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gaius_baltar

2,401 karma · joined July 28, 2017

I'm not a cylon.
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gaius_baltar··on RF Cafe
Same thing here. I can get it with Tor as most of the exit nodes as far from Brazil (for good reason).

Perhaps we should mirror the entire site (it seems to be plain good old HTML) and archive it on IPFS or so to get rid of these dumb geoblocks.

gaius_baltar··on A third world engineer responds to “RISC-V: They should have known better”
> It does not take $60 to ship small sub $1 chips from Asia to Nigeria/Bangladesh

So don't even try to find how expensive is bring these to Brazil. Even the $5 orders from JLCPCB become infeasible for hobbyists here due to all the roadblocks.

gaius_baltar··on Shipping a laptop to a refugee camp in Uganda
> 1. Never underestimate developing countries' governments' willingness to absolutely bend their people over to extract tax revenue (and then their corrupt representatives extract bribes on top of it)

As a Brazilian with a love for electronics and DIY, I feel this pain every day.

gaius_baltar··on History LLMs: Models trained exclusively on pre-1913 texts
> "...what do you mean, 'World War One?'"

Oh sorry, spoilers.

(Hell, I miss Capaldi)

gaius_baltar··on Investors expect AI use to soar. That's not happening
Thanks, I didn't know this trick! Perhaps soon we'll need to keep lists of per-site white-listed user agents...
gaius_baltar··on Trip to moon required Apollo 11 crew to sign US Customs declaration to enter US
Would CBP pay the travel costs? :)
gaius_baltar··on Archival Storage
> What is your process for automating this checksum twice a year?

Backup programs usually do that as a standard feature. Borg, for example, can do a simple checksum verification (for protection against bitrot) or a full repository verification (for protection against malicious modification).

gaius_baltar··on Hachyderm.io bans post on Swedish TV as disinformation for not being in news
Did my best to try to summarize the issue within the length limit but, hell, that's hard to explain with so little words. At least the actual post does a good summary of it.
gaius_baltar··on Amazon now discloses you're buying a license to view Kindle eBooks
> Are there any examples where legitimately purchased licenses were made unavailable?

From customers point of view, these purchases were legitimate.

But the important point is that they did it in the past and only the right balance between bad PR and expected profits will prevent them from doing again.

gaius_baltar··on Meta's Threads to Show Ads in US, Japan
I'm surprised that it had not started before. The cycle o bait → switch → enshittify is faster and faster after all.
gaius_baltar··on Court orders Google to uninstall pirate IPTV app sideloaded on Android devices
Brazil had a similar thing a few weeks ago, but it got drowned in the news because if was related to the Twitter/X block.

While the block itself may be legitimate, as the motivation was the refusal from X from deleting a few tweets doxxing a police investigator and his family members, the whole process was done in a few little short of a full blown dictatorship: one of the points of the court order demanded Google and Apple to remove all VPN apps from their stores, and some legal experts interpreted that as also ordering removal from the phones themselves. The justice that sent the order backtracked it later, but it was possible and the order was standing during that time.

The VPN issue got relatively little discussion on the press and too many people were too quick to equate criticism of the overly broad court order with defense of Twitter and Musk, so the well was poisoned from the start.

gaius_baltar··on Boeing workers vote to strike
Jokes on Boeing are ok, they are just people with some loose screws.
gaius_baltar··on Unity is cancelling the runtime fee for games customers
> I don't understand the hate. They did a very bad decision and had major backlash. Fast-forward one year: they rectified it completely, they greatly improved the free terms compared to what was before, they replaced the CEO and other involved executives.

But nothing prevent them from doing the same again if their indicators say it would be profitable. Developers just don't want to take the risk anymore.

gaius_baltar··on UK rail minister got engineer sacked for raising safety concerns
A more fitting quote would be "They gave them the propaganda number".
gaius_baltar··on ArchiveTeam Warrior
That's lemmy.ml . See this comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41143632

edit: they already did.

gaius_baltar··on Wayback Machine Is Down
It still down at the moment. Is there any details on the outage somewhere else?
gaius_baltar··on Microsoft removes documentation for switching to a local account in Windows 11
Funniest thing is that they are the same people who reject Linux because they need to read some docs from time to time.
gaius_baltar··on Microsoft removes documentation for switching to a local account in Windows 11
> Disclaimer I am not very familiar with Linux for Desktop - but to me this is an indication that we are not yet in the "just works" state for desktop linux.

Or it does just mean that while the Windows recurrent problems (how to create local accounts, disable telemetry, install 3rd party programs, etc.) are just seen as life as normal while Linux problems are seen as such.

gaius_baltar··on Microsoft removes documentation for switching to a local account in Windows 11
> edit: I mean they had to remove Solitaire and Minesweeper to save space...

Don't worry, you can still install Minesweeper from the official store ... with ads and play-to-win microtransactions. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40647278

gaius_baltar··on We tried to design the perfect sellside note. How did we do?
I should have used the title "The American mind cannot comprehend this diagram" but let's tick to he rules!
gaius_baltar··on People spend more when prices end in .99 (2018)
In Brazil we have an entire PKI based receipt system, every single purchase generates a full listing record straight to a government database sent in realtime (or later, in "contingency mode" as called, if having network issues). A lot sales also include the customer's personal tax-id... no privacy for any purchase at all. It's required for everything, even a liter of milk from the corner bakery.

