pc486 @ pc486 @reddthat.com

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Joined

2 yr. ago

A friend of mine explained why it's important to his kids: they can't chat with a group of their friends.

Why? Because parents don't want to install WhatsApp or other group chats due to legitimate concerns about scammers, pedophiles, and other child predators. SMS chat fills that gap, but it breaks horribly for groups bigger than 10 people. Hence if some kid is on Android, they break their chat. Given the penetration of Apple devices, it's the kids with Android who are considered at-fault. "Just get an iPhone!"

Welcome to anticompetitive practices targeted at your children.

Spot on!

Sometimes even cheaters could be dealt with without an admin in those days. Servers would have fun game settings and odd maps that would break cheating gameplay.

My brother and I often played CS in the same room, on opposing teams because we didn't like being cheated and didn't want to be cheaters. We found an empty server with a sniping-only map. Made for great fun and someone joined in about 15 minutes later. They seemed really good, so we joined together to see if we could make it challenging. The new guy was just too good, so we decided to swap back and forth with the new guy to see if one of us could make a 1v2 miracle happen. That's when we figured out he was impossibly aim hacking. Bummer, our fun game was toasted.

Then we realized the map settings had friendly fire on and a 5 second start delay. Aim hacks don't target your own teammates. A perfect trap was available: we'd headshot TK the cheater at game start and then 1v1 each other. The cheater tried swapping to the other team only to find my brother using the same TK tactic. Our cheating friend found himself without a chance to grift. Needless to say, he didn't hang around for long.

It's a bummer this article pushes aside the importance of calculating bearings. Figuring bearings remains a required skill in both sea and air navigation. GPS works very well, but you don't want to depend entirely upon it when there's life and property at risk. Sextants, chronographs, and navigational maps remain onboard many ships.

To not be so negative, here's something interesting the article does raise but didn't mention: azimuthal maps are regularly projected at any place on earth. Azimithual projected at a radio station this makes pointing directional antennas intuitive and fast. It's also helpful in grasping how a directional antenna will behave as their radiation patterns are drawn in polar coordinates and hence can be drawn on top of an azimithual map.

Camping in the shoulder season is great! A little cool but often far fewer bugs.

I've only bikepacked once in an area more hike-a-bike than bikepacking, but I still enjoyed it. This photo is a great reminder to just get out and do it. :)

Edit: I just noticed you strapped on a Stanley cook set. That's easily my favorite camping set. I've gone much lighter these days, but I still haul that one out occasionally. It's so cheap yet so well designed. What a nice idea to strap it onto a bottle cage/holder.

Highways are a great way to install new regional transit. Brightline West is going to link Los Angeles to Las Vegas in the median of interstate 15. That highway is a total mess on weekends and this new line is expected to drastically reduce traffic with big convenience wins given its average speed of 101mph/165kph. And the project is funding wildlife overpasses and other habitat improvements.

As is typical, this science reporting isn't great. It's not only that AI can do it effectively, but that it can do it at scale. To quote the paper:

"Despite these models achieving near-expert human performance, they come at a fraction of the cost, requiring 100× less financial and 240× lower time investment than human labelers—making such privacy violations at scale possible for the first time."

They also demonstrate how interacting with an AI model can quickly extract more private info without looking like it is. A game of 20 questions, except you don't realize you're playing.

Those are two different theys. Huston is against freeway expansion. They even sued in a desperate attempt to prevent it.

I'm so glad to see my own tax money is being spent to pave over Huston. It's certainly what they want.

There's no way we'll know this soon but, given there's been a huge push at the SEC to clamp down on crypto-related financial crimes[1], I wouldn't want to be anywhere near this debacle.

Before I go, I'll just leave this link: Report Suspected Securities Fraud or Wrongdoing.

1. Dot your i's and cross your t's with crypto and dancing with the SEC. LBRY failed to register as a security when they pre-mined and yesterday it sank their company. Charges are pressed in bursts of new cases almost every month.

What an unfortunate outcome. I hope his family and friends remember their good times together.

Hopefully John's death helps push for even safer cyclist and pedestrian infrastructure in Tucson. They're one of the best, perhaps the best, cycling city in Arizona. Residents there will provide political backing behind building safer streets.

This is a regulated area, one that the SEC oversees. They've prosecuted insider trading on crypto: https://www.sec.gov/news/press-release/2023-98

Tech has been in aggressive growth mode since 2008 because the Fed was handing out free money (interest rate lower than inflation). That allowed investors to dump money into tech businesses in hope of rapid business expansion, which in turn makes the business more valuable.

The free money dried up. Now these tech businesses are going to find out if they're sustainable.

They may have cut themselves. Usually high level cuts are announced as "leaving for an amazing opportunity" or to "focus on family" or similar. That happens a month or two later after a deep layoff round and reorganizing. We'll see if these recent layoffs included executives by Q1 next year. Watch LinkedIn if you're that curious.

