FYI: Text sometimes work when calls don’t. Text use much less bandwidth.

Sure… but… not all municipalities let you text 911. And with the way modern phones are being implemented with VoIP+LTE and iMessage/RCS and some of the very exciting failure modes of modern networking… I’m having a very real concern that even if my municipality lets me text 911 (I don’t remember offhand but I think mine does) that if I actually needed to dial 911 under relatively prosaic emergencies like a silly little power outage, I might be out of luck.

I’m not convinced on the cell phone thing. Every time there’s even a minor thing around where I am, like a dinky little power outage, everybody grabs their cellphone and my service goes to crap, so much so that when I’ve tried to work through a power outage with my phone, I’ve worked out of my wife’s car after having driven somewhere that does have power.

Also, a standard ham radio uses a lot less power than the entire chain of phone plus network equipment. So, sure, there’s cell tower trucks with generators but a ham rig needs a dinky little solar panel.

I guess it depends on your aspirations and where you live?

A radio that can hit the bands longer than the 10 meter band is pricey. Which is why Ham has traditionally been the sort of hobby that a distinguished older white gentleman does, not a thing for regular people.

On the other hand, a cheap VHF/UHF handheld radio can be really quite cheap (Baofeng radios being an example). You will only be able to talk to the local area but most areas have a repeater in convenient geographic locations (mountaintops, ideally) that will listen on one frequency and then transmit at higher power on another frequency so that you can reach a wider area. So in my area for the EmComm use-case, there’s a whole organized VHF/UHF system of volunteers.

Oh yeah, and you can also screw around with putting custom firmware on WiFi devices or Meshtastic in Ham mode.

I dono… I’d like to think that there’s useful things especially these days to be done with Ham radio and that it’s not just a thing that is just for distinguished older white gentlemen, but it’s kinda hamstrung (LOL, pun) by the present-day audience that’s preventing people from seeing what it could be.

Funny you ask because I literally just got my ham license because of this.

Radio works without infrastructure. Okay there’s some ham stuff that is internet-connected et al but overall you are just spewing radio waves into the ether with a variety of simple encodings and someone else can pick them up. So powering a few radios off of a dinky solar panel and battery combo is no biggie, whereas powering cell towers, routing infrastructure, et al is a bunch of generators that need to be fueled and whatnot.

Like… you can hit the 20-meter-and-longer wavelengths with a radio and a random bit of wire and some ingenuity and get your signal all over the place. And the maximum power you are ever allowed is 1500 watts and most folks can make do with far less power than that.

Also, amateur radio has fun stuff to do other than mere EmComm needs. Part of why Twitter used to be handy in a pinch for lesser-disasters in days past was that it could be used for EmComm needs but also had other fun stuff to be done with it. Things that are “just” for EmComm infrastructure tend to get forgotten about and abandoned and rot away to nothingness.

A lot of areas in the US have ARES/RACES orgs to provide an already organized group of people… but some of the fun games that hams play like POTA/SOTA, Field Days, et al also serve to make it fun to have a portable setup.

The last time the fires hit my area I was watching the fire progress via Purple Air sensors. If this one sensor was still sending, then my friend’s place up in the mountains was probably OK. Seems … kinda obvious almost?

So… I’m not sure if this is an entirely rational thought.

I’d always wanted to do ham radio but hadn’t bothered. Before my time, ham radio let you do amazing things that weren’t otherwise very easy. Like have a group chat with a bunch of people all over the world. Except when I was looking for things to do, you could get on the Internet and chat with a bunch of people all over the world … without the antennas and hardware and all.

Lately some stuff happened and my spouse’s friend who lives near Asheville NC and lived through the flooding there where ham radio was the only working form of communications, so my spouse got pressured into buying a radio, which means that I got myself a license because … well, radio works without much infrastructure?

Mostly I figure I needed to fill the void that was getting on Twitter if something happened locally.

My household celebrates two different winter-related holidays, Christmas included.

I have some connectors there on my ESPHome devices to string up intelligent LED strands. I even got some RGBW LED strands so that I can have more pleasant-looking lights.

I’ve got a fake tree and some other decorations, plus a blob of older LED and incandescent strands.

…and I just haven’t felt any real holiday spirit the past few years so none of it’s been put up.

The hard-to-solve problem with the news is that reporting on suicides causes suicide (as in: more people commit suicide, not just people who were on the ledge decided to go) yet people also want to know things.

I’m unclear if the usual disclaimers added to the article actually help or just are the only sounds-like-it-might-help thing that comes to mind so at least the publisher can feel better about the added deaths that, statistically speaking, they might be causing. I just remember it being covered in one of my college gened classes and the way it was presented was that everybody threw up their hands in frustration and gave up.

