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As Krusty the Clown on The Simpsons once said:

"They drove a dump truck full of money up to my house, I’m not made of stone!"

I've been meaning to come up with my own digital voice signaling system.

Thanks, it's an interesting hobby. Technically interesting, but unfortunately I think a lot of the politics of it turn people off.

But then you're no longer in the noise floor. That makes you triangulable and bomb-able.

A bunch of farmers that go shooting drunk. /s

Seriously though, everyone back in the 1700s realized that all Americans were American. I'm not sure that's true any more.

Seriously though, given all the NSA has done: Could the NSA launch a "beach head" inside Apple?

Ham radio Amateur Extra. The license after Technician and then General.

The RTLSDR is an easy way to see if you'd like radio or not.

With networks like meshtastic there's this sweet spot of density. Not enough density, no message throughput. Too much density, also no message throughput.

It's one of these things where for the early adopters it worked great, but then the late adopters got pissed off because it didn't work.

As for meshtastic: I'm one god damned fucking hop away from my friend through a repeater. And it doesn't fucking work!

My point is that if you can't do spread spectrum, you've got to think about creative ways to get messages out. Something in the noise floor looks promising even if it's not fast. Further I've seen designs for WSPR that allow the radio to be something like a TTL buffer chip.

If you "announce" yourself you become a target for the signal intelligence folks. Sat phones became a liability in the 2nd gulf war, as they lit up like a beacon saying: "Bomb goes here!".

Why bother? Just jam the fucking hell out of it. Most critical infrastructure is not on the ISM bands.

Triangulation is damn easy. If the US can put on bomb on a suspect satellite phone user back in the 2000's (and they did!), they can certainly send a bomb on that today.

Sat phones during the second gulf war (maybe even the first) became a liability. The transmission lit them up like a god damn beacon saying, "Bomb goes here!".

>Isn't stopping abuses of the power of the military the reason for the 2nd Amendment?

It was for establishing well ordered militias. They could be used to help defend the country in a time of war.

> Why don't the people in Minnesota go open carry and let ICE agents think twice before drawing their weapons on people?

Most of the demonstrators believe that "the pen is mightier than the sword", and non-violence is the way to achieve political means. (Ghandi, MLK jr.)

When the peace-niks start amassing guns, that's when you have a tipping point in this country.

A military won't be killing all Americans, just the ones it can label as "terrorists" to the people who elected them.

No, just blast the hell out of the ISM bands on which they operate. This seem certainly feasible for a military apparatus the size of the US.

$50 RTLSDR Kit

https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0CD7558GT

I got this to play around with what's on the air, and now I'm a full blown extra.

But did all the nodes and repeaters update to the version of meshtastic with routing? Meshcore started with routing out of the box.

I don't think it's the noise that's too high, my original understanding of the meshtastic 2.0 protocol (from this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7v6UbC5blJU) was that an edge device would receive priority. So the message might go the wrong direction, say. Or, worse, a meshtastic radio in a basement might get priority.

Because they didn't understand (or care about) network topologies from the start and reliable message transmission, not to mention the versions of devices that are still on their network, I'm guessing it's gonna be a couple more years before they finally get their act together.

States like Iran have signal catchers, where they can get a rough idea where a signal is coming from through triangulation. The US military has had this for over 20 years now. Often these coordinates are fed in as targets into weapons systems.

If you're going the radio route these come to mind:

Meshtastic: 1W, one band, local. Useful if Iran doesn't know about it. But easy to jam and probably triangulate.

Wifi Halow: 1W, can possibly hop between bands, but probably also really easy to jam and triangulate.

WSPR: Possibly good, transmitters can hide in the noise floor, and can go long distances with 100mW of power, but slow. Probably triangulable, very easy to jam once located in the spectrum. Data can be transmitted and received with off the shelf components.

Military Radios: Very good. Transmitters can frequency hop, making triangulation and jamming difficult. Also encryption. You can easily transmit in the same frequency space that Iran would be using to avoid jamming. But also, mostly unobtanium. I have heard stories about US military radios showing up at Ham Fests.

