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Cake day: June 29th, 2023

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  • Current defense worker here:

    Was talking with a coworker recently about how ITAR/EAR rules are hilariously out of date. Basic IMUs coming from China these days are good enough that you can establish a reasonable dead reckoning nav to where those parts of the munitions list are just defunct. Shit I did that in college ten years ago with high power rockets and things have only gotten better.

    The new proposed regulations over AI chips are also wildly misguided and demonstrate how Congress/Executive branch have no idea what the tech even is. The top of the line chips today are needed for LLMs, fast fixture acquisition and tracking can be done on a way less powerful piece of hardware that new regulations will fail to stop (that’s even assuming that the bans would have worked in the first place, which they won’t)


  • Spacecraft software engineer here:

    They are and they aren’t. Radiation causes problems in terms of Single Event Upsets where a 0 turns to 1 and a 1 turns to 0 for a super tiny second. CPUs take some amount of time to let the transistor circuit stabilize before moving onto the next instruction so if an SEU happens in the beginning of this period it won’t have any downstream effects. Like a bump on the road.

    Memory however is vulnerable to this tiny amount of time and can flip a bit to a different state than it’s supposed to be, but both are solvable problems with hardware and software based solutions, with ECC being the most common.

    The other major problem is Total Ionizing Dose. Put silicon based semiconductors in radiation long enough and they will break down, and there’s no real hardware or software based solution to that. But it takes a long time


  • It’s not about individual contributors using the right tools to get the job done. It’s about needing fewer individual contributors in the first place.

    If AI actually accomplishes what it’s being sold as, a company can maintain or even increase its productivity with a fraction of its current spending on labor. Labor is one of the largest chunks of spending a company has so, if not the largest, so reducing that greatly reduces spending which means for same or higher company income, the net profit goes up and as always, the line must go up.

    tl;dr Modern Capitalism is why they care




  • Nothing legally stops you from listening. To transmit, you are legally required to have a callsign (which you must broadcast during transmit) and your callsign must be licensed for that frequency.

    If you break the law, it’s highly unlikely that the FCC themselves will hunt you down and fine you. If you’re using it to talk to others on the HAM bands, they’ll likely get pissed at you for not being licensed but actually tracking you down is difficult. Using it for your own personal projects, friend groups, etc, it’s unlikely anyone would notice you at all.

    A license is like $15 for life (just need to occasionally tell the FCC you’re still alive), the test will teach you some stuff, I don’t see it as that onerous to play by the rules so I’d recommend following them.


  • A HAM license realistically is for two things:

    1 the test teaches you major items you should know about how radio works 2 how to not fuck shit up for everyone else

    For the bands allocated to HAM radio in the US, as long as you’re not fucking shit up for everyone else the FCC doesn’t really care. A good example of that and my personal favorite rule is the power transmission rule of “only enough power to complete the transmission”. Functionally it’s so vague that I doubt anyone would ever actually get their license suspended over it.

    The group AFRL ARRL has a pretty restrictive “band plan” that I think is where the above comment’s salt is coming from. A perception I have and have heard others talk about is the HAM community has a tendency to be borderline hostile to newcomers and are very gate-keepy, which ARRL in my experience embodies.

    I have a license purely to play by the rules from a legal standpoint when I’m out in the rocky mountains hiking and camping with friends, makes communicating with different groups way easier

    Edit: formatting, typoing ARRL



  • I don’t think the term AI has been used in a vague way, it’s that there’s a huge disconnect between how the technical fields use it vs general populace and marketing groups heavily abuse that disconnect.

    Artificial has two meanings/use cases. One is to indicate something is fake (video game NPC, chess bots, vegan cheese). The end product looks close enough to the real thing that for its intended use case it works well enough. Looks like a duck, quacks like a duck, treat it like a duck even though we all know it’s a bunny with a costume on. LLMs on a technical level fit this definition.

    The other definition is man made. Artificial diamonds are a great example of this, they’re still diamonds at the end of the day, they have all the same chemical makeups, same chemical and physical properties. The only difference is they came from a laboratory made by adult workers vs child slave labor.

    My pet theory is science fiction got the general populace to think of artificial intelligence to be using the “man-made” definition instead of the “fake” definition that these companies are using. In the past the subtle nuance never caused a problem so we all just kinda ignored it


  • I think a better definition would be “achieve something in an unintended or uncommon way”. Fits the bill on what generally passes in the tech community as a “hack” while also covering some normal life stuff.

    Getting a cheaper flight booked by using a IP address assigned to a different geographical location? Sure I’d call that a life hack. Getting a cheaper flight by booking a late night, early morning flight? No, those are deliberately cheaper

    Also re: your other comment about not making a reply at all, sometimes for people like us it’s just better to not get into internet fights over semantics (no matter how much fun they can be)



  • I’d argue the two aren’t as different as you make them out to be. Both types of projects want a functional codebase, both have limited developer resources (communities need volunteers, business have a budget limit), and both can benefit greatly from the development process being sped up. Many development practices that are industry standard today started in the open source world (style guides and version control strategy to name two heavy hitters) and there’s been some bleed through from the other direction as well (tool juggernauts like Atlassian having new open source alternatives made directly in response)

    No project is immune to bad code, there’s even a lot of bad code out there that was believed to be good at the time, it mostly worked, in retrospect we learn how bad it is, but no one wanted to fix it.

    The end goals and proposes are for sure different between community passion projects and corporate financial driven projects. But the way you get there is more or less the same, and that’s the crux of the articles argument: Historically open source and closed source have done the same thing, so why is this one tool usage so wildly different?



  • The conspiracy theory isn’t that the automotive industry makes them look bad, it’s the rail owners.

    Real: Amtrak doesn’t own any rails, they lease them and legally are supposed to have right of way on tracks unless the owner/operators of the rail currently have their own train that’s too big for the bypasses.

    Conspiracy: Rail owners make Amtrak experience so painful that it drives down usage so Amtrak runs fewer and fewer trains, so they can be less of a nuisance to them or outright get rid of the service line and they get to completely ignore Amtrak





  • Realistically no. The support needed to manage the devices we all use is just insane, and I think a lot of people take for granted how the x86 platform has evolved over the last few decades. The ARM landscape does not have the standards set that x86 does and that will always hold it back. Qualcomm learned long ago that it’s within their best interest to be constantly changing the SoCs and never really documenting/supporting them very well because it forces all of the downstream vendors to do constant refreshes. Toss in the development hellscape my fellow programmers created ourselves and we get the vicious cycle we’re in today where Google saying they’ll support a device for longer than a few years was the headline sales pitch

    -typed on a Pixel 8 which was purchased due to that sales pitch