mNovak

One filing type they didn't mention, is SES-STA (Satellite Earth Station Special Temporal Authority) -- aka a temporary experimental license for user or gateway equipment. This is where the juice is, i.e. if they're testing out new models that haven't been announced yet, and if you're lucky includes some technical specs.

But they're hard to filter through because they file so many for uninteresting things too.

While this is also true, the article is more about the direct scam that is fundraising companies. These are in principle separate of the charity, basically running a call center and collecting the funds, and that company pockets 90% of the funds people think they're donating to the charity. Of course the 'charity' is aware of this and is complicit, either because they have no other means of fundraising, or (as seems to be the case in this article) the charity is also a scam, basically just having a good name to plug into the script.

Point is, it's more than just writing off parties and entertainment or high salaries, it's directly taking cash in pocket.

Yeah, also came here to point out Corelle. For many years I had a set of Corelle plates and bowls and such that they sold at Target, cheap and aimed at college students.

Likely there's a very mundane reason it hasn't replaced all standard glassware, such as being slightly more expensive or having limited design shapes/forms (thinking of the plates). This doesn't exactly strike me as "evil capitalism," just "throwaway culture". The difference is the consumer makes that choice when both options are available, but one is cheaper.

Just because something is important doesn't mean it has to be inconvenient. A lot of people conflate opening a business with a major life event and embarking on a career, where a few weeks of admin is some kind of minimum commitment. But the whole idea is that we should allow for small organic "side hustles" and growth.

Here in the US (at least in entrepreneurial circles) it's common advice to wrap an LLC around anything that involves money. Hobby website starting to get some traffic? LLC. Selling earrings at the craft fair? LLC. I own a small building with my brother--you bet there's an LLC there. I started a $0 capital consulting company while a post-doc, just to try.

It's not a daily occurrence, but often enough that I don't want to waste time.

The whole thing is a red herring. How many of these old antennas exist, maybe a dozen? At "25 homes" each, it doesn't meaningfully impact the cited 50 TWh need.

Sure the structure is free so why not, but even that needs maintenance, just ask Arecibo. It's unclear from the article if they plan to use these as sun-tracking panels, but the burden of that would make it rapidly economically unfeasible.

To be fair, the actual paper is much less grandiose [1]. This is just the usual pop-science breathless reporting.

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-024-44770-w

Well if we follow the historic development arc, frequency-scanning waveguide arrays would come next. Nicely, very minimal modification required, and you can start cranking up the antenna gain. Mostly just a physical fabrication challenge, which is hobby-approachable.

https://www.radartutorial.eu/06.antennas/Phased%20Array%20An...

14dBm EIRP is extremely low power for a radar however. Off the bat the author is using 1W (30dBm) PA, and you could readily get another 20dB from a moderate sized antenna (e.g. repurpose a scrap DirecTV dish).

Unless you're next to a base, it's the FCC that will come knocking long before the military.

Actually I could see this being very popular for wedding planning; something inherently collaborative, with clear categories, that people are actively trying to budget to a specific number. I mean yes, numerous spreadsheet templates exist for this, but you're basically selling a pleasant interface (it does look great!).

I have a harder time imagining this for business use cases, unless maybe you really focus on the approval/reimbursement flows.

>> Can other GNSS give usable timestamps? Seems like it'd be tricky for a jammer to target all of them

Actually the opposite; GNSS systems are all purposely designed to operate at virtually the same frequency (check out this figure [1]) while cleverly not interfering with each other. There are sub-bands within each constellation too (L1,L2,L5 etc) but it's very easy to pump out wideband noise across all the GNSS bands.

[1] https://www.researchgate.net/figure/The-spectrum-of-current-...

With synchronized receivers you could do some rudimentary direction finding. Note that synchronizing SDRs is much more achievable if they're physically nearby (e.g. can run a cable between them for a common clock) vs if they're physically distant observers (can't exactly use GPS time for synchronization if you're measuring GPS interference)

Like the article states, many people use GPS as a shorthand for GNSS generally. In any case, they're all at similar frequencies, so typically they'll all go out together if there's significant interference.

Michael Redmond, to my knowledge the highest ranked English-speaking Go player, does youtube analyses of Go matches, including Pro vs AI games, which are very insightful.

I wonder if the tiny unipolar motor in a quartz watch would have enough torque to spin a small half-character wheel. Those things are dirt cheap, and thin, so you could realistically drive each cell independently.

I'd just solder paste and reflow, like a large surface mount device. Challenging to get consistent no doubt, and the alignment would have to be very accurate (or have a few separate boards), but I think doable.

Seems like you could largely automate a workflow for identifying pads in the scan and generating the mirror layout, with simple routing to some kind of standardized interface for the probe lines.

I'm wondering if a 'bed of nails' approach could be used to eliminate the mechanical difficulty of the flying probes? Basically a grid of (many thousands) probes at some resolution, connecting to essentially the same switch matrix backend you already have.

