separatism. I am all in favour of Scotland getting a second independence referendum (especially after Brexit, since EU membership was a pretty big part of the No campaign last time), and of the other regions getting the same, if they want it. But the reality on the ground right now makes it ridiculous to call them "countries".

Anyway, the whole administrative structure of the UK really is fascinating. In Australia it's comparatively simple. You've basically got the national level, the states or territories, and then local government areas. We have some variance in what an LGA actually is. Sydney, Melbourne, and Perth all have multiple LGAs within them, similar to what London does (but without the bizarre structure of an overarching mayor—the mayor of Sydney is most equivalent to London's Lord Mayor Susan Langley, in charge only of the central-most area, and there is no equivalent to Sadiq Khan. Meanwhile, Brisbane's councils amalgamated in the 1920s, so the City of Brisbane covers something much closer to "all" of Brisbane. The Lord Mayor of Brisbane is more similar to Khan, and Brisbane City Council is more like the London Assembly, with no equivalent to the City of London, or Kensington and Chelsea.

I've not read the rules of the home game, but I have wondered how this sort of thing would play out in a smaller-scale game, and whether (and what) guidance they give for defining your regions. My instinctive answer is that if there are three levels required, I'd probably use our federal electorates for the largest scale (Brisbane contains between 10 and 16, depending on how loosely you define the borders), use state electorates for the middle scale (of which there are about 27 in the zone of that 10, and 40 or 41 in the 16). And use suburbs for the smallest scale, which Google tells me includes 190 mainland suburbs within BCC, plus however many are in the satellite cities. But that seems like it makes the inner-most administrative region far too narrow. Feels like a tough balancing act.

My comedic highlight of the episode has to be Adam's reaction to the football statue in rugby.

Honestly with how the run had already gone by that point, I just knew that he was going to fail the fog roll. It was just narratively perfect at that point.

I wonder if we would have seen more variety if the “what country are you in?”

They do discuss this in this episode's Layover. And basically, they agree.

Grumble grumble grumble I hate that the boys are buying into the bs "they're different countries" nonsense that Brits go in for. The administrative regions of the UK are less like countries than US or Australian states are. At least states have a constitutional right to exist and administer themselves. Scotland and Wales have to rely on the goodwill of Westminster to have any self-governance at all.

He knew about the reflection problem but there was no way to avoid it. And the current is just a feature of...the river. He had to photograph the river.

He may not have noticed the rain, but it's not really clear that he could have done anything different even if he had.

And to be honest I doubt he could have gained a huge amount extra if he had found a better hiding spot. Maybe an hour or two if he's really lucky.

"Constantine, like clementine"

But…that can be pronounced two ways? Isn't that the point?

Hey, she wasn't just in Thor. She was also in Thor: The Dark World and Thor: Love and Thunder!