The people who wanted A created B. It's not really a conflation but more of a causal reality.

The untrained eye at a distance can't tell the difference between the snake and the poo emoji.

I've been on Zepbound and Wegovy, and n=1. It seems like the more complex the flavors (at least to me) the less appealing the food is.

So Doritos is too much. A butter or white cheese puffed corn snack tastes pretty good -- but I don't crave them.

Again shenanigans. This is an arguing technique from the bitcoin maximalists who would proclaim something to be false when a google search would show otherwise.

You've drank some kind of kool-aid. You've been gaslit. Don't do it to the rest of us.

https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=65564#

Or maybe he's going to stick around to watch the fireworks. Milk the company for a few more months before it goes into regulation.

It's also possible he lied about his end date to throw suspicion off. Or he may be still working for the company and used someone else's resignation to pin the blame on them.

> We can't know how much power AI uses.

I call shenanigans on this statement. We can and most certainly can tell how much power AI is using. The upper bound is the total datacenter usage.

At work there was only one way to test a feature, and that was to deploy it to our dev environment. The only way to deploy to dev was to check the repo into a branch, and deploy from that branch.

So one branch had 40x "Deploy to Dev" commits. And those got merged straight into the repo.

They added no information.

But isn't that a self-inflicted wound then? I mean is there some reason your devs decided not to fix the DB cluster? Or did management tell you "Eh, we have other things we want to prioritize this month/quarter/year?"

This seems like simply not following the rules with having a monorepo, because the DB Cluster is not running the version in the repo.

There is some issues with "boomers" and "toxic culture". Ham radio can be pretty toxic -- but you have to find the groups that have the knowledge but don't have the toxicity. There is a stigma to being a Ham these days -- often well deserved I think. You can find lots of youtube videos of toxic hams on the air. Or you know facebook forums.

But those people aren't the experts typically. The experts have their own community, friendships, etc. They'll be super nice, and they might speak up, but they expect to have polite conversation. And if the forum is a shit show, they'll take their expertise elsewhere.

> charge at least 5-10x more for wildly different hardware, use hundreds of times more power, etc

So I think what's super interesting is that it not necessarily need to be 5-10x more, nor needs hundreds of times more power.

I'll start with the power argument first.

WSPR (pronounced "whisper") often uses 100mW transmissions and can be heard across the globe in the HF spectrum. The techniques for reception can pull the signal out of the noise. It's common for weather balloons to send telemetry this way. People use it to monitor band conditions as well.

The trick is that WSPR puts all the power into one signal approximately 6hz wide. That's why it's so efficient, and one reason why it can be heard across the globe with such low power. Now you're probably not going to get that distance in the 900Mhz ISM band, but you will be heard further if you so choose (or need to be).

As per cost?

100mW assuming a 75ohm antenna (dipole) is 36mA of current. For 1W (which is roughly the ISM limit) it's 115mA of current, so the components won't need to be high power, probably jelly bean parts.

The RTLSDR is $25 bucks with 2.4Mhz bandwidth which is way overkill for this.

Lots of microcontrollers are cheap.

There's engineering cost and time, sure, but Meshtastic did show that a need for reliable mesh low power messaging exists even if it's not the final form.

Here's a thought experiment. Remember, there's only one channel.

Let's say you have 100 meshtastic nodes in a residential valley. And you have 1 meshtastic repeater up on a mountain overlooking the valley (or it could be on a radio tower or water tower, say).

So it's clear that most of these nodes won't see each other because terrain, housing, trees, etc.

But it is possible that the repeater may have clear line of sight to most of them. And that's where the hidden node problem lies.

And adding more nodes and more repeaters is not going to help. The problem is either solved by increasing the number of channels (hence the sdr angle) or by time division multiplexing the single channel and coordinating who can talk at what time. The first is easy. The second is much harder.

If you're monitoring 20 channels, which you would need to do anyway, you'll know which channels to transmit on.