This is also the electronic version of an older, paper based system, called Nota Fiscal (lit Fiscal Receipt) ... legally, every single item carried around the country must have one. Of course this was/is a major enabler for selective police action against "undesirable people" moving trivial stuff from a home to another, etc.

gaius_baltar··on Transforming a QLC SSD into an SLC SSD
There were several instances were I saw an interesting tool for manipulating SSDs and SD cards only available from strange Russian websites. This one at least has an English UI ... A lot of research seems concentrated there and I wonder why it did not catch the same level of interest in the west.
gaius_baltar··on Sony overturns Helldivers 2 PSN requirement following backlash
These companies don't deserve any kind of pat on the back for just doing the bare minimum. Doing the right thing or making minor concessions to customers is not something that deserves special recognition - it is the basic responsibility of corporations.

Too often, these corporations act all high and mighty when they make some tiny concession to customers or avoid a PR disaster. That's not them being generous or ethical, that's just them covering their own butts. They have all the money and power in the world, so the least they can do is meet basic standards.We should not reward this as if it is some noble, praiseworthy behavior.

Corporations have immense power and resources. When they finally decide to do the right thing after public pressure, that is not deserving of accolades. They are looking out for themselves first and foremost. So let's not act like they're heroes for it - they're just avoiding getting called out, that's all. True ethics and responsibility from corporations should be the norm, not some rare, praise-worthy occurrence.

gaius_baltar··on What Researchers Discovered When They Sent 80k Fake Résumés to U.S. Jobs
Archived version: https://archive.is/qn32R
gaius_baltar··on Doom Running on a Toothbrush
Or just "yt-dlp <url>"

yt-dlp ( https://github.com/yt-dlp/yt-dlp ) still works pretty well at the current state of Twitter.

gaius_baltar··on What happened with the Web Monetization API?
Nope, as cryptocurrencies are not really currencies, so you are always trading capital.

Taler experimented with a different direction when they built a distributed payment system for moving usual currencies digitally, even with a asymmetric behavior to preserve buyers privacy while making sellers taxable. Sad that it did not catch on.

gaius_baltar··on The first email from space [video]
Just did it... perhaps I am too used to read SRTs as plain text that I assumed it would be Ok for other people.

For people who want it, transcription in SRT format is here: https://text.is/O6ZX

gaius_baltar··on The first email from space [video]
(continuing)

the shuttle into a phone line and point it at the AppleLink phone number. Well, it turns out that wouldn't work, because the servers running AppleLink's modems required full-duplex two-way communications. So instead, they connected that audio out to a Gateway Macintosh that was set up in JSC. On one side, it had a modem that was connected to the regular AppleLink services through, you know, regular phone line. And on the other side, which actually had to be connected to the printer port, because, you know, normally the modem takes the modem port, it would talk to the shuttle communications. And there was a special piece of software in there that would understand half-duplex signals, you know, tweak them around, repackage them. And on the other side, it would talk to the AppleLink services and make this whole thing possible.

So that's how it was supposed to work. But they did have a number of technical problems. The first time they tried to do this, there was some data switching system on the ground that was asleep. So they had to, like, power cycle their system decoding on the ground. The next time they tried, it failed because that hardware was still sort of in the process of waking up. Finally, the third time they hit send, it sent. And it worked and history was made. Now, an interesting side of this, on this, was that they used the standard AppleLink memo service, which was basically email. But the email addresses weren't protected in any way. So it was, they had to keep the shuttle email address secret. In fact, they registered STS-43 at AppleLink as an address so that curious people would be sending to that address rather than the actual shuttle address.

So anyway, after this flight, the Mac did fly again, but NASA elected to move the communication systems over to their tried and tested grid compass laptops. And I don't have any information on exactly how this operated beyond knowing that it used the same kind of modem. There might have been the same Mac at JSC for all I know, or they might have run their own bulletin board at NASA, right? NASA, BBS. There's very little information on this. There's a few references to the modem still being used and there's some photos of crew using it on later missions.

But I do know that by 1998, the email system was able to receive messages from the general internet because Bill Clinton sent an email to the crew of STS-95, which included Senator John Glenn. And he used a laptop that belonged to somebody that was in the right place at the right time. It wasn't a government laptop, it was like some doctor who was there and they used his AOL account to send a message to the space shuttle. And this is the first time, by the way, a sitting US president has sent an email. Bill was also the only president to attend a shuttle launch. Obama was actually supposed to see STS-134, which would include Mark Kelly, who of course is now a senator. That launch was scrubbed and Obama wasn't there when they retried again.