An acquaintance who screwed up her leg really bad and went through a whole process of getting bolted back together et al decided that she wasn’t going to tell people what happened. Because everybody always asks “how’d you do it?” as if it was some curse that she had personally triggered that they could avoid. And I thought about how the first question in my mind was “how’d you do it?” and I guess it made me think about the inanity of making sure to check for flying herring while traveling backwards hanging out the window of a train going between Albuquerque and Phoenix after having signed up for a triple indemnity life insurance plan… or something like that.

The only exception, of course, is you are doing something that the news orgs consider “wrong” like doing drugs or being certain categories of mentally ill or riding a bicycle for transportation.

I’d ended up having a conversation with an archivist about the somewhat related question of “What was the Soviet Union’s history of itself, absent the editorializing that the rest of the world has been doing?”

For example, Tamim Ansary wrote Destiny Disrupted: A History of the World through Islamic Eyes that explained a lot of things about the middle east through that sort of lens, so I was hoping that someone would write a history of the USSR in a similar fashion, which I didn’t find.

One of the problems we have when approaching the more successful world governments is understanding … well, I guess good intentions? There’s kinda two sides to the story of Dear Leader. On one side, the self-aggrandizement as the father of the country, on the other side the act of actually trying to be the father of the country. Obviously a strongman today is mostly running the show almost entirely for selfish reasons but what you kinda see in the USSR and modern day China is at the same time an attempt to make the state better off. Which, of course, falls prey to effective use of power. “Do this or you will be executed” doesn’t work very well… not with the US approach to the death penalty, not to the totalitarianism of the attempted Communist state.

But, even today, there’s tons of “Good idea, bad implementation” things that the Chinese government does where the rest of the world governments just let things get worse.

The vibes I was getting in the days of Lenin from my reading was interesting. Lenin was the leader of the USSR but not in the way that Stalin was. The Bolsheviks of the time insisted that things be discussed and debated and worked through and not even Lenin was above that. And there was a very forward-looking idealistic sort of viewpoint. They could reject everything and do things right for once and many of them were new to power so they were freed of that worldview. And a lot of those things didn’t pan out as well as they wanted it to and people started to need to be “convinced” to do the new thing. First the “useless” hereditary upper-class, but then everybody else. And then eventually Lenin died and Stalin didn’t have that much patience for the Bolshevik old-guard and took over.

tl;dr: In a sense, it’s as if a bunch of Star Trek fans had toppled a government and were trying to build the best government ever for the future, using whatever means necessary.

OTOH, Divergent3D / Czinger Motors has 3D printable (with caveats) hypercars that are more … reasonable?

Apparently the Local Motors Rally Fighter (made by the same folks as the Strati) has downloadable files in this Reddit thread: https://www.reddit.com/r/carmodification/comments/kztg6l/localmotors_rallyfighter_plans/?rdt=40977

It’s not necessarily that useful, mind you, but at least it’s exciting.

I guess the thing to note is that if you are looking for a project, you probably could create some really good downloadable plans for an e-Bike that could have the key important parts printed on someone else’s SLM metal 3D printer and it wouldn’t even be especially silly or that absurdly priced, which would be a nicer argument for the superiority of bikes over cars if I haven’t been unable to bike because of wrist problems for the past few years.

Well, one option, which can be pushing the boundaries of selfhosted for some, would be to use a hosted k8s service for your public-facing stuff and then a home real k8s cluster for the rest of it.

So, there’s a lot of things to unpack here.

First, the idea that your spouse is your primary sole emotional connection is a relatively weird new concept on the scale of things. There’s been a huge period of history where your primary emotional connection was your male companions and your spouse was infantalized by comparison. If you were well-off you might be so lucky and have your group of emotional companions, your group of romantic companions, and the person who bears your legitimate children.

Second, there’s really not much of a good underlying working model for actual modern conservatism. The frontiersman/“house on the prairie” sort of rugged independence was never actually a thing back then and a lot of big issues like medical bills were a lot simpler when the answer to having any sort of illness was that you either get over it after relatively inexpensive and simple treatments or you die. So the conservative movement must necessarily sell you a false bill of goods. US politics are such that there is no actual fully-left political party, so that by default makes you a democrat.

There’s also a bunch of added uniquely christian baggage. So there are left-wing christians who also have their own set of weird baggage.

Third, mostly irrespective of politics, there’s a lot of cultural programming for males that they can’t actually worthwhile work though their emotions in a productive fashion. Movies, TV shows, books, literally everything in the media creates this idea of maleness and the writers are just trying to write a catchy story and seldom have time to think about what kind of male they are creating. This is, overall, a relatively recent concept.

Fourth, “things men need emotionally that women cannot provide” is actually pretty silly. Outside of practical advice about what to do with specific pieces of anatomy where maybe it would be nice to have some reference, the things people do is a pretty wide field. “Oh, someone to watch football with” ignores female football fans, et al. This ties in a lot with right wing men because they can’t necessarily have an emotional connection with someone not-male because that’s equivalent to messing around with someone’s property. And it also ties in with the social programming that created a stereotype for how men are supposed to relate to each other that’s just a writer trying to put a good story together without thinking of the social implications.

