Another cool #hamradio fact is that, since right now we're near a maximum in the solar cycle, around dusk and dawn you can basically communicate directly with any place on the planet. To communicate with daytime places, you use the 10m band, and to communicate with nighttime places, you use the 40m band. The pink speech bubbles on this map show people who reported hearing my 10m signal in the last hour. If I switched to transmitting on 40m, you'd see a similar set of speech bubbles but going east instead of west.
When the solar cycle is in a trough, only the nighttime signals get through.
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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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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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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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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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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.
A crystallization of a realization that's been percolating for about a year:
Credit and money (at least representative money, though I think also ultimately fiat money and even sort-of commodity money) are fundamentally the same kind of thing: they're markers of trust in a specific entity, to uphold specific but highly-fungible commitments.
They basically only differ in which entity is being trusted.
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Oh nice, I figured out how to enable embedded videos. So here's the cool drone video but you don't have to click a link:
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Is it just me or are some names "more meme-y" than other names? Like, Eliezer Yudkowsky. Very meme-y name. I feel like a name that meme-y is a genuine asset. Leopold Aschenbrenner. Also very meme-y.
Ben Weinstein-Raun? Hard for me to judge, but I'd guess middling meme-y-ness at best. Benjamin Weinstein-Raun seems at least a little meme-y-er. Should I start going by Benjamin in professional / semi-public contexts?
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This inspires me to ask, how do you pronounce your surname? (I'm particularly unsure about the Raun part, but I guess the other part could be wine-steen or wine-stine). Names are more meme-able if people know how to say them, arguably. But then again, few know how to say Eliezer Yudkowsky when they read it for the first time!
I think my full name of Amber Dawn Ace is very meme-able, to the extent that people assume some part of it was chosen by me, but actually no, the first two were chosen by my mum and the third is the surname she was born with.
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Quoting bmcgee.ie/posts/2023/10/numtid…
This year, I met some new members of our federation [...], including what has to be the best example of nominative determinism I’ve ever encountered: Linus Heckemann (a.k.a. LinuxHackerman).
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If you use Linux or FreeBSD and aren't paying attention today, there's an unauthenticated remote code execution vulnerability in CUPS. If you use Linux or FreeBSD, especially for a desktop or laptop computer, be sure to disable CUPS or see if you can update to a version with fixes for today's CVEs.
More info: phoronix.com/news/Linux-CVSS-9…
Unauthenticated RCE Flaw With CVSS 9.9 Rating For Linux Systems Affects CUPS
There's been much speculation since this morning over a reported 'severe' unauthenticated remote code execution (RCE) flaw affecting Linux systems that carries a CVSS 9.9.9 score..www.phoronix.com
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I really like that sometimes things get better over time. From 2016 - 2023 I fairly often did research to try to find the best indoor air quality monitor, and even though in principle it would have been very easy to manufacture something great, the actual competitors all sucked.
But I moved into a new house recently, and looked again; there's now at least one really good option: the QingPing Air Quality Monitor Gen 2.
Maybe it's spying on my for the Chinese government or something and that's why it's so good? But it has a pretty nice UI, measures ~all the relevant things (PM2.5, CO2, VOCs, humidity, temperature), and has an app that logs 30 days' worth of measurements. It's not cheap, but it is a bit cheaper than the similar things I'd bought for the purpose that were also substantially worse.
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Like, if I think it through all the way, I can see why I am actually mentally privileging the vertical axis, but it's hard to get my system 1 to understand this.
Ultimately I think the biggest thing is that humans are roughly bilaterally symmetrical but not top-bottom symmetrical, and my guess is that this is sufficient to do the symmetry breaking. Like, if you parity-flip me, I still visually "make sense" as a left-right-swapped person, but I don't "make sense" as a top-bottom-swapped person; people don't have their heads on the bottom.
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So there are at least two interesting thought experiments about putative zero-g humans:
- What if humans were radially symmetrical? and
- What if humans had no visual symmetries at all?
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Yeah, I was about to say the same thing about bilateral symmetry.
Another thing I just realized is that if I look at a mirror on a ceiling it intuitively feels like it's reflecting across the mirror and not switching left/right.
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Plasma lighters are neat
Recently I was thinking a bit about updating my "bug out bag", especially thinking about including more ways to start a fire on top of just having a bic lighter. I looked around online for other fire starting tools, and learned about electric plasma arc lighters, which I had never heard of before.
Naively, it seems like a really great alternative to a traditional lighter:
- no expendable fuel; any source of electricity can serve as fuel
- about as easy to use as a regular lighter: slightly less hot surface area, but in exchange you get push-button activation and no difficulty positioning the flame to avoid burning yourself
- very resistant to wind
- iiuc, should work even in very cold temperatures where butane lighters struggle
I tentatively think these things are great. I don't know:
- how long one full charge lasts
- the operating life of the battery
- whether the arc contacts wear down over time
If those considerations compare favorably with bics, I think these lighters might strictly dominate traditional lighters for a primary emergency fire source, excluding cost. Plus they look really cool.
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I find this first Gumby TV episode way more strangely compelling than most things I've seen from its era (1956). It's very unpolished; some frames even have visible hands in them. I wonder how they made the spacey soundtrack.
youtube.com/watch?v=wt87rvCPVi…
- YouTube
Enjoy the videos and music you love, upload original content, and share it all with friends, family, and the world on YouTube.www.youtube.com
If I got to choose one thing to change about American public schools, my first thought would be to introduce basic economic concepts as a subject with the same weight as civics.