Incidentally, by the way, AOL also has its roots back in AppleLink because when Apple wanted to find an alternative to paying GE for their very expensive services, they approached quantum computer services, which had built a very similar online system for Commodore 64 users. From this, they produced AppleLink Personal Edition. It was launched in 1988. But because it wasn't using the GE backend, there was no way for the regular AppleLink users to interact with the AppleLink Personal users and the service didn't really go for long. The partnership was dissolved in 1989 and the service was rebranded, relaunched as America Online. So anyway, yeah, in 1998, I do know that on the shuttle, the computer that they were using now at that time to read the mail was an IBM ThinkPad running PC DOS.

And I'm not sure when they transitioned from the grid compass to the PCs, but I do know that at that point, they were still using a 2400 baud modem connection because there's a document from 1999 where NASA is looking for a replacement modem and this is part of the specification. Of course, these days, the space station has amazing communication capabilities and like the space station has Wi-Fi. Not only does it have Wi-Fi, it has Wi-Fi antennas on the outside so they can talk to space suits. And last year, there was actually a demonstration of a video link from an approaching cargo spacecraft from 600 meters away, more than half a kilometer away, they were able to get a Wi-Fi signal. And that's the kind of thing you can do when you don't have tons of other people with Wi-Fi networks clogging the airwaves.

I'm Scott Manley, fly safe.

gaius_baltar··on The first email from space [video]
(continuing)

were more or less sitting around idle because of course business is happening during the day. So General Electric Network Internet Exchange, or Genie, was launched.

Priced at $6 per hour at night and $36 per hour during the day, Genie had all the best online games at the time and lots of sci-fi writers ended up using the service, including J. Michael Straczynski, who announced some TV show called Babylon 5 on there. And Babylon 5, one of my favorite TV shows, just celebrated its 30th anniversary of the series debuting.

Anyway, back to Apple Link and the shuttle email. On STS-43 the communications experiment was designated DTO-799, PGSD-slash-PADM Air Ground Communications Demonstration. So PGSC is the Payload General Support Computer, the aforementioned Grid Compass, and PADM was the Portable Audio Data Modem. And the modem was of course key in communication back then, right? This would be talking back to Earth. The space shuttle already had amazing communications capabilities compared to all previous space programs. It had been launching the Tracking Data and Relay Satellites, or TDRS. In fact, the primary payload on STS-43 was TDRS-5. These satellites sat out in geostationary orbit and they enabled communications with the shuttle when the shuttle didn't have a line of sight to the ground stations.

The shuttle actually supported digital communications protocols at bit rates that absolutely eclipsed the lowly dial-up connections that us earthbound plebs generally had to deal with. Like the telemetry and the voice communication, all that stuff would take up about 216 kilobits per second. But the shuttle could also send data like a real-time video as much as 50 megabits per second, so it was able to scream out data.

So yeah, there wasn't also an existing teletype communications system on board, so from the shuttle they could send up text to the teleprinter to provide written instructions and messages to the astronauts on their trip. And sometimes these printouts could be huge. They would spill out of the printer in zero-g, making for some comical sights as astronauts tried to make sense of the massive instructions flowing out of this device. So a big part of the air-to-ground communications experiment was to provide a two-way equivalent of this, and maybe one day eliminate the paper copy if it wasn't needed.

So now the question is, how do you connect a Mac to this space-age digital communication system so it can take advantage of all that bandwidth? Well, it turns out that modifying the digital communication system to support a data link to a device on the flight deck was not possible with resources they had on hand, right? So they just hooked up an old school modem, the portable audio data modem, to an audio channel. And let's be clear, the space channel communications were all digital, including the analog audio, which was converted to a digital format for transmission and then decoded and converted back to audio.

So the modem on the flight deck, it would convert the digital data on the computer to analog audio and vice versa. So the binary data on the computer was converted to an analog audio signal by the modem, fed into the shuttle's audio processor, which could convert it to a digital signal, and then beam that to the TDRS satellites, which would then send it back to the Earth at White Sands, and then that would be sent across the country on data links to the Johnson Space Center in Houston. And there, the data would be decoded, including the shuttle audio. And some lucky person at JSC could have picked up the wrong phone and, you know, sure, no doubt have listened into the modems screeching at them, right?

But anyway, according to the documents that I found, the protocol they used was V27TER, half-duplex. That's a fax protocol that uses 1200 symbols per second at 2 bits per symbol, making a total data rate of 2400 bits per second. And the half-duplex part is significant. It means that this is a one-directional transmission. And when a pair of modems share the line, only one can be transmitting while the other is receiving. And I think this may be down to the fact that shuttle audio was like a push-to-talk system, where you would push, talk, and then you would release and you would listen. And so running a modem over this had to run with the same constraints.

So, you know, you might think the obvious next step is just to plug that audio from

gaius_baltar··on Google Update Reveals AI Will Read All Your Private Messages
The article contradicts this point:

"There will be another, less contentious privacy issue with your Messages requests to Bard. These will be sent to the cloud for processing, used for training and maybe seen by humans—albeit anonymized. This data will be stored for 18-months, and will persist for a few days even if you disable the AI, albeit manual deletion is available."

This person shard a report on this issue for Ireland's Data Protection Commission: https://eupolicy.social/@thatprivacyguy/111839553765828301

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