I'm still baffled by the human drivers for those tunnel runs. I can't imagine a more controlled environment where self driving should be capable.
3,355 karma · joined July 9, 2013
I try and make my comments on HN worthwhile; certainly more than just a silly joke. Sincerest apologies for if and when I forget myself (or more likely forget I'm not talking rubbish on reddit).
I've been annoyed and suspicious since they stopped being TextSecure and dropped support for SMS messages, and still don't buy the reasons given.
It started as offering opportunistic end-to-end encryption on "direct" (SMS) communications to help privacy. It didn't even need a data connection. People bought into it and as an Android user it was good [1]. Data then got added. First boiling frogs to the side, and then SMS support was removed completely, for what I still think are disingenuous reasons (see [1]), and the summary of it's technically impossible and not worth it. Trust us.
So what did we get? Well instead of leaking metadata to my phone provider, I'm now sending even more metadata to signal. They've put themselves in the path of every kex, every message, every group chat, every call, every read-recipt. Moxie Marlinspike is my new Santa; he knows when I'm sleeping and he knows when I'm awake.
And for something sold as privacy, what the heck is with their Linkedin-be-proud dark pattern of convincing people to upload their contacts (it's safe - honest!), or announcing proudly that "contact I haven't spoken to in 15 years and for good reason" has joined signal! Would I like to connect with the person I was really hoping had forgot I existed and was only saving the number so I could make sure I never answered it? Yes please - and I hope you told them that as well - FML... I'm also suspicious about the encrypted cloud backups, but that might just be me.
They also spent years making it difficult for people on de-googled phones, or to use it on desktop, or to run their own servers, or to run custom clients which seemed at odds with encrypt-all-the-things.
I should be happy about the mass adoption of the encryption protocol. I should see WhatsApp adopting it just before they got bought out by Facebook as a win for privacy for the common folk. I should trust it more now that there's so many eyes on it. I should be in no way suspicious of the lack serious objection the lack of LA provision by the authorities, or the fact Spy-on-You INC would continue buying the messaging platform they can no longer look at.
Things have felt off for a while and I wouldn't be shocked to see it on a future list alongside EncroChat, or Sky ECC, or Exclu or maybe even ANOM - a honeypot from the start. I can't prove anything, and don't know anything, but it sets _all_ of my "there's something wrong and I don't know what it is" senses tingling. But also I'm pretty bad at feelings. Maybe I just need to wee, or drink more water. My gut feel still insists there's a pattern to my RSA dongle's one time codes, so really you shouldn't believe a single word I've said.
[1] There were issues. iirc it didn't work on Apple devices, sms is bad for images and group chats, it broke in a messy but easily bypassed (& fixable) way and it would never work for calls. It also still leaked metadata to the phone network. And SMS is just fundamentally dead and costly - but it absolutely served a purpose.
I had chronic insomnia for >25 years (my entire life) making it extremely difficult to hold down a job or generally interact with society. I've since been on Mirtazipine for about 15 years and the difference is unbelievable.
In the UK it's only dispensed in 15, 30 or 45mg. I was started on 15mg but that left me extremely groggy for most of the next day. My doctor convinced me to move up to 30mg and I'm able to mostly sleep and actually function the next day.
It's not all roses and there's a handful of side effects. Personally I had about 6 months of metallic taste in my mouth and it absolutely buggered my sex drive. A few friends jokingly call it "mirfatapine" as it can make them binge-eat and put on weight, but personally I find the good absolutely outweighs the bad and it's literally life changing.
I know if I forget to take it, because I suddenly realise it's 4am and I'm still wide awake and gibbering. If I'm working festivals then I can _choose_ not to take it and go back to my old routine working 52-hour shifts before falling asleep.
Whilst I'm not overly thrilled at taking psychoactive drugs nightly, it's been the only thing I've ever found (and I spent a lot of my childhood trying anything and everything the doctors recommended and self-medicating in various forms) that actually makes it possible to sleep nightly, and therefore function long term when I'm forced to wake up for work. If you're desperate and out of options it's absolutely worth trying, but do be aware it takes months to become effective.
As I've not seen anyone else mention it, I feel the need to point out that Digital IMAX (which is the vast majority of screens and showings) maxes out at 4K.
Droitwitch LW's antenna uses a T-aerial suspended between two 210m steel masts acting as massive capacitive top-loaded vertical monopole. The signal isn't beamed or shaped, it propagates omnidirectionally and this style of antenna offers _0 dB_ of ERP increase.
Even worse, they're transmitting AM, so the power output dynamically increases with the volume of the analogue audio being transmitted. If you cut off the input to Droitwitch, it'd still be putting out a 500kW carrier wave. When audio is applied the amplitude of the carrier is modulated, so for peak loudness (someone shouting or the loudest spike in music) it can take an extra 50% power to create the upper and lower sidebands - at peak, the Vapotron tubes could be putting out a combined 750kW.