The near-universal lack of econ understanding seems to me to underlie many of the worst aspects of current political discourse.
This stuff seems much more important for most people to understand than trigonometry or chemistry.
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Something really wild to me is the extent to which archaeology seems to believe that artifacts were used for some kind of religious / worshipful purpose.
Like, in the modern world, relatively very very few objects are used for worship. If a future civilization finds a figurine, it's probably a Barbie doll or a Funko Pop or something.
Future civilizations might find our most treasured artifacts and presume that we worship glass rectangles or something.
Seems kinda weird if this is the default assumption for unexplained historical artifacts, as it naively appears (to a non-archaeologist). Like, why do we think that these figurines are fertility goddesses rather than toys or instructional tools or even pornography?
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I contend that we do worship glass rectangles.
Nobody thought Christianity was a 'religion' when it was dominant. They thought of it as 'the way things really are' and no one described it in terms of religion.
Our current 'secularism' is also a 'religion' in this same way. We don't see it as religious activity to go to a supermarket or post on Facebook. But ... it is?
> Nobody thought Christianity was a 'religion' when it was dominant. They thought of it as 'the way things really are' and no one described it in terms of religion.
FWIW I don't think this is true. If you want to talk about the New Testament authors, the last bit of James 1 seems to talk about Christianity as a religion, James and Paul talk a lot about "the faith", Hebrews 11 talks about faith as belief in things unseen and seems to indicate it's a good thing. The proceedings of the Council of Trent talk about "the Christian Religion" (e.g. history.hanover.edu/texts/tren…).
[I mean TBC they also thought it was "the way things really are"]
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Hmm lemme clarify.
RE: 'Religion' as 'worldview you can select into or out of' -- at the time of Christianity's dominance (which wasn't until much after New Testament being written anyway), no one thought of Christianity as a worldview. They thought of Christianity as the way things really are.
"Religion" was more like those pagan traditions that you could opt into or out of but were clearly wrongheaded, outdated, nonsensical, and everyone knows are made up. That's what I mean.
Now we use 'religion' in the same way, without recognizing that our dominant worldview is also a religion in fact.
FWIW this wasn't clear from the way I wrote things up but the Council of Trent was held in the 16th century as a reaction to Protestantism. People at the time really did use words like "faith" and "religion" to describe Christianity, altho I'm not sure they would have said you could opt out of it or that it was made up.
At any rate, zooming out, I feel like we can drop the word "religion" and there's still an important thing here. My understanding is that most religious practitioners think that there's something importantly different about the rituals I'd be tempted to call "religious" (e.g. going to mass / church service, sacred artwork, etc) and stuff I'd be tempted to call "secular" (e.g. drinking a can of soda, going on my phone), even when they think mass / sacred art is super important and real. So there's still a live question of "was this pot related to by people back then more like the way believers relate to sacred artwork, or more like the way believers relate to cans of soda".
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Recently I've had some physical issues that have kept me from being physically active (not that I'm usually very active, but this has been even worse than normal):
- About a month ago I learned I have a hernia after doing some wood-chopping (which is really fun btw), and I've been having an upsettingly difficult time setting up an appointment for surgery to fix it
- A week after that, I broke my pinky toe by accidentally kicking a staircase in the dark
The hernia has kept me from feeling good about doing any kind of weightlifting, and the broken toe has made it hard to walk more than a few blocks. This kinda sucks and I'm not sure what to do about it.
Maybe I should be cycling more? Anyone have other ideas?
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Note: You can invite people to this instance if you'd like! Please only invite people you trust to be kind, friendly, and reasonable. Especially only invite people you're sure are human.
To invite someone, go to your "contacts" page and click on "invite friends" in the left sidebar. You'll need their email address.
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Do y'all remember that princeton election guy who forecast a win for Clinton with 99% in 2016? I just found a post-mortem interview with him where he says:
Probabilities are not a good way to convey uncertainty. The first reason being that it’s hard to estimate the true amount of uncertainty, and I discovered that.
I... have never before felt such a strong urge to say "skill issue". But people weren't saying "skill issue" yet in 2016, so nobody got the chance. Time is cruel.
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Sam Wang and Nate Silver had an interesting back-and-forth, if I remember correctly. A friend of mine was convinced that Sam was right and that Nate was “putting his thumb on the scale to cover himself.”
In hindsight, it seems to me that Sam’s approach was more of a straightforward averaging of polls, while Nate’s method is more like a gambler’s—integrating his own beliefs into the model.
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How do tools differ from trading partners?
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I'm guessing it's only because I have only 1 friend so far, but I have an empty feed, so I am discovering posts using the circular button in the navbar. It's a confusing interface!
> "The top left icon, with the rectangular grid, is the thing to click in order to see the "Facebook timeline" analogue
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Post for collecting bugs reported on this friendica instance
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network page? on your global community page?
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Reminds me of of the "you are bugs" scene in the three body problem.
> And as we go about changing the world to suit our preferences, the rats will remain unconsulted. It seems clear to me that rats will only get what they want, when what they want happens to be nearly-costless to humans.
This seems like it's making progress towards a formalization, though I think it still struggles.
If you imagine that covid virons were agents, then it seems to me that although there's a sense in which we're much more powerful than them, and you know, humanity could, if "it" wanted, defeat them, they can kinda get what they want without enormous costs to humans. And yet humans are still much more powerful than covid virons.
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Sam FM
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David Mears
in reply to Ben Weinstein-Raun • • •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:
Entad
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Satvik
in reply to Ben Weinstein-Raun • • •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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