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kanbankaren

161 karma · joined April 3, 2024

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kanbankaren··on Gemini 3.8 text-to-speech
Probably.

I listened to some of the voices. The male voices are believable while all the female voices sound the same and artificial. For some reason, it also reminds me of the voices in Toy Story movies.

Bias in the training data?

kanbankaren··on HERMES radio enables voice and data communication over vast distances
What is the difference between the two?

A ham operator might put out 20W of ERP while a radio station operates at 100W though international broadcasters use upto 500 kW.

kanbankaren··on When AI Benchmarks Plateau: A Systematic Study of Benchmark Saturation
37 authors and contributors need to be named up top?

Oh! I got my name on a paper! I don't think there is much reward for it these days.

kanbankaren··on Show HN: Open-source engine running Gemma 4 26B in 2 GB RAM on any M-series Mac
Yes. Model would be limited in its performance, but it would perform well in the limited domain because LLM interpolate from training data. They don't think like humans.

We might think that knowledge from logc and discrete math would spill over to coding. Unfortunately, it doesn't seem to work like that. Even 1T parameter LLM fail on tasks if there are no variants of it in the training data.

kanbankaren··on Show HN: Open-source engine running Gemma 4 26B in 2 GB RAM on any M-series Mac
> Always curious when someone will figure out how we can elide most of the data from an LLM (but retain the logical ability). I don't actually need an LLM to have a very big internal knowledge base to be useful, so long as it can invoke a search tool...

I think this can be achieved already. Take a base model and train only on source code. In fact, the very early Granite models from IBM were like that though it didn't support reasoning which limited its performance.

You can do it too. I don't know how much it will cost to train on just source code repos. $10K in total? Not sure.

kanbankaren··on It's a shame what's happened to radio
I can receive it only during night.
kanbankaren··on It's a shame what's happened to radio
What a ridiculous comment!

Cellphone emergency broadcasts turned out to be not reliable during the Hawaiian Island fires.

RDS in FM has a special mode for emergency broadcasts and some countries use them. As FM signals easily cover a 50-75 mile radius, the coverage area is huge versus cellular emergency broadcasts requiring the towers to be powered on which have also failed during natural disasters.

kanbankaren··on It's a shame what's happened to radio
Hey,

I can receive RNZ on shortwave on the East Coast of USA! About 10,000 miles away if we count the signal bouncing multiple times between the ionosphere and the ground.

kanbankaren··on It's a shame what's happened to radio
My current Android phone has a FM radio that doesn't even require a wired headphone as the FM antenna is built-in. If you connect your BT headset, the FM station is heard through the BT headset in full stereo.

Of course, it is a Chinese brand who haven't forsaken FM radios. Apparently, Europeans still prefer a FM radio on their smartphones that Chinese brands that sell in Europe still retain them.

Here in USA, people don't seem to care about radio.

kanbankaren··on A Road to Lisp: Which Lisp
It is already typed. Types are optional. I think types have been available for the last 30 years? Check the specs.
kanbankaren··on A voxel Tokyo in real Japan time – ride the Yamanote line and study Japanese
Don't be smartass. My question was how to change pitch? Most people can't change their pitch unless they have been trained. I can't speak with the pitch of child or woman. Neither are most people.
kanbankaren··on A voxel Tokyo in real Japan time – ride the Yamanote line and study Japanese
How would you pitch-up?

Does the entire Japanese population learn these things while growing up?

kanbankaren··on Reading the news is the new smoking
You drank the kool aid.

Even for USA,

1. The 90s were the most violent period in terms of crime.

2. Corruption has neither increased or decreased in the last decade.

3. Other than the 2020 election during the pandemic, the number of votes cast has increased in every election contrary to your claim.

kanbankaren··on Reading the news is the new smoking
> we’re still in the situation of today.

What situation are you talking about?

The world is less violent, more affluent than 30 years ago, but appears to be the opposite due to 24/7 news cycle.

kanbankaren··on Elastic lays off 7% of employees
> I also think that concepts like debt to GDP ratio are somewhat detached from corporate policies.

Corporate policies ultimately decide growth. More growth leads to higher profits and higher tax collected by the Government which in turn means they don't have to borrow more.

kanbankaren··on Elastic lays off 7% of employees
> many parts of the Japanese system of hiring for life

This is a terrible strategy. It encourages inefficiency to metastasize throughout the company.

No wonder Japan is stuck in a rut since the 90s and its debt-to-GDP ratio is 205% which is one of the highest in the world.

Your romantic idea of Japan would get destroyed by just browsing www.reddit.com/r/japanlife/

Japan has one of the worst work culture and low productivity in the world.

kanbankaren··on VibeThinker: 3B param model that beats Opus 4.5 on reasoning with novel SFT+GRPO
Qwen 3.5 9B Q4_K_M solved this using 10K tokens in 5 mins on a RX 7600.