The amplification stage is only ~70% efficient as well, so at peak power it's possible that the site is pulling nearly 1MW from the grid.
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Compared to a modern UHF DTV transmitter station the differences are wild. The big transmitter near me is putting out 6* DTV MUX's at 174kW ERP each, but that's through a 15dBd UHF array at the top of the mast which gives an obscene amount of gain.
- Mains draw at the wall ~150kW (including cooling and ancillary systems).
- Total TPO (RF energy leaving the cabs) from each of the six transmitters is only ~52kW combined (8.7kW each)
- Output of the combiners after losses of ~0.5dB is ~46kW. We can expect another ~1.5dB of attenuation after forcing it up 300m of waveguide to the top of the tower so we're now sat at a "mere" ~33kW of RF energy going into the bottom of our antenna.
- 33kW with a +15dBd gain gets us to an ERP from the antenna of 1.044 MW.
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Note: Numbers compiled from public sources. All mistakes and misunderstandings are mine. Whilst I do work in a tangentially related industry this is completely out of my area of expertise - in the same way that working as a cleaner at an aeroplane does not mean one knows how to fly or maintain a plane.
I was very much getting myself confused with some of their other transmission sites where they take multiple DAB or DTV services, modulate, amplify and combine them and then broadcast through the same antenna.
My suspicion is that this means an exciter and a stack of amps per service, which then go through a two stage combiner and out to the antenna. There might even be a pair of exciters and amps per service depending on redundancy.
The combiners (certainly for FM/DAB/TV services) also cause cumulative attenuation as the signal gets combined each time, so even if all 3 are radiating at the same power, the first in the chain might need twice as much amplification to make up for losses.
edit: MB21 (of course) has some fantastic technical info about Droitwitch: https://tx.mb21.co.uk/gallery/gallerypage.php?txid=1454&page... and there's some great pics here, too: https://www.radiorewind.co.uk/radio1/droitwich.htm
I believe they're still using a pair of Marconi B6042 transmitters (250kW each, in parallel) to provide at least one of the services.
If we pick an extremely fast orbit, then relativity means the hardware will age out (slightly) slower, so I'm sure that'll help with the maintenance issue.
It's the wrong way around though. Ideally we want to speed up our current compute ability not slow it down; if it experiences more time than we do then it can do more. Relative-MHz means my slower hardware becomes tangibly fast again.
General Relativity says mass warps space time, so we need to get these datacentres out of the Earth's gravity well. And the Sun's, and the Milky Way's; out into the deepest void of intergalactic space. The good news is that a maintenance callout is still quicker than some of the earth based DC's I've had gear in, but the bad news is that it doesn't get us much of anything at all.
Special Relativity lets us abuse time with speed (something I discovered as a teenager). Going faster than Earth means we experience less time, so we just need to try and slow down comparative to our home base. The earth is orbiting the Sun at ~30km/s, the solar system is orbiting the centre of the Milky Way at ~230km/s and our local group of galaxies is moving relative to the Cosmic Microwave Background at ~600km/s. We can easily get our DataSpaceCentre up to 1,000km/s or more, so we just need to point it relative to all that movement we mentioned above making stationary relative to the universe. It's completely doable, but (as well as far more variable response times to callouts) only gets us an extra second of compute over a human lifetime.
Fundamentally, we're attacking this problem in the wrong direction. Earth's gravity is comparatively minor, and our piddly ~600km/s relative movement is a tiny fraction of the speed of light. We should be filling The Earth with compute, and then decamping humanity into space and travelling at relativistic speeds. Or put the compute in space and move the Earth into the event horizon of a black hole. You can't do the inverse of Interstellar keeping Earth where it is, the maths isn't in our favour. If everyone lived on (a less moist) Miller's Planet, we'd get 7 years of compute every hour. It puts Moore's Law to shame; the relative MHz are obscene.
There's the obvious problem of communications. I'm led to believe there's issues with radio and light, so this probably isn't a job for fibre. Veritasium seemed to imply a battery, switch, lightbulb and a wire stretching around the globe would light instantaneously, so I'm sure we can come up with a new copper Ethernet standard for low latency over solar distances.
Invest early, we're going straight past the moon!
This has absolutely nothing to do with burner phones and the proposed changes won't do anything to change that.
~5 years ago there was a big push (in the USA) to try and solve it with STIR/SHAKEN but I've not been involved or paid attention since then, so don't know if anything came of it. It's a legitimately hard problem to solve though. Lots of engineering and backwards compatibility technical problems, but also political, logistical and commercial issues are abound. You've also got some turtle issues too; it's attestation all the way down.
