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adolphon A 26-Gram Butterfly-Inspired Robot Achieving Autonomous Tailless Flight

Gotta love how their flight control board is the same size and mounted to the back of the ESP32 module.

Edit: It references ELRS but I don't see one of the standard Lora tower antennas used in the smallest commercial modules. They also often use an unshielded esp32 Soc instead of the full module.

   The onboard embedded system is based on an ESP32-S3-WROOM-1-N16R8 (dual-core 
  32- bit Xtensa LX7, 240 MHz, 16 MB Flash, 8 MB PSRAM), supporting parallel 
  real-time wing actuation and wireless communication with a custom ground 
  control station for data logging and monitoring. . . . and an LDO outputs 5 V
  to the ExpressLRSmodule. The ELRS module serves only as a safety override for
  manual control.

adolphon The Hydrogen Truck Problem Isn't the Truck

Truely rail-fans are transportation equivalent to vegans in food or cross-fit in exercise. I've spent many an hour on the Isle of Sodor and appreciate how useful those engines are in so many contexts. Yet still, there are buses that move alongside Percy, and pick up stranded passengers, and the Fat Controller (aka Sir Topham Hat) still has a sedan. It's a multi-modal world out there and the tractor trailer still has a place in it.

adolphon The Age Verification Trap: Verifying age undermines everyone's data protection

Please do stop and reconsider your epistemology. You have provided no information, only unsupported assertions. You also made a claim about taxes that was clearly untrue since they apply to much more than physical goods.

adolphon IRS Tactics Against Meta Open a New Front in the Corporate Tax Fight

Why bother commenting if you don't have any data to back up your assertion?

You can make claims about what "should" happen but that is just your fact-free opinion.

adolphon Mac mini will be made at a new facility in Houston

Houston is a net exporter of screw [0]. But in seriousness, Houston has domestic production of fasteners etc for oil and gas as well as NASA.

0. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DJ_Screw

adolphon IRS Tactics Against Meta Open a New Front in the Corporate Tax Fight

> 63% of the IRS' audits under the Biden admin targeted those earning sub-$200K.

In 2022 92.3% of filers reported income of less than $200K [0]. An audit rate of 63% is lower than what one would expect if audit-attracting behavior was evenly distributed across the population.

0. https://www.irs.gov/statistics/soi-tax-stats-individual-stat...

adolphon The Age Verification Trap: Verifying age undermines everyone's data protection

Taxes also apply to services and information, not just goods. I just checked some invoices to double-check my recollection.

You have made a claim that age gating some online services is an "arbitrary idea." I don't see how that is different from taxes at all. Taxes are likewise an "arbitrary idea." Taxes are likewise a societal control measure.

There is no need for articles to explain a very straightforward truth. If you are unable to make the case for something, claiming unspecified writings elsewhere doesn't get you any further.

adolphon The Age Verification Trap: Verifying age undermines everyone's data protection

Yes, my spouse and I were very conscious of this. My kids are now at an age where some of the just-in-case tracking chafes and they ditch trackers and turn off location on their watch. Its a normal renegotiation that occurs as they pass through various maturity thresholds. The older of them has thusfar rejected phones and watches and uses Omarchy on an old Thinkpad.

adolphon The Age Verification Trap: Verifying age undermines everyone's data protection

Yes, afaik authentication is performed by applications at L7 and as such flows via Internet protocols like anything else.

All kinds of laws are applied to services provided via Internet. For example, once upon a time people said collecting sales tax was an insurmountable problem and a disaster for ecommerce. Time passes and what do you know, people figured out ways to comply with laws.

adolphon FreeBSD doesn't have Wi-Fi driver for my old MacBook, so AI built one for me

Plus zig!

