7402

The FCC does NOT need a search warrant to inspect radio equipment:

https://www.fcc.gov/reports-research/guides/inspection-fact-...

All normal countries spy on their enemies and all normal countries spy on their friends. All normal countries use cyber-espionage. All normal political groups condemn the actions of groups they oppose and excuse the same actions when committed by those they support.

It was three decades ago, but I read The Phantom Tollbooth and The Hobbit to my daughter around that age.

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