Doesn't Australia have "follow the traffic" rules?

No, they will set up cameras and fine anybody going more than a few km/h or so over the speed limit (theoretically they can fine you for going 1 km/h over the limit but there is some kind of tolerance, people usually assume 10% but the police and road agencies don't disclose what it is (apparently it's not always the same for every road or for the conditions at the time either). I believe it's generally less than 10%).

I'm not a parent.

Kids are prone to learning languages and fast, so try to keep them surrounded with content of a foreign language that you deem interesting for their future.

This is super enjoyable and actually makes me realize how culturally aware DALL-E-MINI really is.

It depends on your expected use case. AI? Gaming? Rendering? The priorities change between these different scenarios.

In my opinion, thermal pads are better suited for components that need just that little extra bit of heat dissipation to perform adequately, i.e components that are < 10° C from being able to be passively cooled. Voltage regulators come to mind.

So in that instance, if the thermal pads are reasonably well installed, the components should be just fine, since we're working with much looser tolerances.

When you need active cooling, the manufacturing complexity increases to the point where the convenience doesn't really make sense, since you have to get it right, so thermal paste is the way to go.

Pads are preferred over paste for two main reasons: low assembly cost and ability to fill gaps. Both are very important. If you have an application using a pad, and it's flat enough to replace with (good) paste, you will always see a performance improvement.

I do not ever re-use pads. I have a used pad on my desk at work that shows an indent of the chip that was pressed into its other side... and you can read the part number and lot code laser marked into the chip. If the pad conforms to that but then can't relax back... it's never going to make good contact again. Full stop. (Granted, this was an extremely expensive thick gap-filler pad [TG-A9000, I think] for a particular application, and performance will vary.)

> If you have an application using a pad, and it's flat enough to replace with (good) paste, you will always see a performance improvement.

if the tolerances are tight enough, if the heatsink doesn't even touch the VRM thermal paste won't do nothing.

That's a fair point -- I was assuming contact and already moving on to surface roughness!

I heard that it was the plan from its inception.

I can only imagine how desperate he must have been. Truly debilitating levels of allergy.

Personal interest does not necessarily equal marginal utility.

That's so simple that it could actually become a product.

Asian cinema still produces movies with deep philosophical twists like that. Check out some YouTube recaps for any movie that seems out-there and you'll find out that more often than not it was made in Asia.