  **Decision**: Use C for kernel interactions, Zig for pure logic only.

https://github.com/narqo/freebsd-brcmfmac/blob/be9b49c1bf942...

adolphon The Age Verification Trap: Verifying age undermines everyone's data protection

When everything is turned off by default, iOS Screentime is very effective. It also has effective tools for to grant certain exceptions, facilitated by Messages. It also distinguishes between "daytime" and "downtime" for the purpose of certain apps and app attributes, like the contact list. For example, we have ourselves, grandparents and the neighbors as "all the time" contacts but their friends as daytime only. They don't retain their devices at night but it is possible for them to pull them from the charging cabinet.

adolphon The Age Verification Trap: Verifying age undermines everyone's data protection

> holding parents accountable for what their children consume

There is a local dive bar down the street. I haven't expressly told my kids that entering and ordering an alcoholic drink is forbidden. In fact, that place has a hamburger stand out front on weekends and I wouldn't discourage my kids from trying it out if they were out exploring. I still expect that the bartender would check their ID before pulling a pint for them.

It takes a village to raise a child. There are no panopticons for sale the next isle over from car seats. We are doing our best with very limited tooling from the client to across the network (of which the tremendously incompetent schools make a mockery with an endless parade of new services and cross dependencies). It will take a whole of society effort to lower risks.

adolphon Voith Schneider Propeller

This is conceptually significant because the article links the mechanisms used in watercraft and aircraft.

adolphon Pocketbase lost its funding from FLOSS fund

It'd be interesting to get a patio11 perspective on what is or is not "standard KYC paperwork" in a trans-national transaction.

https://www.bitsaboutmoney.com/archive/kyc-and-aml-beyond-th...

adolphon 27-year-old Apple iBooks can connect to Wi-Fi and download official updates

> The UI looks so good. Why can’t we have good looking things anymore?

From the perspective of a Macintosh System 6 appreciator, OSX is kind of fussy with gratuitous details.

https://aaron.cc/opening-screenshots-from-a-vintage-macintos...

adolphon I converted 2D conventional flight tracking into 3D

I wonder how this could be inverted to display the "planes overhead" [0] (so little progress in 15 years) in AR similar to how SkyView [1] displays points of interest in space.

0. https://tech.yahoo.com/phones/article/2011-11-26-siri-wolfra...

1. https://www.terminaleleven.com/skyview/iphone/

adolphon Poor Deming never stood a chance

> Where Deming reads like a science paper, Drucker reads like an installation guide.

If you are looking for "do this" then Deming is not your person. If you seek understanding that drives transformation (knowing what to do in your context based on a broadly applicable value system), then Deming's system can deliver.

Lessons from the Red Bead Experiment include the fallacy of rating people and ranking them in order of performance for next year (based on previous performance), as well as attributing the performance of the system to the performance of the “willing workers” in this simulation of an organization governed by what Dr. Deming referred to as the “prevailing system of management.”

https://deming.org/explore/red-bead-experiment/

adolphon Poor Deming never stood a chance

Pray we never need statistical process controls for the mass manufacturing of military objectives.

Deming's exhortations exist because they are aspirational, essentially propaganda for his vision of organizational cybernetics. "Deming was part of the Teleological Society with Wiener, Turning, von Neumann, and others during and after the Second World War — one of the groups that was the precursor to the Macy Conferences and worldwide cybernetics movement that also led to the development of the Cybernetics Society." [0]

"[Deming's] view of cooperation stood in stark contrast to business as usual, which emphasized competition, even within one’s own company. Throughout his life, he demonstrated how even competitors working together benefited their respective companies and, more importantly, their customers." [1]

0. https://cybsoc.org/?page_id=1489

1. Willis, John. Deming's Journey to Profound Knowledge: How Deming Helped Win a War, Altered the Face of Industry, and Holds the Key to Our Future (p. 164). (Function). Kindle Edition.

adolphon A deep dive into Apple's .car file format

Hazard a guess that serializing demented data structures into something text encoded like json or yaml or XML/SOAP is no less painful than a straight binary representation aside from unfamiliarity of tooling to reason about and arbitrarily query the structure, like jq, lq, etc.

adolphon A deep dive into Apple's .car file format

When you build an app with Xcode, your .xcassets folders are compiled into binary .car files that ship with your application. . . . The “CAR” extension likely stands for “Compiled Asset Record” based on method names found in Xcode’s IBFoundation framework.

