Alex just swapped in a RTX 3060 Ti into his PC yesterday. And while it is too expensive for a Nvidia …60 graphics card IMHO — my 1060 was around AU$330 in 2016, if I remember correctly — I was curious to try real‐time ray tracing in a game for the first time, specifically in Cyberpunk 2077.

I didn’t bother with a frame rate counter. But walking around Night City at night, with RT set to Psycho, outputting to 2560 × 1440 with G‑Sync, and DLSS on Quality, the game definitely seemed to be running above 30 fps. At the same time, it didn’t look obviously soft or fuzzy either.

The idea of DLSS had always felt like a cheat to me, just like temporal anti‐aliasing. (Good lord, the ghosting and noisiness from TAA in Cyberpunk 2077 on Xbox One X is so distracting to me.) Still kinda does, especially because it’s limited to Nvidia’s GPUs. But now that I’ve tried it? I did feel kinda impressed, actually. It’s pretty cool.

(Still wishing GeForce …60 cards will go back to around 120 W.)

I’d heard the taxi prank mentioned on On the Marbles before, but hadn’t watched it until this morning.

I had already read a written description of this trailer, but still.

James Purtill, ABC Science:

From next week, fully vaccinated New South Wales residents will be able to spend more time outside, with police monitoring their vaccination status.

It’s expected other freedoms will be granted as the vaccination rate improves.

But given the security holes in the vaccine certification system, it’s not clear how authorities, or workers at pubs, cafes and restaurants, will be able to spot any potential forgeries.

One solution may be a new, more secure app.

From early October, the NSW government will trial a vaccine passport system within the Service NSW app, which is currently used for venue check‑ins.

In response to questions from the ABC, Service NSW did not share details of how the app will work; whether it would directly access the Australian Immunisation Register for proof of vaccination, or instead rely on a person’s federal vaccination certificate.

The spokesperson did not respond to questions about whether the federal government certificates would still be accepted as proof of vaccination alongside the Service NSW app.

If they were accepted, the forgery problem would remain, regardless of whether or not the NSW app was secure.

At the same time, not accepting federal vaccination certificates could create widespread confusion.

Senate Estimates also heard that about a third of the 3.5 million Australians who have accessed their certificates had taken the trouble of setting up the Express Plus Medicare app digital certificate.

The remainder, about 2 million, appear to be intending to use the digital certificate.

This points to a future scenario where easily forged certificates are the most common way of proving vaccination status.

Asked about the risk of forgery, [Services Australia chief executive officer Rebecca Skinner] told Senate Estimates that both the in app digital certificate and the PDF version could be trusted.

“If anyone was at all concerned that someone’s vaccination certificate was not accurate, and it was required for some assured purpose, then the assured certificate is the one available in the Express Plus Medicare app or able to be printed out or found in your immunisation history statement.”

To be fair, a verifiable, national vaccination certificate was not one of Morrison’s two jobs for this year.

If the federal solution doesn’t improve, I can only hope that each state and territory come up with their own (stronger) certificates. (This federal Coalition government shirking leadership, doing not even the bare minimum, and pushing the responsibility and the bulk of the job down to the states? No!) Then the situation becomes analogous with other state‐issued official documents like licences. We’ll just have to trust regular frontline staff like bartenders and ushers and Kmart greeters can check them, including interstate ones, reliably.

ABC News:

The Premier said 61.4 per cent of Victorians aged over 16 had had at least one dose of the COVID‑19 vaccine.

One local government area, the Borough of Queenscliffe near Geelong, has become the first in Australia to have at least 70 per cent of people aged 15 and older fully vaccinated.

The Geelong, Warrnambool and south‐west Victorian regions have the highest vaccination rates in the state, with more than 71 per cent of people aged 15 and over in both areas having had at least one dose.

The areas that have the lowest rates include Melbourne’s north west, where the first dose rate is 53.1 per cent, and Melbourne s south east, which has a first dose rate of 54.9 per cent.

Yay! We’re the 2½G‑est in Victoria!

Stands to reason we might eventually become the 5G‑est the soonest as well?

Since I’d recently picked up Animal Crossing again, I’ve been bringing my Switch along to get fossils on the way to work and check turnip prices at lunch. It’s reminded me of the joy of portable gaming.

And then I remembered: oh wait, Xbox Remote Play!

I’ve already ordered a new Xbox controller — all of my current ones are older and don’t have Bluetooth — and I’ll try that with the iPad first. If it doesn’t work out, I’ll just re‑purpose that controller to the Apple TV to play Marble It Up! and other Apple Arcade and tvOS games. (Yay, Apple One Premier.)

But if Remote Play does work out, the Backbone One will become a serious consideration for my iPhone.

