A slightly horrifying / cool thing I learned from doing #hamradio and in particular the FT8 mode:
Every 15 seconds, thousands of computers let out a wavering, wailing tone into the void. Then there's 2 seconds of silence. And then they do it again. Since they're doing this by sort-of "pretending" to be sending audio signals, you can listen to it: soundcloud.com/vartchcodpiece/…
It sounds kinda like a mashup of whalesong and digital ghostly wailing. Wailsong, I guess.
What are they saying to each other, you ask? They're basically having the same conversation over and over again. I'll tell you how it goes:
"Hi, anybody there? I'm Alice and I live in Appalachia."
"Hi Alice, I'm Bob and I live in Bermuda."
"Hi Bob, I'm Alice and I hear you really clearly."
"Hi Alice, I'm Bob and I hear you not-so-clearly."
"Hi Bob, I'm Alice and goodbye!"
"Hi Alice, I'm Bob and goodbye!"
FT8 - 3.573 Khz - 80m
FT8 or Franke & Taylor 8 is a form of digital communication used primarily by amateur radio operators to communicate on amateur radio bands with a majority of traffic occurring on the HF amateur bandsSoundCloud
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a friend just told me about Framework laptops and it seems like a compelling philosophy of laptop design: it's modular and user-serviceable, and indeed they ship it to you in bits with a screwdriver 😅
Curious if anyone here has had any experience with them. Some reports on the internet that they have fan noise / temperature troubles?
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They're popular enough among hacker-types that typical linux compat issues seem to be mostly ironed out (suspend/resume, graphics, wifi, etc.).
The main reason I'm not using one is because I want a silicon root of trust that can attest to the integrity of the whole effective TCB of the platform, and only their chromebook variant has a plausible story of even attempting to (TPMs don't normally cover the embedded controller firmware), but last I checked the chromebook variants has pretty limited max specs (not enough ram for comfortably compartmentalizing desktop workloads into VMs with the desired granularity). This is understandable, since chromebooks are thought to be a low-end market segment, but still unfortunate.
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Then yeah, seems reasonable – the biggest variance on wait times is typically security, TSA pre cuts that down a lot in most airports, and the rare cases that cause a significant delay there are likely to delay a lot of people, which means a good chance the flight will be delayed as well. And domestic flights are typically pretty easy to reschedule if you miss them, unlike international.
There are caveats if you're at an unfamiliar airport or checking bags, but I imagine you're accounting for those already.
I recently had the unfortunate experience of an unreasonably long pre-check line at Newark airport. There was a lot of "wait, *this* is the pre-check line??” There were even signs advertising that you could skip this line if you get "pre-check clear." Everyone has a fastpass, so they invented a fasterpass.
(I think it would've been ~30-50 minutes of total waiting in the line if I hadn't apologeticly wormed my way up the line, explaining to people that I was about to miss my flight)
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Some #hamradio updates:
- Because US amateur radio licenses are public and include addresses, you can see a map of everyone with a license. It's way denser than I would have expected in Berkeley:
And hey, there's @Daniel Filan with his fancy Extra-class license a bit further down on the map!
- Today I managed to hear my first trans-pacific signal, from Nauru (a tiny island country 5,000 miles from here). Apparently it's what's called a "DXpedition", where a group of radio amateurs go on holiday in order to help other amateurs check "rare" countries off their lists. Unfortunately from their website, it looks like they're transmitting with more than ten times as much power as I have (or at least they brought equipment for broadcasting at that power level), so this isn't much evidence about whether I'll be able to have a full conversation with them or not.
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hitting enter after typing password on 2FA settings page deletes 2FA config · Issue #14464 · friendica/friendica
I have searched open and closed issues for duplicates Bug Description On the 2FA settings page, you need to enter your current password before making any changes. If I hit Enter on this field, it s...GitHub
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AI Art Turing Test
I enjoyed this!
I got just over 50% correct, ie little better than chance. Clearly I don't know shit XD
Regardless of 'can you/can't you tell', my favourite pictures in this were all AI-generated, including both some I really thought were human, and some I correctly identified as AI.
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I got 77%
I'm realizing a decent amount of real human art might involve strange out-of-place choices
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Correctly identified as AI: 18
Correctly identified as human: 19
Labeled human as AI: 4
Labeled AI as human: 7
(This might be off by 1 or 2, because 1 or 2 things in Scott's answer key didn't seem to perfectly line up with the test?? I think????)
Similar incident maybe not known to the Americans: they ran a poll to name a polar research ship, where people could write in suggestions. Someone suggested the name "Boaty McBoatface", and this won by a landslide. However, the powers-that-be boringly decided not to honour this :p (They called the ship RRS Sir David Attenborough)
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There's a line in a Dessa song ("Dixon's Girl") that I particularly like:
"There was a snow storm in Jackson
When you and I met
At a club called Saint Sebastian's
But the sign said something different"
Why would a club in Mississippi be unofficially called "Saint Sebastian's" and officially called something else? Makes u think.
