I'm finding it really hard to make #hamradio contacts in Delaware. Weirdly hard, given that the five states with smaller populations than Delaware were all much easier, even though some of them are further from me, and I've had no trouble making contacts in its neighboring states.
A few days ago I decided to try to be more strategic about contacting every US state since I was really close, and I've now spent probably twice the time trying to contact Delaware, as trying to contact all four of the other stragglers combined.
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Today I was inspired to ask ChatGPT for help with my health issues for the first time since o1 was released. It suggested that I might have Cushing's Syndrome, which actually makes a lot of sense. I don't think any doctors ever suggested this directly, but I do have a recollection of a doctor asking me if I was extremely thirsty or urinating a lot (I wasn't), which might have been a question for a relevant differential.
So hopefully tomorrow I'm going to wake up and go get a cortisol test.
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A big chunk of my current best-guess political philosophy is somewhat libertarian, the rough intuition being that in many important respects, things very often go better when people make their own choices, especially about how much things are worth to them.
This is a helpful framework when the agents in your economy / political system are relatively static entities. But as far as I know it doesn't really have anything to say about cases where one agent might mold another agent's preferences, or decide which agents to bring into existence.
Some examples include:
- having children
- many aspects of how children are raised
- building AI agents
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Population ethics is the ~one area where my moral intuitions bottom out at "there is no actual answer here". Most questions of morality intuitively feel like there is a right answer but thinking about population ethics consistently leaves me with no solid foundations and nowhere to get foundations.
(Related: how should we think about farming animals for meat, given that mostly they wouldn't exist otherwise?)
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Proposed fun / slightly edgy party game: Perzendo
Materials: index cards and a pencil, or a google doc.
One player is the perzendo master. This perzendo master writes the names of two people in the room, in a list sorted by some secret property.
The other players take turns. On each turn, a player either proposes a name (of any human, living or dead), or tries to guess the property. The perzendo master puts these names on the list, wherever they fall according to the secret property.
The first player to guess the rule correctly wins.
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TIL that an experience that I've had ~once every month or so for my whole life, and assumed was near-universal, is actually relatively rare, and correlated with various bad things that I'm not aware of experiencing in relation to it (EBV infection, migraines, head trauma).
Basically, as I experience it (typically right as I'm falling asleep) everything visually starts to feel very small and far away, except that my tongue feels large and cumbersome in my mouth.
It's called Alice in Wonderland Syndrome; other people experience similar size distortions though the details vary a lot.
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Pascal's Wager doesn't go far enough:
Granted, the Christian God offers infinite rewards, but as far as I can find this is always in terms of "eternal" life or "eternal" communion with him, and so we can be confident that he is offering rewards only as large as the cardinality of the continuum.
So come on down to Crazy Georg's Omega Plus First Church of G...d: If you can conceive of a God advertising any size of infinite reward, G...d will match it.
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Granted, the Christian God offers infinite rewards, but as far as I can find this is always in terms of "eternal" life or "eternal" communion with him, and so we can be confident that he is offering rewards only as large as the cardinality of the continuum.
FWIW I think it's plausible that the Greek words used in the NT doesn't have this sort of connotation.
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I found this relevant and interesting chapter from Unsong by thinking "hmm, but Omega is an ancient word in some sense, and it's been more recently used in the context of infinities... and Jesus also referred to 'alpha and omega' to represent something like infinitude. So I can probably make a joke about kabbalah. Oh, but Scott Alexander will have already done that."
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On Friday I tried to show @Daniel Filan how FT8 works, but I was having a really hard time getting QSOs. I was worried something was wrong with my #hamradio antenna setup, since the internet claimed that band conditions should be good. But this afternoon and evening I had a great time and got 17 QSOs across 5 different bands! So I think Friday must have been something transient rather than my (very janky) setup degrading.
I now have confirmed QSOs in 40 states, and unconfirmed ones in all but 3! (North Dakota, Delaware, and Vermont. Almost managed to get one in Delaware today, but wasn't quite able to complete the protocol) Plus 28 "DX entities" (mostly countries, but includes e.g. Alaska and Hawaii separately) on 6 continents!
