mikewarot

Is there any chance that the plague of Flock sensors could be used to help track the radio tags?

I believe that AI is being massively underpriced, in an economically unsustainable manner. There will be less of it, but the hardware to run it locally will get much cheaper.

I believe that AI is going to take some jobs, just like automation of data handling means we no longer have typists, file clerks, etc.

I believe that AI should stand for alien intelligence, as it's essentially a random set of weights that's been trained on a trillion bytes of text, for a trillion passes. Think of it as speed-running evolution. Each new AI should be seen as coming from a different star system.

I believe that we can radically reduce the power requirement for AI with a different computing architecture that removes the distinction between RAM and CPU.

> following too closely

Having ended up in the middle of a 5 car sandwich going to last years VCFMW, I've learned we all collectively fail to understand that the car in front of us can be stopped, in addition to using it's own brakes.

AI is massively underpriced at the present time. That's what's driven adoption so hard, along with the hype.

Once that ends, the prices will rise, quite a bit, and this will cause demand destruction, possibly causing most?? of the big players to fail. The thing is, even if we end up awash in AI hardware and RAM, the power to run it is a major part of the cost, and that's not going to get cheaper.

So, in a few years, there will be far, far less AI in use. We'll all be fine.

It seems to me that some of the complaints in the article were hardware related, not really software.

>Blue Screen of Death >Windows had extreme stability issues for most of my childhood.

I was a Windows system administrator from 1997 through 2013. In the beginning, we had issues with the blue screen of death in Office Professional and Windows 98. It turned out that when HP wrote their printer drivers for the LaserJet 4000 printers, they used an optimizing compiler, and it dynamically loaded floating point emulation.... and let it get unloaded, thus when you needed to compute page layout to print.... blue screen of death.

Once I solved that, we never had problems again, for over a decade!

Once we got to Office 2000 Professional, we stopped upgrading, and enjoyed 12 years of stability.

The only real problems were with the gigabytes of email people kept around, most of it in their "Deleted Items" folder, used as a filing cabinet, and the Exchange server that was full. They wouldn't let me buy a spare machine for to test out the email server backups, which naturally turned out to be a prayer in the end. 8(

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>Nothing was secure Nothing has changed, it's still not secure, no matter your choice of OS. We're not running HURD or Genode on everything, or even Qubes. It's ambient authority everywhere, which is nuts in an era of persistent megabit internet.

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>Software came on unreliable physical media That's what backups are for. I had a folder of all my CDs, that was included in my system backups. So, I could restore the domain server, restore the backup filesystems, then reinstall everything, without using any media other than the Windows Server CD (actually, a copy of it, with the serial number written on it)

That Office 2000 install should still work today, without buying it again. It's unlikely to get memory holed.

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>Give me higher-level programming languages that abstract common pitfalls from C and C++.

Yep... Turbo Pascal, then Delphi, and now Lazarus/Free Pascal have done that since the beginning.

At least if I could still work, there's a chance I could hold on. It sucks being medically frail.

And yes, I do care about society in general, and societal collapse.... what worries me is that the right seems bent on taking away the social safety net that's keeping me alive, and the left seems to be worried about not making waves.

I'm retired too, but I'm worried that if enough people end up unemployed that'll break social security, and the markets and everyone's retirement accounts.

I'm medically out of the labor market, if SS disappears, I will end up homeless.

The weird limit they put on Social security contributions is strangling the system.

I object to the inclusion of mRNA based treatments into the category of Vaccine.

According to wikipedia, the mechanism they (the mRNA based treatments) use is:

  In contrast, mRNA vaccines introduce a short-lived[58] synthetically created fragment of the RNA sequence of a virus into the individual being vaccinated. These mRNA fragments are taken up by dendritic cells through phagocytosis.[59] The dendritic cells use their internal machinery (ribosomes) to read the mRNA and produce the viral antigens that the mRNA encodes.[4] The body degrades the mRNA fragments within a few days of introduction.[60] Although non-immune cells can potentially also absorb vaccine mRNA, produce antigens, and display the antigens on their surfaces, dendritic cells absorb the mRNA globules much more readily.[61] The mRNA fragments are translated in the cytoplasm and do not affect the body's genomic DNA, located separately in the cell nucleus.[1][62]

So, it's a short lived, self limited gene therapy, not a vaccine. It hijacks the patients own cells to provoke an immune response. If the cells hijacked happen to be in tissue other than the intended injection site, via blood circulation, for example... you can (and sometimes do) have things like heart tissue being attacked by the immune system, with health altering results.