In particular something like [1] might just have enough resolution. The 'probes' now are just pads on the sensing PCB. This converts it from a mechanical problem to a crazy high density PCB layout problem, which sounds like it'd be up your alley!

Heat cure for the anisotropic layer is annoying, and might make it a single-use solution (but that's not bad if you're selling the boards!)

Another 'just dumb enough to work' concept would be to take the board scans, and print a custom PCB of the same pad layout mirrored, and you can directly mount the two boards face-to-face. Basically a board level breakout, either to make the wire soldering easier, or better, again directly incorporate the netlisting hardware.

[1] https://www.3m.com/3M/en_US/p/d/b5005076018/

I agree some format to attach more metadata into schematics is useful, especially if enough good modules become easily available -- something as simple as "hey this is a 5V rated component" is nice not to have look up sometimes.

But to add to the wishlist of innovations in PCB layout; someone please give us better gerber editing/conversion tools. Geber strikes me as being very like pdf -- absolutely standard, well reproducible, but awful to edit in any way other than 'intended'.

The scroll segmentation looks like it'd be a very manageable task for distributed volunteer work too, at least as a kickstart if that's really the bottleneck now. Just a 100 or 1000 halfway dedicated volunteers (small by internet standards, for a useful and simple task) could make a big dent. Don't know how many scan layers are in a single scroll, but for instance Project Gutenberg's proofreading network has processed millions of pages, one by one.

A lot of people pointing out the various studies saying that plastic consumption increases after a bag ban; but isn't that expected in the short term? Everyone has to go buy 3-4 heavy reusable bags for the first time (or few times as they get used to the idea), that's obviously going cause a spike in plastic consumption, above a normal year of disposable bags. But the more meaningful question is if 5 years later, people are still buying excess heavy bags for a few uses or if the behavior actually adapts.

Looks great! I'll poke around--my dream is make a WH40k-like turn based strategy.. curious to see if this can handle sufficiently convoluted rules.

Looks really cool!

Just a quick note - The 'Live Demo' probably shouldn't be locked behind a login unless there's a good reason for it.

More broadly, do you plan to have general free courses? i.e. would I go to your site to hunt around for something interesting to learn, or are you always behind the scenes, and some third party is advertising their course to me (which uses this as a backend)? Just wondering about the marketplace; how/why I would end up on the site in the first place.

I thought for sure realtors would get the gig-economy treatment during the rise of Uber and AirBnb; just a person to handle showings while the mega-corp drops prices slightly and collects huge profits. Not sure if I'm happy or sad that they persist.

But to me the craziest part of it, is that in my experience 90% of people don't comparison shop for a realtor, they just go with that person their friend used. Those social referrals are the vast majority of realtors' deal flow. Consider also that when realtors' make referrals among themselves, the receiving agent will typical give a 30% commission split back to the referrer. So what I'm getting at is, there's basically $10k+ value decisions being thrown around essentially at random, and without any metrics or qualifications.

I was also definitely surprised this didn't already exist; but hey I never thought of it either! My apartment has a bunch of bookshelves with hanging bars in them (?) definitely not big enough for normal hangers unless you turn them sideways and lose a bunch of space.

On this design though, my biggest criticism would be that it requires the hanger to be leaning against the wall when folded, to not fall at an angle. While that's fine for the co-designed rack she has, it makes them a lot less useful on their own or in other randomly wall-to-rack spaced closets (even says so in the kickstarter).

The simple solution is to move the hook to be centered over the folded hanger, so it's balanced when folded. It'd look super goofy and not hang right unfolded, but that's probably fine. Surprised none of the prototypes tried that.

Mythbusters tested "talking to plants;" as I recall it did in fact work, loud music also caused greater growth than controls.

[1] https://vimeo.com/15521523

Interesting that much of the issue isn't necessarily the cables, rather the insuring of the cables

For me personally, the 'bad accounting' comes into play with contract work. You build some widget for customer, and if it's anything less than work-for-hire (i.e. you give customer a commercial license but retain copyright or some right to reuse your code in the future), that was research and gets amortized. Think like building or just modifying a Bootstrap template -- is that really "research"?

Maybe it's not concrete, but it feels like there's a difference between investing capex into a planned future product, and retaining some rights in the work you create for others.

I was also surprised how few comments there are. It has been making the rounds in the SBIR community, (you'll see that if you read a few public comments) but I saw almost no one mentioning the software side of it. I submitted one on behalf of my company. Others should too, it's really very easy to do.

The browser built-in blockers still seem to work. What would it take to defeat those?

How much power and weight budget will you have for payloads?

I work with a startup that's developing tech for very low power consumption RF beamforming; I think HALE applications seems like a natural fit. Feel free to DM if you want to chat.

I mean, I would settle for a simple RTS style 2D web interface! A lobby and match making, if I'm really ambitious.

Unit rules are a special problem--Wahapedia has a csv download of unit and weapon rules.. I think there were several thousand in 9th edition.