Still, it's unfair to the lower levels, including line management, because they don't get that option. It's a "thank you for your service" and a boot out the door.

Note: not all tech companies are like this. Gumroad is an excellent example of a very open and ran-differently business.

Q3 just ended. These layoffs are because the books are not looking good. Everyone is hurting with inflation and higher interest, tech being particularly vulnerable to high interest rates.

I can only hope the execs cut correctly. A second round of layoffs at a company can destroy morale enough to sink the company. Who wants to continue working at a place that fired your close peers, wondering if you're next?

One option I haven't seen suggested is a wag bag. They're a bag you do your business into that solidifies everything and makes it safe to dispose into the nearest garbage can. You'll see them used by no-trace backpackers, climbers, and dispersed campers. Carry one in your bike's bag and rest assured you have a fast and traceless method.

Don't forget to bring sanitizer or dry leaf soap for hand cleaning.

I use Cleanwaste brand, but there are plenty of choices out there. Find a local manufacturer of them.

Additionally, carry extra TP or bring a bottle-top bidet. The kits tend to not have much TP included.

Best is a matter of how you rank features! The FT-60R suggestion is a good one, but that's a choice of robustness (it's incredibly solid) over some other features. If you're after satellite work, it's not a great choice. Or if you're really interested in APRS tracking during your runs, it's also not a great choice. Or, like in my situation, I need to help my local club in working with their Yeasu 70cm repeater running FM and C4FM, which is why I have a FT-70DR.

The UV-5R is doing you well. Let's find things you'd like to do that it doesn't do well. Is it 1.25m band support? FM satellites? Audio quality? Digital modes? The radio's physical size or hand feel?

Or are you beginning to think about beyond HT, but still portable. Like HF or trying out SSB on VHF?

BMS boards can be very small for the currents demanded by HTs. I'd br surprised if they're not integrated into the packs, even if there's only two contacts.

As to if our HT batteries are... I don't know! I haven't seen a teardown of a Yeasu SBR-24LI but maybe I'll tear mine down when it kicks the bucket.

I totally agree. Heck, I don't do any digital VHF+ except for C4FM, and only then because it came on my preferred radios and I was curious. Simple, ubiquitous FM works great for me. 😁

Manufacturers are going to reuse hardware and software components to minimize engineering costs for their products. That's why we see DMR, P25, and C4FM in amateur equipment: they're modes their commercial products need. Hopefully the free nature of M17 means it'll eventually become a $0 addition to a manufacturer's offering. Although I suspect the Chinese radio brands will pick it up first in trying to get a competitive advantage. I know I'd buy a radio with off-the-shelf M17 support.

As an aside, your mountain bike mention makes me want to share some of my HF bicycle portable setup. Maybe I'll collect some photos.🤔

Don't let that hold you back! These radios are inexpensive and not rare items. If the modifications look difficult, then maybe ask a fell ham to help you. I know I would help anyone interested at my local club.

OpenRTX brings M17 to a few radios. I haven't tried it myself (digital VHF doesn't interest me) but it looks inexpensive to get into.

I'm not worried about proprietary modes on the ham bands because they cannot compete as software slowly becomes more integral to radio. There are two commonly held values that I think explain what we're seeing with digital radio today, and what the inevitable outcome will be.

Hams have money but are frugal with how we spend it. We tend to seek the highest possible value for the lowest possible price. If it's something simple, we tend to spend only a little money. If the thing is packed full of features, then $1000 will quickly disappear. A wire antenna? DIY or, at most, only buy a choke/transformer. That shiny IC-7300? Already ordered with delivery tomorrow.

Hams tend to be hackers. Proprietary is not a barrier, sometimes a fascination itself, so long as the proprietary thing can be hacked into something entertaining, useful, weird, or just for fun.

These two values, frugality and hacking, are acting together to make modes like VARA popular. These values are also why VARA and other proprietary modes are doomed.

VARA is cheap when compared to a popular competitor: PACTOR. Would you pay $1,300 or $70 for roughly the same set of features? VARA's pricing model leans into this price advantage with a free tier clearly meant to target the frugality of hams. Try VARA out and, if you like it, then $70 is cheap enough to close the sale. VARA is also a soundmodem that runs on generic computer hardware. Your average ham can download VARA today and have it running in minutes on components they already have. VARA is a solid value proposition for hacking a digital HF station together.

But, in time, an open source modem will arise. VARA will lose popularity when it inevitably competes against a free, as in beer, and free, as in freedom, tool. Selling a software modem is a losing battle against a similar software modem that costs nothing and runs on anything, operating system be damned. VARA will never run on some esoteric microcontroller, which we all know must happen ASAP. Who can say no to a Winlink toaster?

I expect digital VHF/UHF radio to follow a similar path as commercial portable radios replace hardware with software. What may be a voice codec as a chip (hardware like PACTOR) will become some DSP firmware (soundmodem like VARA). The frugal and hacker values will push VHF/UHF further into freedom; M17 and OpenRTX being a great example.