The answer is exactly what you have posted. I am impressed by Qwen!

kanbankaren··on I replaced Spotify with a homemade FM radio station
Terrible in one word.

The bandwidth for AM transmissions in North America is only 20 kHz and radio emissions has to STRICTLY fall within that bandwidth. Technically, it allows an audio BW of 10 kHz, but in practice it is close to 4 kHz which is telephone quality.

Not suitable for Music.

kanbankaren··on Why are so many young people getting cancer?
[Trailer park Boys. I would give $50 if you delete your post.gif]
kanbankaren··on I replaced Spotify with a homemade FM radio station
You drank the aptX kool aid and forgot the fidelity loss along the signal path.

FM broadcasts do a high pass at 50 Hz and stop at 15 kHz. The best SNR is only ~50 dB which is already achieved by plain old SBC. There is no need for higher fidelity audio codecs like AAC/aptX/aptX HD/LDAC besides the fact that most smartphones don't support aptX or aptX HD.

kanbankaren··on I replaced Spotify with a homemade FM radio station
Yep. It is mostly nostalgia as there isn't anything better than an AI curating a million songs based on our like/dislikes, but on a macro level, we are at the mercy of people who tune these algorithms.

Are we being 'nudged' to like certain genres or musicians because they are being promoted? Of course, this could happen with a DJ or traditional FM station too, but with centralized AI, you impart that 'nudging' on literally millions of people.

kanbankaren··on I replaced Spotify with a homemade FM radio station
You don't even need a Raspberry PI.

You can simplify it even further. List of things you need.

1. Smartphone or DAP.

2. Car Bluetooth FM Transmitter (~$20)

3. USB to 12 V car adapter(~$10)

4. Existing FM radio.

You can set this up in 5 minutes. Connect the smartphone/DAP using BT or AUX cable. Select a free FM channel and you are ready to go.

Also, in the photos, the FM antenna is fully extended which is unnecessary as these FM transmitters put out plenty of RF power.

P.S. On AliExpress, you can buy both for < $15 while on Amazon it is around $30.

P.P.S. Just the USB FM transmitter is only $5 on AE. For the cost of a cup of Coffee!

kanbankaren··on LLMs are eroding my software engineering career and I don't know what to do
> There are many ways to interpret regulation,

Then the rules should enumerate all the ways. From your posts, you come across as if programmers don't know what they are doing which is insulting to those who work in mission critical industries like aviation where a programmer could be criminally charged if he/she didn't implement the specs STRICTLY.

kanbankaren··on Do transformers need three projections? Systematic study of QKV variants
It confused me too.

A n-tuple notation would have been more readable and mathematically accurate like (Q=K, V), (Q, K=V), and (Q=K=V).

kanbankaren··on I'm Getting into Mesh Networks (Meshtastic, MeshCore, and Reticulum)
> They would probably need some robust, non-problematic kit that could work in any environment.

Nothing is more robust than ham radio at 144/420 MHz. Even first responders use frequencies adjacent to this and has the same RF propagation characteristics.

For S&R teams, you could apply for LMR license. It is valid for 10 years.

kanbankaren··on I'm Getting into Mesh Networks (Meshtastic, MeshCore, and Reticulum)
For emergency comms(remember, emergency services provided by the state don't monitor the ham bands, so can't call them), a $20 ham radio would work or just carry FRS radios.

FCC does allow use of a ham radio in a real emergency without a license.

kanbankaren··on The Emacsification of Software
Surprised that Monaspace hasn't been mentioned below.

https://monaspace.githubnext.com/

kanbankaren··on BYOMesh – New LoRa mesh radio offers 100x the bandwidth
> would propagate about the same right?

No. Free space loss increases with frequency.

FSP loss for 915 MHz at 10 kms is ~ -111.67 dB while for 2.4 GHz is -120 dB.

That is a 9 dB loss which is significant. It could mean the difference between a copy or just plain static though the LoRa is supposed to be copyable down to -140 dBm.

The max tx power is around 150 mW (21.76 dBm), so at 10 kms, the RSSI is 21.76-120 = -98.24 dBm which is above the -140 dBm limit.

This calculation is assuming there is no loss due to vegetation or humidity or other barriers.

kanbankaren··on Good Sleep, Good Learning (2012)
There is some new scientific finding that in deep sleep, fluids from the brain drain out and if that flushing doesn't happen, it might lead to Alzheimer's disease.

You should at least monitor your deep sleep using a smartwatch. Less than 1.5 hours and I would be worried.

kanbankaren··on Good Sleep, Good Learning (2012)
0 regrets now doesn't mean 0 regrets decades later.
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