ZFS also lets you specify number of copies on a single disk. This sounds a bit weird, but as drives suffer block failures far more often than total failures, it's actually surprisingly useful in some situations.
[1] My suspicion is significantly, as storage sizes are now multiple orders of magnitude larger and errors per MB can't have scaled up linearly to match.
For anyone not in the know, Resolve has an exceptionally capable and feature rich free version. A lot of the AI features (and >4k editing) are locked to the Studio licence which is a one-time payment, but works simultaneously on two computers (including different OS's) and allows upgrades across major versions.
I spent less than $300 on it a decade ago and my licence works fine on new v21 released this week. My least-regretted software purchase in 3 decades.
"Can you paint them gold? And how about custom packaging and drop-shipping as well?"
I don't remember which updates triggered it, but that was September 2015.
The calculator gives numbers for nearly everything, but I can't obviously see how much space it needs for model storage or how many writes of temp files I should expect if I'm running flat out.
If you're testing hardware or vm's that don't support it or don't have root, you can stick your linux box transparently in the middle by bridging two interfaces, and apply your traffic mangling there. Testing wifi? Use a decent WiFi AP connected to one of these bridges and mangle your traffic once it hits the wire/after it stops being RF.
At a previous job I had a linux box set up with multiple bridges (each set with a different "testing profile" on different vlans) and trunked to a physical switch. Made it very easy for people in the office to attach physical devices through known bad network links by either using pairs of physical switchports or just dumping VMs/SSIDs into the right VLAN so they could test different things (simultaneously) without needing to reconfigure the actual mangling.
Worth noting that tc applies to egress traffic, so if you want a uniformly bad line it needs applying to both sides - but it does mean you can simulate unidirectional link problems too.
I very rarely listen to them in that form, but I honestly like the idea that in a post-Carrington event, zombie apocalypse or mad-max style future where electricity or electronics become scarce, I can (if desperate enough) listen to them with a nail and a cone.
Last time I asked, user hackmiester pointed me to https://goughlui.com/2016/05/03/project-the-definitive-colle...
The "Texas Instruments DSP based Modems" linking to USR-Sportster-bong-bong.wav is pretty close to what I remember.
edit: hackernudes reply is perfect. The youtube auto generated subtitles are pleasing too.
Amazingly still works on Win 11 and still seems to keep it local (bypassing the windows search), so I'm pleased to report consistent results for 30 ish years.
Of course, now I've mentioned it out loud, it'll be the next thing to go...
I don't know if it's just me being old and grumpy, but everything windows 8 and later (server 2003) seems like half-baked, unfinished enshittification. Trying to do something even vaguely "advanced" to a network adapter puts me back in windows 95 land along with the run box. The "manage" pane with device & disk manager and logs is from a totally bygone era yet it seems to still be the only way of getting that information. The worst bit is, I'm not complaining. All the bits that look and feel like they've been forgotten since Windows 2000 are the easiest, least infuriating bits of the system I interact with.
I was going to point out that with the variance in FM demodulation chips, using a pile of FM receivers probably wouldn't get you perfectly synced audio these days at all, even more so if it's going through usb/software/audio stacks.
Then I re-read the Ops comment and this actually seems to be a network of _transmitters_. I'm not sure what problem they're trying to solve, but I can't believe multiple PiFMs is ever the answer.
Commercial DAB radio does use single frequency networks (with tight timings and clever calculated offsets), and I am somewhat curious how analogue FM responds with regard to offset destructive interference, but this isn't that.
Please don't do this. For context, a car FM transmitter is limited to 250nW (in many jurisdictions). A Pi GPIO pin with the right bit of wire is potentially capable of 10mW or more. 40,000 times more powerful and a lot more noisy. One could be causing problems for people surprisingly far away.
As it stands at the minute, the clocks are a mere 5 microseconds out and will slowly get better over time. This isn't even in the error measurement range and so they know it's not going to have a major effect on anything.
When the event started and they lost power and access to the site, they also lost their management access to the clocks as well. At this point they don't know how wrong the clocks are, or how more wrong they're going to get.
If someone restores power to the campus, the clocks are going to be online (all the switches and routers connecting them to the internet suddenly boot up), before they've had a chance to get admin control back. If something happened when they were offline and the clocks drifted significantly, then when they came online half the world might decide to believe them and suddenly step change to follow them. This could cause absolute havoc.
Potentially safer to scram something than have it come back online in an unknown state, especially if (lots of) other things are are going to react to it.
In the last NIST post, someone linked to The Time Rift of 2100: How We lost the Future --- and Gained the Past. It's a short story that highlights some of the dangers of fractured time in a world that uses high precision timing to let things talk to each other: https://tech.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=7132077&cid=493082...