mikewarot

I took a video I shot back during Covid, stripped the audio, and threw it into a quickly composed GNU Radio flowgraph, and it sure looks like there are a few doppler curves in it, and you can almost hear a propeller plane around 150 seconds in... I live near a small airport, it was a nice sunny day, so someone surely was out flying.

I need a better spectrograph to be sure.

Given the leverage of LLMs, it could be a kid in Chicago just doing it for shits and giggles.

In the age of personal super-empowerment, there doesn't have to be a rational reason anymore.

Manual computational photography. Use any random digital camera with a deep field of focus, take many photos from slightly different viewpoints, then use Hugin (the panorama stitcher) to manually align on items in the desired focal plane. Then use it to project all the images to the same virtual focal plane. Then a little python script to average the images into the output. Crop and see if there are adjustments needed, repeat.

Here are a few examples on my Flickr account: https://flickr.com/photos/---mike---/albums/7217772029791881...

The images that focus on the Wrigley Building or the Tribune Tower in Chicago have a virtual aperture of about 10 feet across. For most subjects it's more like 6-12 inches in diameter.

I used to do the manual picking of point pairs on the train while commuting to Chicago. It was quite relaxing.

Repair of a Collins 651S-1 receiver. The 65-95 mhz vco module is bad, but if you over damp the pll loop filter it does eventually lock and receive properly. I found a similar but not identical replacement from a different model receiver. It lacks one of the two DC tracking signal outputs but I added an op amp based circuit to simulate the missing signal.

The loop is stable and responsive when receiving from 17 to 29.9999 Mhz, but not much below that... Almost got it

I think the "electromigration" part of this is a red herring. It seems perfectly plausible after reading this report that improper construction and low safety factors were the cause of the collapse.

Yes, side channel attacks are sneaky, and always end up leveraging someone's hubris, with huge effort.

If you rely on an encryption machine that can't give the same letter on the output as the input, and the next thing you know, after millions of zł and £ and $ of effort, including capturing a submarine in the middle of the ocean before it sinks, others are reading your encrypted messages.

You isolate your Uranium enrichment facility in the middle of Iraq with guards, barbed wire, and pretty good security, but someone is able to slink in, put a passive monitoring probe on the 3 phase power going into your facility, and sneak it back out a few months later... and then they do an FFT, then measure the peaks to back-compute the speed of each stage's centrifuge, and the next thing you know, they can tell exactly how well things are going for you (read about that on Slashdot more than a decade ago! Possibly related[1])

If you put all your data through a digital computer, someone may use Van Eck phreaking to spy on your video output, or other emissions. If they have the right gear in range. Getting that gear in range again usually entails the results of large sums of effort.

Sure, it's possible to leak info out the data lines going from a CPU to RAM with a properly formatted set of patterns. If you don't even try to isolate that CPU from an ingress of control, however, you don't need that high effort strategy, you just need a good North Korean hacker working from the other side of the globe.

Folks, we mostly solved the ingress of control problem back in the 1970s, and it was getting folded into Multics as multilevel, capability based, security. But, the folks at Bell Labs, and many other places (MOST other places, and almost all of us, myself included) decided that security wasn't really important. That's why we're in this mess today, not because of idiots with LLMs and too much money.

We're in this because Operating Systems that rely on ambient authority can not ever be made secure.

Unix, Linux, Windows, and all the rest are unfit for purpose in the era of persistent Internet. We need to undo that local minima decision back from the era of paying by the minute for dialup connections to the BBS, and before every computer was networked. It's going to suck, but it's likely to be a Y2K level problem, not impossible.

[1] https://web.archive.org/web/20170828055815/https://www.washi...

Indiana says hold my beer....

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indiana_pi_bill

I was trying to emphasize that it's quite unlikely that traits from unrelated models will be consistent. Things learned about the internals of ChatGPT's weights are unlikely to help you with those of Grok, for example.

Is there any chance that the plague of Flock sensors could be used to help track the radio tags?

I believe that AI is being massively underpriced, in an economically unsustainable manner. There will be less of it, but the hardware to run it locally will get much cheaper.

I believe that AI is going to take some jobs, just like automation of data handling means we no longer have typists, file clerks, etc.

I believe that AI should stand for alien intelligence, as it's essentially a random set of weights that's been trained on a trillion bytes of text, for a trillion passes. Think of it as speed-running evolution. Each new AI should be seen as coming from a different star system.

I believe that we can radically reduce the power requirement for AI with a different computing architecture that removes the distinction between RAM and CPU.

> following too closely

Having ended up in the middle of a 5 car sandwich going to last years VCFMW, I've learned we all collectively fail to understand that the car in front of us can be stopped, in addition to using it's own brakes.