Radicalization doesn’t work on people who are emotionally connected and comfortable. Part of why we are where we are is that there’s a whole class of people whose happiness has been precluded by the structure of their lives and the best people who can take advantage of this are fraudsters selling a false bill of goods. And I don’t even really feel sympathy for those people anymore because they are hurting people who I do very much care about and after a point it doesn’t matter if they are just too dumb to see it.

But, I guess, to return to your initial point, the idea that if you find a person and get married to them that you have “solved” connection, that’s the road to unhappiness. Partially because marriage generally requires a commitment and effort to stay together as things happen and people change… but also because relying on one single person without other social connectivity is not a stable equilibrium.

A few years ago now I was thinking that it was about time for me to upgrade my desktop (with a case that dates back to 2000 or so, I guess they call them “sleepers” these days?) because some of my usual computer things were taking too long.

And I realized that Intel was selling the 12th generation of the Core at that point, which means the next one was a 13th generation and I dono, I’m not superstitious but I figured if anything went wrong I’d feel pretty darn silly. So I pulled the trigger and got a 12th gen core processor and motherboard and a few other bits.

This is quite amusing in retrospect.

From the article: “Tesla began delivering the Blade Runner-inspired truck in November 2023”

Me: Fuck you. That is an insult to Syd Mead’s legacy.

It’s the Pravda of the VC-centric tech scene and has been for a very very long time.

(I am referencing the Soviet Union implementation thereof, for clarity)

It’s never going to bite the hand that feeds it, where people will voting-ring or the owners will just force-edit it to prevent that from happening. Outside of that, sometimes it might say something useful. The problem is that today’s problems are not because of a lack of advanced mathematics understanding or new programming languages.

I mean, I think he’s a textbook example of why not to do drugs and why we need to eat the rich, but I can understand the logic here.

When you navigate a car as a human, you are using vision, not LIDAR. Outside of a few edge cases, you aren’t even using parallax to judge distances. Ergo, a LIDAR is not going to see the text on a sign, the reflective stripes on a truck, etc. And it gets confused differently than the eye, absorbed by different wavelengths, etc. And you can jam LIDAR if you want. Thus, if we were content to wait until the self-driving-car is actually safe before throwing it out into the world, we’d probably want the standard to be that it navigates as well as a human in all situations using only visual sensors.

Except, there’s some huge problems that the human visual cortex makes look real easy. Because “all situations” means “understanding that there’s a kid playing in the street from visual cues so I’m going to assume they are going to do something dumb” or “some guy put a warning sign on the road and it’s got really bad handwriting”

Thus, the real problem is that he’s not using LIDAR as harm reduction for a patently unsafe product, where the various failure modes of the LIDAR-equipped self-driving cars show that those aren’t safe either.

It’s important to realize that the nerd you saw on the news has always been someone wearing nerd as a costume and the entire history of technology is loaded with examples of the real nerd being marginalized. It’s just that in ages past the VC’s would give a smaller amount of money and require the startup to go through concrete milestones to unlock all of it so there was more of a chance for the founder’s dreams to smack up against reality before they were $230m in the hole with no product worth selling.

While there is arguably a larger pool of people who you can reach by not having open racism and the CEO whipping his dick out (and mysteriously not slamming it into his Tesla door, even if it is a masterful gambit) you can still get a lot of white men of privilege who are smart and hardworking who don’t nominally worry about being on the receiving end of most of the harassment so it’s OK as long as they end up part of the winning team because they’ll get mega stock bucks at the end. And this does extend to the factory floor, at least people’s impressions while joining the factory floor. They wouldn’t be an engineer but they’ll be a supervisor or something?

It’s kinda un-earned? Like, there’s stories that people tell each other of questionable veracity? Some set of startups in the days of yore gave their cleaning staff or whatnot options so I think it’s become part of the cultural mythos now even if the reality is that the cleaning staff these days is contractors who are mistreated so even if it did actually happen then, it won’t happen now.

And, dono, once you’ve solved the hard problems early on, there’s less of that drive to do the truly novel things and so you get more of the people who want to be part of a company that’s going to the top and wouldn’t mind if they could coast and/or fail upwards along the way.

The problem is that employers tend to presume that they can continue to abuse people going forwards into the future because they’ve gotten away with it so far. Until they do things like yank offers from new college grads or laying off too many of the professional staff, at which point you’ve shattered the illusion.

tl;dr: Elon sowing: Haha fuck yeah!!! Yes!!

Elon reaping: Well this fucking sucks. What the fuck.

All things being equal, however, I’d rather they do the version more likely to remove themselves from the gene pool.