(St. Sebastian is the unofficial patron saint of homosexuality.)
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I mean, sure, but my mind unfairly translates that section into "yeah, you're right, but I can't be bothered to actually change my mind just because of something like that. Don't @ me."
He points out that many popular views are self-defeating, and is like "well surely all these self-defeating views can't be wrong!" But, like, yes they can? And also this is an especially apt case, since the question is directly about what-to-believe! You're not even really going up a meta level.
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Yeah I don't necessarily buy his counterargument either, just wanted to point out that it has been discussed :P
I guess in fact if you believe in epistemic modesty, deferring to the fact that most people don't believe in it doesn't actually fix your problem, because that tells you to not defer and follow your own beliefs, but then your own beliefs tell you to defer again. It's not just that it recommends that you don't use it, it's actively paradoxical.
I think you and I probably disagree about how much it matters to have an inconsistent / seemingly arbitrary "do epistemic modesty unless it's paradoxical, then don't" rule. I think I can make it sound more reasonable if it's something like "it's surprising if you alone are right while a large number of relevant experts are wrong, so usually reject this thesis, but in some cases this rejection is even more surprising / obviously incorrect, so in that case you have to stick with your beliefs".
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Court houses have this kind of Objective Beauty that I find offputting. I think it's something to do with
1. marble floors are too noisy and squeaky
2. hallways are too echoey, makes you feel exposed
3. not enough windows
4. half the people there are miserable for various reasons
(I expect that people in a supreme court are less miserable than in the average court, but more miserable than in the average office building)
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Daylio (popular mood tracking app; I've been trying it for about two weeks) is pretty nice. It feels wholesome to spend a couple minutes reflecting on my day in a kinda structured way, even though so far I haven't really gotten any insight out of it.
My guess is that it feels healthy for some reason like, if I'm spending a little metacognition on (nonjudgmentally) remembering my day, it feels clearer that I care about myself, and maybe that I'm not trying to erase parts of my experience.
I've been a little surprised to notice that most days have been "good" over those two weeks. No "rad" days yet, but also only two "meh" days, and no "bad" or "awful" days. I would have expected that my modal day was "meh". I might just have been lucky recently, though.
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Have you ever wanted to do something like cp -r, but doing something different for certain subpaths?
... You haven't?
Well here is how to do it anyway:
find . -false \
-o -path . \
-o -path ./log -exec ln -s /home/friendica/{} $out/{} \; -prune \
-o -path ./view/smarty3 -exec ln -s /home/friendica/{} $out/{} \; -prune \
-o -name .git -prune \
-o -type d -exec mkdir $out/{} \; \
-o -type f -exec cp --reflink=auto {} $out/{} \;that is: don't do anything with
., with ./log or ./view/smarty3 populate them with a symlink and then don't descend any further into them, ignore any .git directory anywhere, and with any other path, copy it normally. (The -false is just so I can start every line with -o.)(This example in particular could be ~mostly replicated with rsync --exclude and putting in the symlinks afterwards, but minor modifications would make that not work anymore; also, it's possible to combine the two symlink branches in this case, but it's ugly.)
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About two years ago I got a ham radio license. I haven't done anything with it so far, but I just ordered my first HF radio transceiver, and materials for a ~100ft temporary antenna in my back yard (I'm extremely lucky in that my new house has a 120ft tree in the back that I can lift a wire into).
We're approaching a peak in the solar cycle, which means that over the next year or so it will be unusually possible to communicate over extremely long distances. You can look at dxmaps.com/spots/mapg.php (especially the "10m" and "40m" tabs) to see real-time examples of the kind of distances I'm talking about: In the evenings, if my setup works well, I'm expecting I'll be able to have conversations with people in Japan, Australia, and New Zealand, without any intermediate infrastructure at all. This is such a wild thing to be able to do; I'm really excited.
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Ben Weinstein-Raun tagged Ben Weinstein-Raun's status with #hamradio
About two years ago I got a ham radio license. I haven't done anything with it so far, but I just ordered my first HF radio transceiver, and materials for a ~100ft temporary antenna in my back yard (I'm extremely lucky in that my new house has a 120ft tree in the back that I can lift a wire into).We're approaching a peak in the solar cycle, which means that over the next year or so it will be unusually possible to communicate over extremely long distances. You can look at dxmaps.com/spots/mapg.php (especially the "10m" and "40m" tabs) to see real-time examples of the kind of distances I'm talking about: In the evenings, if my setup works well, I'm expecting I'll be able to have conversations with people in Japan, Australia, and New Zealand, without any intermediate infrastructure at all. This is such a wild thing to be able to do; I'm really excited.
JP Addison
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