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my new video is finally complete! as ive been teasing for about half a year now(!!), it's about one of the most infamous fan theories on the internet! hope you enjoy ^^

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i was genuinely worried that jorge was gonna fall off his bike after finishing. he couldn't even peel himself off the bike to do a triumphant celebration at the line. i thought he was experiencing cataplexy; the relief was so palpable even through the screen

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comms

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(genuine question) what do you think of fe's women test? is it a good opportunity for them?

I don't know, would be the honest answer. in the past the tests have been good opportunities - well, I say "tests," it in fact was just the one in Riyadh.

but being forced to find a woman if you wanted to run a second car, in the first in-season Gen2 test, meant teams actually had an incentive to do it. I honestly don't think any FE teams are ill-intentioned or that they had planned not to have female drivers but well, even from being heavily encouraged at the start, none of them did by Season 3.

so the fact they got forced to go and find a woman and give her sim time to prep and work with her and sign her onto their books suddenly made them think: oh. maybe this is easier than we thought. several of the women at that original Diriyah test came back and a few got formalised roles with teams. Tatiana Caldéron, in particular, was really quite in-demand between teams for a bit. but then a global pandemic happened and teams could barely make contact with their regular drivers and everything turned so survivalist this sort of stuff all disappeared, too hard to work out the tangles of for most contracts.

so I think it's good that those are being re-upped, that teams are being forced to make contact with women and to work with them. every session with the Gen3 EVO counts so, so much so they will have needed to brief the hell out of the drivers to make sure they can get stuff out of it - this isn't a show run, the teams need this data.

given the power of the machinery it does worry me a lot that so many of the drivers are stepping in from F4 (F1A & other equivalent series) but tbf, there have been men who've done that in past tests. it also feels a bit that there's a distancing in that - obviously you would not expect to see a lot of these testers progress to an FE seat any time soon because they are too junior.

(not everyone, obviously. Simona de Silvestro literally used to be a full-time Formula E driver)

I'd like to think there will be follow-up opportunities. Extreme E, FE's weird sister, has shown that not only does equal seat time level the board but that elite women can outmatch elite men when given the same opportunity: in a stacked field of champions, Laia Sanz came out on top as the best driver in the Odyssey-21.

one test session, during which the drivers are mostly under pressure not to bin the car, won't level the field. but if even a handful of the drivers prove they can give useful feedback and run productive test sessions, then that puts them in consideration for more running and that is, unfortunately, more than they would have got otherwise.

so: do I think it is world changing? no. but I think there are opportunities, if teams use this as a chance to assess the drivers for them.

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a “i am a third-worlder please don’t do this to me” button on donation nag pop-ups that close them for good

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Mitsubishi Mirage X1X, 1986. A special edition second Mirage 3dr hatch that was developed in collaboration with Porsche. The steering wheel was by Italian company Italvolanti with  Porsche Design alloy wheels. It was powered by a 125hp 4G32T 1597cc turbocharged 4 cylinder engine.

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harmful: machine transcription makes it out so that i sound like a youtuber

because of the daft way i use whisper (i.e., to make a base transcription for a subtitle so that i don't have to type everything from scratch and hurt my wrists in the process; i can then just adjust the individual lines, and then retime them), "hallucination" aren't really a problem to me; i read and edit every line anyway. interestingly enough the paper found that 38% of the hallucinations are "harmful"; it is very important that they tested the thing on recordings of people with aphasia. i don't remember coming across any hallucinations other than the machine getting stuck in a repeating loop, restating a sentence over and over; so that's almost definitely because i've never transcribed people with aphasia, or really anyone with strange word choices, or more importantly talking cadences.

also really good paper title

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because of the daft way i use whisper (i.e., to make a base transcription for a subtitle so that i don't have to type everything from scratch and hurt my wrists in the process; i can then just adjust the individual lines, and then retime them), "hallucinations" aren't really a problem to me; i read and edit every line anyway. interestingly enough the paper found that 38% of the hallucinations are "harmful"; it is very important that they tested the thing on recordings of people with aphasia. i don't remember coming across any hallucinations other than the machine getting stuck in a repeating loop, restating a sentence over and over; so that's almost definitely because i've never transcribed people with aphasia, or really anyone with strange word choices, or more importantly talking cadences.

also really good paper title

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Hooray for wasps! It's good to see some pro-wasp PR for once.

Follow the link to the Guardian to learn about the incredibly important role parasitoids play in keeping ecosystems healthy; in this case, saving the trees used by Wilkins' bunting from a fungus spread by scale insects!