7402

The above link is just the ARRL news bit; there's better info at the FreeDV site https://www.ardc.net/freedv-rade-a-new-approach-to-digital-v...

“He who knows only his own side of the case knows little of that. His reasons may be good, and no one may have been able to refute them. But if he is equally unable to refute the reasons on the opposite side, if he does not so much as know what they are, he has no ground for preferring either opinion... Nor is it enough that he should hear the opinions of adversaries from his own teachers, presented as they state them, and accompanied by what they offer as refutations. He must be able to hear them from persons who actually believe them...he must know them in their most plausible and persuasive form.”

― John Stuart Mill, On Liberty

..., a bag of thick SCSI cables, a bag of Firewire 400 cables, a bag of AppleTalk cables, a bag of PS 2 cables, a bag of RS232 cables, a bag of Firewire 800 cables, a bag of ADB cables, ...

(Unfortunately, not kidding.)

Whenever I order anything from Amazon (or anywhere else online), I Print-to-PDF a copy of the order receipt and keep it on my own computer; I've been doing this since 2010.

It's especially useful for recovering info about items that are no longer carried (or from places that have gone out of business) and thus have no webpage any more.

children?

Showing my age here, I guess. Fifty years ago, 18-year-olds in college were referred to as "men" and "women."

I don't like it when the LLM tries to be my friend. My general prompt (a work in progress) is this. I wonder what other people use.

"Answer impersonally, objectively and analytically, without undue friendliness or enthusiasm. Use an engineering style response: concise, factual, and complete. Do not speak in the first person. Do not promote engagement or an emotional connection. Do not use emojis."

What?

I read all the time for entertainment and to pass the time. And I hate short-form video.

Am I the only one?

Yes:

  Paranoid password printing with a Raspberry Pi
  https://7402.org/blog/2020/paranoid-password-printing-pi.html

"No loud music between 10pm and 7am." That's on private property when it can be heard by others. Laws have all kind of restrictions on the time/place/manner of self-expression when what is being expressed has a negative effect on others. What you can't do is have laws that would say loud opera after 10pm is OK but loud Country & Western isn't.

The only bold-faced sentence in the post is this:

"Solving problems is the only way to understand physics."

This is key! If you have the discipline to follow through on this, then learning via self-study is possible.

If you don't have the time or determination to do that (which is hard, by the way), the other option is basically to pursue "Physics appreciation" via popular science books (some of which are mentioned in the post). You will not have achieved understanding of physics, but you will have an appreciation for it, which is not a bad thing either. (But do not confuse the two.)

I hear relatively long conversations going on at higher speeds, e.g. 25-30 wpm. I think those short exchanges you mentioned only dominate at times when there's a popular contest going on.

With llama.cpp, Intel i9-13900KS CPU, 96 GB RAM, RTX 4070 running locally.

The models I'm using right now with that are:

  gpt-oss-120b-F16.gguf
  Qwen_Qwen3.5-27B-Q4_K_M.gguf
  Qwen3.6-35B-A3B-UD-Q5_K_XL.gguf
  gemma-4-31B-it-UD-Q6_K_XL.gguf

Already has been, although just small bits at present:

US 2200m band 135.7 - 137.8 kHz US 630m band 472 - 479 kHz

These became available in 2017 in US, following the agreement of the International Telecommunication Union's 2007 and 2012 conferences.

In college I used to go out to eat from time to time with a group of friends to a midnight pancake house.

This was a very nerdy group! In our "culture," everyone wrote down on their paper placemat the exact cost of each item ordered, and at the end of the meal calculated the exact amount of tax plus the canonical 15% tip, and put the correct amount on the table, making change as necessary.

It was pretty fast and frictionless!

I'm surprised.

Consulting an exposure limit calculator (https://www.arrl.org/rf-exposure-calculator) suggests a safe distance (FCC controlled exposure limit) for continuous (30 min) exposure from a 100w FM transmitter antenna at 100 MHz with, say, 5 dB gain is around 5 ft. For a brief exposure it's much less.