We shouldn't let the category of vaccines include these treatments. It obscures informed consent in a manner that seems to border on deception for better marketing purposes.

I'm building a data diode, with a pair of Raspberry Pi B+ computers for inside and outside proxy servers. I've got the first Pi booting, and am installing various Linux tools to get familiar with it.

I've been spouting off on the advantages of air gaps and data diodes from a theoretic perspective for more than a decade, I decided it's time to get my hands dirty.

I'll be open sourcing the whole thing, and writing code by hand in Free Pascal, the language I'm most familiar with.

Controversial opinion: It's an operating systems design issue, not a language issue. It's what you get for using OSs built on ambient authority, instead of default deny and capabilities, for 30 years past the point it was obvious they weren't fit for purpose in the internet era.

Back when I was still in the labor force, it looked fascinating, I'm not sure what I would actually do with an infinite supply of 1-2" poles, but it sure seems like fun.

Why do you need to retrain? You've got a specific idea to test, just keep exploring the edges of what's possible on a low budget as a side project, and keep your day job. Cultivate friendships and knowledge of equipment at your local hackerspace, and you'll be quite surprised what can be done on the very cheap.

If you want to keep things private, you can get 5 axis desktop CNC machines for about $5000, really good 3d printers for $2000, electronics to measure/control just about anything dirt cheap thanks to jelly bean parts and super-powerful microcontrollers.

Well, we could burn megatons of liquid sodium in the exhaust streams of aircraft in the stratosphere as a holding action. It sounded crazy at first... but the science checks out, so far.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ST49jDo4d-Q

If I didn't lose 98% of my endurance to long covid, I'd be doing some coppicing[1] for fun. Growing an infinite supply of sticks for making wattle sounds like fun.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coppicing

Tangent time: I've got a smaller one in my yard, and I've got a set of feathers and wedges to avoid having to dig it all up at once. Here's a video of someone using feathers and wedges to split granite.

https://youtu.be/s7_z-SGxUAs?si=vUKYBWYvG7nncszd&t=924

I'm trying to find the original very informative video from a decade or so ago, but I've found this pdf[1], which mentions the heart of the mechanism as a disk/spring on page 19. Some product training in this pdf[2] touches on the mechanism as well, as does page 39 and 156 of this pdf[3]

Here's a PDF from Wyler's own site[4] about the Zerotronic, with the mention of the "pendulum" on page 7.

[1] https://ftp.wylerag.com/Downloads1/WYL_e_wyler.pdf

[2] https://www.someco.fr/wp-content/uploads/2021/08/zerotronic_...

[3] https://symetrie.fr/wp-content/uploads/2023/09/WYLER_Catalog...

[4] https://www.wylerag.com/fileadmin/pdf/manuel/zero_e.pdf

I feel like we're reliving the late 1790s again, back then you had Ramsden figuring out how to divide the circle into into seconds of arc, taking the marking of scales from an artform into something that could be manufactured reliably. Maudslay with his thread cutting lathe took the making of screws from a manual process pawned off on apprentices to something that that could be done in mass production. Wilkinson's boring machine made it possible for Watt to build a pressurized steam engine.

All of these tools are based on things that were one-offs of earlier efforts, and turned into practical machine tools by someone that history chose to remember. We're now at the point where making things by manipulating individual atoms is something a determined amateur can do, it's amazing!

I find myself fascinated by the Wyler Inclinometer, which uses a thin copper disk with spiral arms as the basis of a differential capacitor, and when complete, resulting in a device that can used to calibrate a granite surface plate. It can typically measure 1 micron/meter of deviation.

We now have 3d printers that can reliably make almost anything you want by fusing filament, or stereolithography, or fusion of metal powders. You can buy desktop 5 axis CNC machines. There are control systems available to let you build almost any type of machine tool you can imagine, in as many axis as you want.

We've got software defined radio, cheap atomic clocks, transistors that can switch megawatts, all within reach of a hobbyist.

What an amazing time to be alive.

When I was working as a machinist making gears, I read through the books I had from the 1632 Series by Eric Flint on rotation, by the time I got back to a story, there were new details I'd notice, over and over.

The books stayed there because I got Covid back in 2020, and I didn't get back to pick them up. Since Eric's death, the series is in some sort of limbo, and my attention span isn't what it used to be with Long Covid. 8(

I miss Mike Sterns and the whole world he moved to, though.

To get the downforce a set of retractable skirts comes down to touch the ground around the body of the car. They're consumables.