AI is massively underpriced at the present time. That's what's driven adoption so hard, along with the hype.

Once that ends, the prices will rise, quite a bit, and this will cause demand destruction, possibly causing most?? of the big players to fail. The thing is, even if we end up awash in AI hardware and RAM, the power to run it is a major part of the cost, and that's not going to get cheaper.

So, in a few years, there will be far, far less AI in use. We'll all be fine.

It seems to me that some of the complaints in the article were hardware related, not really software.

>Blue Screen of Death >Windows had extreme stability issues for most of my childhood.

I was a Windows system administrator from 1997 through 2013. In the beginning, we had issues with the blue screen of death in Office Professional and Windows 98. It turned out that when HP wrote their printer drivers for the LaserJet 4000 printers, they used an optimizing compiler, and it dynamically loaded floating point emulation.... and let it get unloaded, thus when you needed to compute page layout to print.... blue screen of death.

Once I solved that, we never had problems again, for over a decade!

Once we got to Office 2000 Professional, we stopped upgrading, and enjoyed 12 years of stability.

The only real problems were with the gigabytes of email people kept around, most of it in their "Deleted Items" folder, used as a filing cabinet, and the Exchange server that was full. They wouldn't let me buy a spare machine for to test out the email server backups, which naturally turned out to be a prayer in the end. 8(

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>Nothing was secure Nothing has changed, it's still not secure, no matter your choice of OS. We're not running HURD or Genode on everything, or even Qubes. It's ambient authority everywhere, which is nuts in an era of persistent megabit internet.

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>Software came on unreliable physical media That's what backups are for. I had a folder of all my CDs, that was included in my system backups. So, I could restore the domain server, restore the backup filesystems, then reinstall everything, without using any media other than the Windows Server CD (actually, a copy of it, with the serial number written on it)

That Office 2000 install should still work today, without buying it again. It's unlikely to get memory holed.

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>Give me higher-level programming languages that abstract common pitfalls from C and C++.

Yep... Turbo Pascal, then Delphi, and now Lazarus/Free Pascal have done that since the beginning.

At least if I could still work, there's a chance I could hold on. It sucks being medically frail.

And yes, I do care about society in general, and societal collapse.... what worries me is that the right seems bent on taking away the social safety net that's keeping me alive, and the left seems to be worried about not making waves.

I'm retired too, but I'm worried that if enough people end up unemployed that'll break social security, and the markets and everyone's retirement accounts.

I'm medically out of the labor market, if SS disappears, I will end up homeless.

The weird limit they put on Social security contributions is strangling the system.

I object to the inclusion of mRNA based treatments into the category of Vaccine.

According to wikipedia, the mechanism they (the mRNA based treatments) use is:

  In contrast, mRNA vaccines introduce a short-lived[58] synthetically created fragment of the RNA sequence of a virus into the individual being vaccinated. These mRNA fragments are taken up by dendritic cells through phagocytosis.[59] The dendritic cells use their internal machinery (ribosomes) to read the mRNA and produce the viral antigens that the mRNA encodes.[4] The body degrades the mRNA fragments within a few days of introduction.[60] Although non-immune cells can potentially also absorb vaccine mRNA, produce antigens, and display the antigens on their surfaces, dendritic cells absorb the mRNA globules much more readily.[61] The mRNA fragments are translated in the cytoplasm and do not affect the body's genomic DNA, located separately in the cell nucleus.[1][62]

So, it's a short lived, self limited gene therapy, not a vaccine. It hijacks the patients own cells to provoke an immune response. If the cells hijacked happen to be in tissue other than the intended injection site, via blood circulation, for example... you can (and sometimes do) have things like heart tissue being attacked by the immune system, with health altering results.

We shouldn't let the category of vaccines include these treatments. It obscures informed consent in a manner that seems to border on deception for better marketing purposes.

I'm building a data diode, with a pair of Raspberry Pi B+ computers for inside and outside proxy servers. I've got the first Pi booting, and am installing various Linux tools to get familiar with it.

I've been spouting off on the advantages of air gaps and data diodes from a theoretic perspective for more than a decade, I decided it's time to get my hands dirty.

I'll be open sourcing the whole thing, and writing code by hand in Free Pascal, the language I'm most familiar with.

Controversial opinion: It's an operating systems design issue, not a language issue. It's what you get for using OSs built on ambient authority, instead of default deny and capabilities, for 30 years past the point it was obvious they weren't fit for purpose in the internet era.

Back when I was still in the labor force, it looked fascinating, I'm not sure what I would actually do with an infinite supply of 1-2" poles, but it sure seems like fun.