The article is well worth reading even without ingesting the specifics in order to follow the author's reverse engineering process.

adolphon Use protocols, not services

  None of this could happen with a protocol. You cannot require age 
  verification on IRC, XMPP, ActivityPub, Nostr, or Matrix, because there is no 
  single entity to compel. Each server operator makes their own decisions. A 
  government would need to individually pressure thousands of independent 
  operators across dozens of jurisdictions, which is a legislative and 
  enforcement impossibility. And even if one server complied, users would 
  simply move to another.

This is wishful thinking. A government would just move to the next layer of the stack and attack the supporting infrastructure, like DNS, payment services or datacenters. To the degree that a protocol is a manner of communication between things (fka services), those things can be made to comply with the prevailing legal authority.

adolphon Culture Is the Mass-Synchronization of Framings

Are those terms substantially different from the article's claims?

THe wikipedia definition of meme is "memes: ideas, behaviors, beliefs, and expressions." The author discusses frames and mental models as a topic [0]. "[A] framing is a choice of boundaries" and "A model is an analogy. It is a simplified simulation of something else." These seem to map to meme-concepts ideas and beliefs respectively and loosely. ("Frame" is probably a meta-meme or ontology that expands or contracts what memes can exist at all or what can be discerned at all.)

0. https://aethermug.com/posts/a-framing-and-model-about-framin...

adolphon The risk of a hothouse Earth trajectory

Thats great that you can correctly manage a compost pile. That level of conscientiousness is a quality that doesn't seem common across the population.

A positive thing about a landfill is that it can take advantage of centralization by capturing biogas created by the large quantities of biodegradable material deposited.

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S03603...

adolphon The risk of a hothouse Earth trajectory

Sorry to be a debbie-downer but

the composting process is also a source of greenhouse gas and air pollutant emissions.

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC9933540/

adolphon Officials Claim Drone Incursion Led to Shutdown of El Paso Airport

A non-aligned population will look out for their own interests and are aware that the attention of the US is temporary but the cuadillismo that lead to cartels are a durable cultural artifact.

  The Battle of Culiacán, also known locally as the Culiacanazo and Black 
  Thursday, was a failed attempt to capture Ovidio Guzmán López, son of Sinaloa 
  Cartel kingpin Joaquín "El Chapo" Guzmán, who was wanted in the United States 
  for drug trafficking.
  
  Around 700 cartel gunmen began to attack civilian, government and military 
  targets around the city, despite orders from Ovidio sent at security forces' 
  request. Massive towers of smoke could be seen rising from burning cars and 
  vehicles. The cartels were well-equipped, with improvised armored vehicles, 
  bulletproof vests, .50 caliber (12.7 mm) rifles, rocket launchers, grenade 
  launchers and heavy machine guns.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Culiac%C3%A1n

adolphon Medieval Monks Wrote over Ancient Star Catalog – Particle Accel Reveals Original

> However in premodern times pretty much all cities universally had negative population growth which would imply they weren’t particularly nice places to live if you had better options.

Your point is well taken although I must point out that for the above to be true the cities could never exist in the first place.

Depending on where you put the cut-off point of "premodern" the contact between precolumbian and European cultures in North America had some notion that people on the European side would sometimes immigrate to Indian culture but not vice versa. "The Down of Everything" by Graeber and Wengrow [0] goes into transcultural impacts at length. A more original source can be found in a letter by Ben Franklin in 1753 [1]:

  When an Indian Child has been brought up among us, taught our language and 
  habituated to our Customs, yet if he goes to see his relations and make one 
  Indian Ramble with them, there is no perswading him ever to return, and that 
  this is not natural to them merely as Indians, but as men, is plain from 
  this, that when white persons of either sex have been taken prisoners young 
  by the Indians, and lived a while among them, tho’ ransomed by their Friends, 
  and treated with all imaginable tenderness to prevail with them to stay among 
  the English, yet in a Short time they become disgusted with our manner of 
  life, and the care and pains that are necessary to support it, and take the 
  first good Opportunity of escaping again into the Woods, from whence there is 
  no reclaiming them.

0. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Dawn_of_Everything

1. https://teachingamericanhistory.org/document/letter-to-peter...

adolphon Waymo exec reveals company uses remote workers in the Philippines

I think this is a key question. In the May 2024 blog post about "fleet response" it sounds like Waymo has a lawyerly set of rules they follow to distinguish between remote operation and providing guidance to the self-driving system.

  Much like phone-a-friend, when the Waymo vehicle encounters a particular 
  situation on the road, the autonomous driver can reach out to a human fleet 
  response agent for additional information to contextualize its environment. 
  The Waymo Driver does not rely solely on the inputs it receives from the 
  fleet response agent and it is in control of the vehicle at all times.

  [...]

  Fleet response can influence the Waymo Driver's path, whether indirectly 
  through indicating lane closures, explicitly requesting the AV use a 
  particular lane, or, in the most complex scenarios, explicitly proposing a 
  path for the vehicle to consider. The Waymo Driver evaluates the input from 
  fleet response and independently remains in control of driving.

https://waymo.com/blog/2024/05/fleet-response

adolphon The Day the Telnet Died

The pattern points toward one or more North American Tier 1 transit providers implementing port 23 filtering

adolphon Jury told that Meta, Google 'engineered addiction' at landmark US trial

Would it be ironic if Meta and Google were required to add "a landing page that displays information about responsible [social media use]" similar to their policies regarding gambling ads (example below)?

https://support.google.com/adspolicy/answer/15132179?hl=en

adolphon Hard-braking events as indicators of road segment crash risk

  >> It's frustrating because . . .
  > Slow down a bit to create another buffer
  > I think if you reflect a bit you'll find

The parent post does return to the psycho-emotional layer of the problem but on the whole the exchange brings to mind the "two movies, one screen" model of perennial problems. In many of the comments here some people emphasize the problem in terms of physics and some see the problem in terms of psychology (both have overlap and are valid).

A third perspective may be "game theory." I think the Prisoner's Dilemma [0] could explain some aspects of the physical/mental problem. In the set below, Driver A's strategy isn't dependent on a singular predictable Driver B but all drivers that may perform the role of Driver B during the course of a commute.

  Agent       Cooperate     Defect
  Driver A    leaves space  doesn't
  Driver B^n  merge         stay

Leaving aside all times in which a Driver B must merge, such as lane ending zippers or merging to approach an exit lane, Driver B merges because there is some advantage to being in the lane of Driver A. If Driver A maintains space they will not just lose to one Driver B but to all Driver Bs.

I conjecture that this is a collective action problem and that above a certain traffic saturation point there must be a social taboo against changing lanes.

This is not to claim that individual perspective shifting is not important. I am reminded of Foster Wallace's Kenyon address "This is Water," [1] quoted below. However, the task of changing individual perspectives is vastly higher energy than the creation of a social taboo, which is why purity codes and other social inhibitors are so prevalent.

  If I choose to think this way in a store and on the freeway, fine. Lots of us 
  do. Except thinking this way tends to be so easy and automatic that it 
  doesn’t have to be a choice. It is my natural default setting. [...]
  
  The thing is that, of course, there are totally different ways to think about 
  these kinds of situations. [...] [Maybe] the Hummer that just cut me off is 
  maybe being driven by a father whose little child is hurt or sick in the seat 
  next to him, and he’s trying to get this kid to the hospital, and he’s in a 
  bigger, more legitimate hurry than I am: it is actually I who am in HIS way.

0. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prisoner's_dilemma

1. https://fs.blog/david-foster-wallace-this-is-water/