Map of listening stations that heard me this afternoon:
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Ended up deactivating my facebook yesterday. I wish I could have emotionally handled whatever was going on, but the only way I know how to productively deal with expressions of anger at that depth, apparently doesn't scale past one or two people at a time.
Last night I felt really conflicted about it. Like, I had just been trying to get people to give me harsh feedback, hadn't I? Doesn't this undermine that, or feel like a petty table-flipping move?
I still have some of those worries, but today I'm feeling like it was obviously the right move. Like if I had a gangrenous limb or something and had cut it off: It's pretty awful that I lost a limb, but it's way better than losing my whole self. Plus in this case I can reattach it if I figure out how to get rid of the gangrene.
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if $3000 is too much to ask them to pay you back, surely they should at least pay you the maximal amount that isn't too much :P
minimally you could be like "I don't think it's fair for me to charge you the full amount but if you could think about what seems affordable / reasonable to you and pay me that I would be grateful"
although tbh I think it kind of is fair to at least suggest they might pay the full amount, even if you don't want to insist on it
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The other downside:
the delimited continuations in OCaml must be used linearly – every captured continuation must be resumed either with a continue or discontinue exactly once. Attempting to use a continuation more than once raises a Continuation_already_resumed exception.
It is left to the user to ensure that the captured continuations are resumed at least once. Not resuming continuations will leak the memory allocated for the fibers as well as any resources that the suspended computation may hold.
whereas I think Koka ensures things don't leak and also lets you resume multiple times, so you can do things like this: github.com/koka-lang/koka/blob…
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Apparently I was wrong about the standard library not having a sort function - it's just undocumented AFAICT! github.com/TimWhiting/advent-2…
Oh, I see, it's in the community std library: github.com/koka-community/std/…
advent-2024/day1.kk at main · TimWhiting/advent-2024
Contribute to TimWhiting/advent-2024 development by creating an account on GitHub.GitHub
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:o
However, I should mention that I may be hallucinating these specific book titles and dates since I don't have access to a current book database.
- Claude Sonnet 3.6
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I think web-of-trust is underused for spam and abuse prevention.
e.g. there could be a pretty simple "endorse" button for each account, which is basically saying "I vouch that this person is a real human and not a troll/spammer". Webs/chains of endorsement could be used to prove that someone ought to be able to interact with you. And for any given active interaction attempt ("react", "friend request", "tag"), there could be an opportunity to mark it as "spam", and accounts with lots of spam could become untrusted, and accounts that endorse lots of spam accounts could become untrusted as well.
In principle you could even implement this in an entirely decentralized way with some public-key crypto, though it might be too expensive in practice.
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:o vlang looks... very very cool to me. I am surprised that it's more than 5 years old, since it seems to offer many things that I've been wanting from a programming language and periodically searching for without luck:
- Sum types
- interfaces/traits/similar
- generics
- Reasonably fast at runtime (roughly on par with e.g. Go, from what I can tell)
- optional GC
- cares about development time (e.g. compilation times are fast)
- cares about various kinds of safety (not as much as Rust, more than Zig). I think there are some substantial tradeoffs here around what happens if you avoid using the GC, since I think there's no borrow checking; e.g. does the stdlib have types that grow and invalidate your references?
- extremely good cross-platform support (cross-compile GUI libraries for ~any platform including mobile, except that you can only build for macOS from macOS)
Basically it seems like they've added the ~3 features whose lack has made Go unpleasant for me when I've tried to use it.
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I think one of the key helpful things about my OCaml experience was learning about how much typeclass stuff can or can't be replaced with other mechanisms (e.g. making it convenient to locally control namespaces so that you can easily specify "I want X from module Y" instead of having it be type-driven).
It both lets you notice when you shouldn't (or at least needn't) be using ad-hoc polymorphism but also when you really do need it (e.g. OCaml I think would struggle to properly replicate Traversable and some other higher-order-polymorphism things).