Why do you need to retrain? You've got a specific idea to test, just keep exploring the edges of what's possible on a low budget as a side project, and keep your day job. Cultivate friendships and knowledge of equipment at your local hackerspace, and you'll be quite surprised what can be done on the very cheap.

If you want to keep things private, you can get 5 axis desktop CNC machines for about $5000, really good 3d printers for $2000, electronics to measure/control just about anything dirt cheap thanks to jelly bean parts and super-powerful microcontrollers.

Well, we could burn megatons of liquid sodium in the exhaust streams of aircraft in the stratosphere as a holding action. It sounded crazy at first... but the science checks out, so far.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ST49jDo4d-Q

If I didn't lose 98% of my endurance to long covid, I'd be doing some coppicing[1] for fun. Growing an infinite supply of sticks for making wattle sounds like fun.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coppicing

Tangent time: I've got a smaller one in my yard, and I've got a set of feathers and wedges to avoid having to dig it all up at once. Here's a video of someone using feathers and wedges to split granite.

https://youtu.be/s7_z-SGxUAs?si=vUKYBWYvG7nncszd&t=924

I'm trying to find the original very informative video from a decade or so ago, but I've found this pdf[1], which mentions the heart of the mechanism as a disk/spring on page 19. Some product training in this pdf[2] touches on the mechanism as well, as does page 39 and 156 of this pdf[3]

Here's a PDF from Wyler's own site[4] about the Zerotronic, with the mention of the "pendulum" on page 7.

[1] https://ftp.wylerag.com/Downloads1/WYL_e_wyler.pdf

[2] https://www.someco.fr/wp-content/uploads/2021/08/zerotronic_...

[3] https://symetrie.fr/wp-content/uploads/2023/09/WYLER_Catalog...

[4] https://www.wylerag.com/fileadmin/pdf/manuel/zero_e.pdf

I feel like we're reliving the late 1790s again, back then you had Ramsden figuring out how to divide the circle into into seconds of arc, taking the marking of scales from an artform into something that could be manufactured reliably. Maudslay with his thread cutting lathe took the making of screws from a manual process pawned off on apprentices to something that that could be done in mass production. Wilkinson's boring machine made it possible for Watt to build a pressurized steam engine.

All of these tools are based on things that were one-offs of earlier efforts, and turned into practical machine tools by someone that history chose to remember. We're now at the point where making things by manipulating individual atoms is something a determined amateur can do, it's amazing!

I find myself fascinated by the Wyler Inclinometer, which uses a thin copper disk with spiral arms as the basis of a differential capacitor, and when complete, resulting in a device that can used to calibrate a granite surface plate. It can typically measure 1 micron/meter of deviation.

We now have 3d printers that can reliably make almost anything you want by fusing filament, or stereolithography, or fusion of metal powders. You can buy desktop 5 axis CNC machines. There are control systems available to let you build almost any type of machine tool you can imagine, in as many axis as you want.

We've got software defined radio, cheap atomic clocks, transistors that can switch megawatts, all within reach of a hobbyist.

What an amazing time to be alive.

When I was working as a machinist making gears, I read through the books I had from the 1632 Series by Eric Flint on rotation, by the time I got back to a story, there were new details I'd notice, over and over.

The books stayed there because I got Covid back in 2020, and I didn't get back to pick them up. Since Eric's death, the series is in some sort of limbo, and my attention span isn't what it used to be with Long Covid. 8(

I miss Mike Sterns and the whole world he moved to, though.

To get the downforce a set of retractable skirts comes down to touch the ground around the body of the car. They're consumables.

The debris that would get thrown out the back going down the road would be a serious hazard.

Where did you read that they didn't see any ROI? I find that highly unlikely.

They don't hire filing clerks any more. They don't have rooms full of people doing manual computation, of typing out monthly bills to mail to customers. That's a huge workforce reduction.

The US Steel Gary works went from about 60,000 workers down to about 3000 thanks to process automation in the early 1960s.

It was a huge payoff for those who automated.

If every update required a manual power cycle, almost all of the internet would be off, most waiting for one of the far too few technical staff to cycle it back on manually.

Our phones wouldn't wake us up in the morning, as they too would be off.

I used Turbo Pascal to build an application that recorded the inspection of Fire Protection Equipment using a handheld computer, special serial card, and a PC back in the days of MS-DOS.

I never would have said that Turbo Pascal built the application. I'd not say that any compiler builds an finished application, but it's merely a tool along the way.

The same should be true of AI. It took a person to come up with the prompt "On a dark desert highway, Cool Whip and a Bear", even if the image was generated AI.