The debris that would get thrown out the back going down the road would be a serious hazard.

Where did you read that they didn't see any ROI? I find that highly unlikely.

They don't hire filing clerks any more. They don't have rooms full of people doing manual computation, of typing out monthly bills to mail to customers. That's a huge workforce reduction.

The US Steel Gary works went from about 30,000 workers down to about 6000 thanks to process automation and other improvements in the early 1960s.

It was a huge payoff for those who automated.

If every update required a manual power cycle, almost all of the internet would be off, most waiting for one of the far too few technical staff to cycle it back on manually.

Our phones wouldn't wake us up in the morning, as they too would be off.

I used Turbo Pascal to build an application that recorded the inspection of Fire Protection Equipment using a handheld computer, special serial card, and a PC back in the days of MS-DOS.

I never would have said that Turbo Pascal built the application. I'd not say that any compiler builds an finished application, but it's merely a tool along the way.

The same should be true of AI. It took a person to come up with the prompt "On a dark desert highway, Cool Whip and a Bear", even if the image was generated AI.

Most of the Senior Engineers I've met have been doing projects since the 1980s for the oil industry or steel mills. They've let the IT staff handle the computers while they stick to what they know, designing and modifying industrial plants. I don't think they have to worry about AI intruding into the Engineering profession.

Arduinos aren't fast enough, and don't generally do internet. To really make it work, you need a controller that has native ethernet, and NO wireless ports, or a really solid way of disabling them (like hooking their antennas to 50 dummy loads) A pair of them can then be proxies for the connection, and serve up status pages etc., without risk of ingress of control to the monitored system.

For me, the old timey Raspberry Pi B+ fits the bill.

I'm working on data diodes... I've got the parts, now I've got to gather enough spoons[1] to do the work to make them useful.

Details: Building a physically irreversible way to transmit data in only one direction should be easy, using a 6N137 optoisolator. The hard part is the proxy servers that you put on both sides of it. Old timey Raspberry Pi B+ boards are my current choice for hardware, as they have NO wireless capabilities, and do have reasonable ethernet ports.

I want to keep the retail parts cost under $100, and open source it all.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spoon_theory

A Communications service monitor is a tool for servicing radios. Until recently, most large organizations used VHF/UHF FM radio for communications on dedicated channels. A service monitor is a tool that can usually absorb the full output power of these radios while measuring power, frequency, distortion, etc. They can also generate a variety of signals for aligning receivers.

Most of the older, affordable models go from almost DC to 1 Ghz. I've got an IFR 2947a, which goes up to 1.05 Ghz.

Here's an example from ebay.

https://www.ebay.com/itm/168770412399

Here's a specification sheet for the one I have, a pdf

https://www.testmart.com/webdata/mfr_pdfs/aerofl/2947a.pdf

Holy cow... I've got to limit my projects, so I don't repeat history where I kept finding radio shack bags full of parts for ideas. But you can get 3 of those, with external antennas for less than $60 through amazon. I put it in my wish list instead of buying them now. I've got a data diode to finish first.

Sideband on 13 CM sounds like an amazing thing to pull off.

I've edited it, but generally you don't want to have problems with mirror images getting through and creating spurious responses. Real world RF filters don't have infinitely steep edges, so initially I figured a 4 Ghz low pass filter would have enough loss by 5 Ghz to get the job done. I revised to to a 5 Ghz low filter, and a 7-12 Ghz Local Oscillator to give the filter an easier job. Also, the lower the swing in percentage terms for a VCO, the easier it is to work with.

So the signal path in receive mode would be:

N connector / 20 dB 100 watt pad / Switched attenuator / Low pass filter / Front End diodes / Mixer / Router board for DSP

Alternatively, there's usually a second path that skips the attenuator, with a lower maximum power level.

The reverse path would work for generating signals from DC (almost) to 5 Ghz.

Having done repairs on a ton of older service monitors, and having my hand in SDR, this is amazing! There's a huge amount of machining and hardware to make a service monitor, but with desktop CNC, cheap PCBS, and jelly bean components that go into the 10s of GHz, the sky's the limit.

I'd add a heat sunk 100 watt DC-5Ghz 20dB fixed attenuator, 0-110 dB switched attenuator, 5 ghz low pass filter, 7-12 Ghz local oscillator/mixer up/down converter, and it would make a small, very high performance service monitor good to 5 Ghz. 8)

My house has appreciated at a ridiculous rate. Personally I'd be fine if it hadn't. It's not in great shape. It's literally the cheapest house in town.