I still won’t be playing Forza or Halo in the car like I can with Animal Crossing, obviously. Not gonna burn up my data plan like that, and I doubt the signal will be consistent enough anyway. But if there’s good Wi‑Fi? Or at home in bed? That sounds pretty cool on paper. And maybe it’ll get me to play native games on iOS beyond Pokémon GO.

Viola Zhou, Vice:

But the more gender‐neutral aesthetics have come under criticism from conservative voices in society. Some officials and parents fear the less macho men on TV would cause young men to lose their masculinity and therefore threaten the country’s development.

Earlier this year, the Ministry of Education pledged to promote sports education in Chinese schools in response to a politician’s proposal about “preventing men from becoming too feminine”.

The latest boycott order is part of a broader response to what the government deems as “chaos” in Chinese entertainment. Days before the order was issued, a commentary published by a Communist Party mouthpiece called the popularity of “sissy pants” a social problem that would distort the taste of the Chinese youth.

“Masculinity is being associated with nationalism,“ [Cui Le, a researcher on queer issues in China with the University of Auckland] said. “It’s believed the effeminate male image could mislead young people, hinder the nation’s rejuvenation, and weaken the country’s ability in fighting with others.”

The pushes for macho men have triggered backlash from an expanding feminist community. Many women feel offended by the term “sissy pants” and the sexist implication that traits associated with women are inferior.

Some internet users expressed worry that the official rejection of “sissy men” will encourage the kind of toxic masculinity that leads to violence against women, sexual minorities as well as men who do not fit into the traditional macho image.

Make fem(boys), not war.

Having stayed away from news all day, I was in disbelief when I was watching this on catch‑up tonight. Scrubbing the video further and further and further to the right, but still no racing.

I’ve watched a half‐point race before. I’ve also (re)watched the longest race. Just a month ago, I saw a race start with a single car. But a race with absolutely zero green‐flag racing?

I’m not saying the race was “wrong”. We’ve seen many accidents in recent years at Raidillon in single‐seater racing and GT, including this weekend in W Series and with Lando Norris. So safety is clearly going to be an especially big issue in heavy rain. I’m just saying this is another race that, like those ones, definitely won’t be forgotten in my mind.

Oh this is pretty. The prettiest Halo edition Xbox ever, IMHO.

Also: not sure if it’s just something they edited out to make this angle appear cleaner for this promo shot, but the four rubber feet on the right side of the regular Series X seem to have been deleted? I’d love it if that's true.

I managed to get a preorder through JB Hi‑Fi, thankfully. Comments I read later seemed to indicate that my order was placed with just five minutes to spare before they went out of stock there.

Would’ve preferred to preorder through Microsoft directly, since I had previously prepared store credit specifically with that intent. Now I have an extra AU$849 sitting in my Microsoft account. Who knows how long it might be before enough games come along for me to spend that on.

Giles Parkinson, RenewEconomy:

Negative prices also ruled for most of the day in Victoria where wind and solar provided for more than 60 per cent during the daylight hours, including a peak of more than 73 per cent in the early afternoon, also a record.

Did Matt Canavan use the NEM during the day yesterday? No net zero means no solar+wind+hydro energy mix like this! And by consuming it, he has compounded the issue by not releasing heaps of greenhouse gases.

Paying coal plants to stay open is going to cost consumers more than Labor’s carbon “tax”. Wow.

Go on, Angus Taylor. Say “lower power prices”. Say it.

Jake Evans, ABC News:

But the federal government has faced internal resistance within its junior partner, the Nationals, against a legislated target to reach net zero emissions.

Instead, the Prime Minister has previously said Australia will “preferably” reach that target by 2050.

Mr Morrison said Australia’s response would be led by technological change.

“World history teaches one thing: technology changes everything,” Mr Morrison said.

“That is why our approach is technology and not taxes to solving this problem.”

We’d all still be secondhand smoking in supermarkets and hanging out for new, healthy, cancer‐ and disease‐proof cigarettes if this government had been left to deal with tobacco.

And they’d probably have Medicare fund research by tobacco manufacturers.

Emissions trading scheme now!

Look, it’s quite simple: if you don’t want to spend your weekdays working a dead end coal job and then enjoy weekends simultaneously on fire, drowning in floodwater, blown off your feet, and starving because crops have failed, then fuck off to Hawaii.

Seriously, I didn’t feel like I was having a bad day until push notifications from the Independent, the Age, ABC, and Reuters came through one after the other.

Three years since the 2018 IPCC report that made me realise I needed to, was past due, and very much was in the fortunate position to take personal action. Here we are still.

And after this, is Sussan Ley really still pushing ahead with her appeal against her duty of care for future generations?

Outside of Australia: I’m really hoping China will bring forward and follow through with their 2060 schedule.

Grr.