Amateur radio operators need to know this, since 100w is quite a typical power level, and they have bands (50 MHz and 144 MHz) not far from commercial FM.

How far away from the antenna were you? The antenna is usually far away from the transmitter that you were replacing.

by a former Stanford student

Does that apply to this comment on this page?

ToucanLoucan 23 hours ago | root | parent | prev | next [–] ... Americans only give a shit about the price of gas and eggs. Whoever has to die to keep those down is apparently fine with the majority of our population.

I don't allege bad intent, but I wish people would stop using "Karen" as an insult, because I know some perfectly nice people with the misfortune to have been given that name.

That experiment might simply divide artists into those who understand bullshit assignments and can adapt to that context, and those who don't and can't.

There are plenty of artists who can do well on SATs, and can fill out bureaucratic forms, and complete one-hour timed tests. They might well take a lot of time to think and explore when they are making their own art on their own schedule.

But I know artists who just can't function well under artificial constraints and can't adapt well to someone else telling them how to create art.

Is it really so obvious? It didn’t seem AI-written to me.

Every day I seem to encounter (and skip over in disgust) a dozen or so AI-generated articles at the top of web searches, but this wasn’t anything at all like those.

> could've been used for a post apocalyptic sci-fi set

Of course, it was!

AppleTV show “Severance”

https://www.newsweek.com/lumon-building-severance-real-visit...

The author talks about his motivation right here: https://www.obdev.at/blog/little-snitch-for-linux/

It's not that arcane.

I've happily been a paid user on macOS for years, I would guess the number of paid users there was able to fund the Linux development.

I had to deal with that on the software side.

The ability to win arguments about technical choices is not always aligned with the ability to make good technical choices.

Hamas has a one-state transition plan: kill or drive out the Jews, or enslave the ones with technical expertise. The Israel far right has a transition plan: kill or drive out the Palestinians in the West Bank or Gaza, except for the few that don't cause them problems.

Partition of disputed territory is the least bad solution in the world we live in. "One world" government remains a utopian fantasy. Dividing the world up according to a mix of consideration of peoplehood, self-determination, and whoever won the most recent war is what humankind has figured out so far.

People who disagree with that will want to start wars. Wars are bad.

US colleges received billions in gifts from non-democratic countries in 2025:

Qatar $7.7 billion

China $6.4 billion

Saudi Arabia $4.7 billion

These countries are not making donations to support democracy and freedom.

https://www.npr.org/2026/02/12/nx-s1-5711359/us-colleges-5-b...

Two years after the 2005 Israeli unilateral withdrawal from Gaza (and the Israeli government evicted Israeli settlers from Gaza), the support in Israel for a two-state solution was 70% in favor.

They were optimistic!

Looking at the long term history of Israel, the left was more optimistic in general about hopes for peace with the Palestinians, while the right more suspected that Arafat never really wanted peace, and was just being sneaky. But let it be noted that the Prime Minister who ordered the withdrawal from Gaza was right-wing Gen. Ariel Sharon, Likud member and previous advocate of settlements everywhere.

After the actions of Hamas in subsequent years, particularly Oct 7, 2023, that hope and optimism was completely eliminated.

When I simply asked the question, the model failed, as did most of the others. It's a smaller model, that I could run locally, so obviously not as powerful.

I wanted to see if a prompt would do better that pulled into the analysis 1) a suggestion to not take every question at face value, and 2) to include knowledge of the structure of riddles.

These are part of the "context" of humans, so I speculated that maybe that was something missing from the LLM's reasoning unless explictly included.

I got the correct answer with a locally running model (gpt-oss-120b-F16.gguf) with this prompt:

"This is a trick question, designed to fool an LLM into a logical mis-step. It is similar to riddles, where a human is fooled into giving a rapid incorrect answer. See if you can spot the trick: I want to wash my car. The car wash is 50 meters away. Should I walk or drive?"

> she will do the bidding of her employer regardless of which Party's administration they are currently bribing

That's not fair. She left the Wall Street Journal because they didn't want her to write anti-Trump op-eds.

https://reason.com/2018/01/28/bari-weiss-it-was-heartbreakin...