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@Daniel Filan apparently the "learning ancient Latin and Greek involves example texts about daily life heavily involving slaves" thing dates at least back to ancient Roman schools for learning Greek.
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Jeez 😢.
A few days ago we found an open duffel bag with a bunch of clothes strewn around it in front of our door (also in Berkeley). My assumption is that it was stolen and everything valuable was removed before it was discarded. Sadly I couldn't find any info about the owner, so we couldn't even return the remaining clothes.
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Ahhh wow. That sucks. I'm sorry you have to buy all your clothing again, that sounds really annoying.
A few years ago I went to a clothing swap. Someone brought a unique red and black scarf from overseas. It was lightweight and really pretty. I gave it to my partner (at the time) as soon as I got it. They had it in their backpack, and they left that backpack in their car for a few minutes while grabbing food from Butcher's Son. That was enough time for it to get stolen. Memorably disappointing.
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Does anyone know how to productively/supportively receive "venting"-shaped communication, when you don't want to reinforce or implicitly endorse the frame or set or assumptions that the venting is based in?
I feel like I have this dilemma a lot of the time: like, someone wants to share something that they're angry or upset or annoyed about, and clearly wants me to be entirely on their side about the thing, and I want to emotionally support them, understand where they're coming from, and help them process and/or strategize.
But honestly about 80% of the time, especially if it's someone who I'm not extremely close to, I find it really hard to straightforwardly do those things because I feel triggered about the context somehow, either because it seems like it's assuming things I don't believe, or because I feel attacked in some way, e.g. because I often have substantial sympathy toward the target of the anger or annoyance, as well as toward my friend.
I wish I knew what to do in these situations.
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HomeAssistant. Wow. How had I not heard of this before this year?
It's allegedly an open source home automation system, but I keep running into ways that it's actually way better than that. You can connect it to just about anything: Sure, air conditioning and lighting and smart locks and all the other home automation stuff. But also fitbit, mattress coolers, various internet data sources; you can use it to set up a custom ChatGPT-powered Google Home replacement (finally!).
And it's all so polished! Like, yes you need to be a level-1 technical person to set it up, and to use the more advanced features, but the flows are so reasonable and reliable. I'm genuinely kinda shocked.
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Misophonia has become a serious problem in my life. There's a person, who is totally great, and who is friends with all my friends and gets invited to everything I'm invited to, that I cannot be around for long periods because when they laugh my brain instantly jumps to an emotion not too far from blind rage.
I don't know what to do about this; it's very intense and basically preventing me from doing most social activities, even things in my own house.
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Sorry to hear it, this sounds very inconvenient and also socially very difficult to approach
My misophonia feelings have varied over the years FWIW. Certain mouth sounds bothered me a few years ago, then they didn't stand out again til a few weeks ago. But my thing has always been much milder than the thing you're describing.
Have you tried loop earplugs? I think they say they can help with misophonia, and my friend with more widespread misophonia said they help a bit. Idk if they'd help with someone's laugh though.
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I spent the whole weekend building this... Err... "Portable" directional 2m #hamradio antenna with @Jen Blight, and it was pretty great.
(It's portable in the sense that it only weighs about 2lbs, and can be taken apart to fit in a backpack. I hope to make substantially more portable ones in the future).
The elements are made from 0.5" PEX irrigation tubing (think hula hoop material), wrapped in copper-coated fabric and copper tape, with a layer of clear "repair" tape to prevent tarnishing, while preserving the mad wizard staff vibes.
Each tube is connected to itself using Anderson powerpole connectors, so they can be easily unplugged, and twisted into a smaller footprint for travel.
The boom is a fiberglass driveway marker, and the mast is a telescoping fiberglass pole.
I don't yet know how well the antenna performs, and as you might be able to see from the VNA, it needs a little tuning. But my radio didn't emit any smoke when I transmitted using it! And the signal made it clearly to its intended target (who was about 30ft away).
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Update: I definitely see a fair chunk of gain! Not enough to communicate with Jen all the way in SF from my back yard, but my field strength meter shows ~40 units when my standard whip antenna only gets ~10. I'm not sure how to interpret this, but if it's roughly proportional to power, I think this implies roughly 6dBd / 8dBi? Also as far as I can tell the front/back ratio is excellent; saw barely any movement in the meter when placed behind the antenna.
I'm pleased with this as a first attempt!
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I'm currently using my 64-core Linux desktop to run a genetic algorithm to optimize my design for an emergency #hamradio antenna. About an hour ago I submitted a patch to the (Haskell) codebase of the optimizer to allow it to support curved wires, which I needed because my design is made of four circular hoops. Despite being a fairly low activity project, the PR was merged within about 10 minutes, which felt awesome.
Am I cool yet? How many more layers of nerd do I have to add before I'm cool?
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While researching, I've seen a few similar designs with several different names; "circular quad beam", "cylindrical quad", "E-Z-O" etc.
I'm very new at this so I don't have as much equipment as I'd like for testing this stuff. Just ordered a cheap field strength meter, so hopefully will be able to do better than the "can you hear me now?" test.
Seriously interesting project. I've used the optimiser in 4NEC2 but it only has preset things you can choose to optimise. Being able to use a Python script as an objective function would be so much nicer 🙂
Anyway looking forward to hearing about what you end up with ...
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Trying a couple different materials for my "emergency kit highly directional #hamradio antenna":
- Stainless steel spring-crafting wire (idea credit: @flammifer@superstimul.us) isn't the best choice of antenna material or diameter, but it is extremely portable: I'd add connectors so I could unplug the ends and twist the wire up, to have it fit in about one square foot.
- PEX tubing is much lighter than it looks, is much sturdier and harder to accidentally deform, and covering it in copper foil tape should produce an excellent antenna. But it would be much harder to fold a PEX antenna down into an emergency kit sized package.
I think I'm just going to make both and compare them.
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Maybe you can start in Zone 1/2 and stop in Zone 5/6 or vice versa, but you cannot get off in Zones 3/4?
This made more sense when I thought that Zones 3/4 would be the central ones but obviously no, 1 is central and 6 is furthest out, so ???
Do you get some tax or some premium for living very-far-out from the centre as opposed to kinda far out?
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Oh my, that dwarf mood is the same thing that exists in the webfic Worth The Candle. A blind focus descends on someone randomly ('forge frenzy') and they create a unique magical item, to the exclusion of food and sleep. In WtC, such magical items are called entads, referring to magical artefacts that are created in this way.
So either Alexander Wales (author) played Dwarf Fortress, or it's a wider trope that both are drawing from.
OK I did a google and I found the author saying in an AMA that he wasn't inspired by Dwarf Fortress:
I have never played Dwarf Fortress, so no. The closest inspiration I can think of is one of the Drizzt books, where Wulfgar gets the mythical warhammer Aegis-fang made for him by his adoptive dwarf father Bruenor Battlehammer. It's been probably twenty years since I read the book, but the chapter where it got forged really stuck with me. Forge frenzy is kind of that, amped up, with worse materials.
Entad
An Entad is a magic item, created by means of a forge frenzy. Conceptually they tend to be most similar to magic items as seen in Dungeons and Dragons.Contributors to Worth the Candle Wiki (Fandom, Inc.)
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I tend to have "strange moods" that last about 6-8 weeks at work, roughly every 1.5 years.
Over the last 7 years at my current job, only two of these have produced anything useful, but they've probably been about as valuable as everything else I've done combined. One weird pattern is that the valuable ones made the least sense up front – like "rewrite key data pipelines in a language none of us have heard of" or "move a bunch of stuff from one piece of infrastructure to a seemingly identical piece of infrastructure." The ones that seemed to make sense up front, on the other hand, never amounted to anything. It's gotten to the point where my cofounders actively encourage me to work on things that don't make sense!
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