> "I found them!" you might say to yourself. But who are you telling?
I don't, personally, have this internal monologue. My interior world is a roiling foam of images, feelings and intuitions, memories and imagined possibilities that slosh around solid concepts and facts like boulders in the surf. I have no trouble thinking of words when I need to but I must first conjure up an audience or sit down to journal.
Before these kinds of interpretive posts, I thought the idea of talking to one's self was just a metaphor.
I would expect LLMs to develop some similar non-verbal structure deep within their black boxes, but I know from my own experience that there's more to cogitation than language.
As Morse speeds up, you stop relying on individual dots and dashes and begin recognizing common combinations of letters. Faster still and you are mainly hearing word stems and suffixes.
The faster the information comes at you, the less important any particular bit is, because you have more context with which to autocorrect.
Amateur radio is a series of narrow regulatory carve-outs of the radio spectrum for the public good, somewhat like a national park. It has existed since the discovery of radio itself. RF is now a mature formal engineering discipline, but the underlying knowledge and practice has also been passed down through amateur channels for generations in an almost guild-like fashion. It is now one of the very few sanctioned ways in which a person interested in radio may put their own electrical components together and see how it works on a workbench.
In the US there are two major distinctions between licenses. The basic Technician class license mainly lets you access VHF and up - these radio waves propagate based on line of sight. The general focus in this area of the spectrum comes from the sheer utility of radio.
Then, the General and Extra class licenses let you operate more fully on shortwave. These are lower frequencies that interact with the ionosphere, giving them the curious property of reaching around the planet. (Extra opens up a little more spectrum, and is recognized by some international treaties allowing you to operate while abroad).
The basic starter equipment for a technician is a handheld or mobile radio. The line-of-sight limitation on VHF is overcome by the use of repeaters. A no-stakes way to sample the activity in your vicinity is to get an RTL-SDR dongle and tune in to the 2 meter and 70 cm amateur bands.
The classic starter kit for a general is an HF radio and homemade dipole. The radio will realistically cost a couple hundred dollars, but the antenna can be just scrap wire and modest coax cable. The size of the antenna is determined by the wavelength at which it operates. The two most common beginner bands are 20M and 40M. A dipole for those wavelengths is about 33' and 66' of wire respectively, but the wire does not have to run in a straight line. You can use a WebSDR to peek in on the activity for free.
My personal interest in all of this is SOTA -- Summits On The Air. It is a radio sport that involves taking portable shortwave transmitters up to mountain peaks. It is equal parts exploration, since many of the peaks in my region lack even trail access; and invention, as the physical realities of mountain climbing necessitate radios and antennas made for the purpose. The actual radio exchange from the peak is simple - who is calling, how well they can hear you, and where they are located, and maybe a pleasantry or two. There is a great deal of camaraderie from the other operators, and you never know whether your next contact will come from San Francisco or coastal France.
Technical point, you generally would not be able to recover an AM broadcast signal from a cellular baseband. You might be able to get it from a direct sampling receiver (some RTL-SDRs can do this), but it implies additional band filters and of course an antenna.
I empathize especially with the author's account of "covid nose." For me, Coca Cola now tastes like patchouli. When I say that out loud, it's easier for others to believe I'm simply a hypochondriac, or that I've forgotten what Coke tastes like, or possibly it's made differently where I'm from. As far as I can tell, it's nerve damage. How could I forget the taste of summer vacation?
Back when smell loss was a common side effect of Covid, the NYT ran a series of articles on retraining one's sense of smell, by e.g. smelling all the jars on the spice rack. I found those articles patronizing. I can instantly recall what both Ceylon and Korintje cinnamon are "supposed" to smell like, but those memories are now mismatched with my olfactory system. All I can do is decide whether to accept the new sense, or just avoid the taste altogether.
We don't discuss smell like we discuss our other senses. Perhaps it's due to the difficulty of producing smell on demand, unlike within the visual or auditory domains. Despite being one of our most basic senses, smell seems to lie behind an inherent veil of subjectivity. My experience with continuous olfactory "hallucination" made me second guess that.
I believe you're thinking of the ISM bands - problematic chunks of the spectrum that are given over to industrial, scientific and medical technologies that emit RF by design. The FCC allows a bit of part 15 free-market anarchy on these bands so long as manufacturers limit power and print a familiar disclaimer on the device. By contrast, the amateur radio service does require a license.
This is actually a chart that shows who is legally protected from interference. A license holder of a service listed in a colored bar has the right to complain if there is another emission on their spectrum. (There are also "primary" and "secondary" users for some ranges, the latter expected to yield to the former). According to that chart, a radiolocation service is the primary user. Amateurs can then work around them (1.5KW earth-moon-earth wifi anyone?) and finally wifi is allowed to exist with all the other random gadgets.
Yes, WiFi is given nearly the lowest priority for a small slice of the spectrum that is full of garbage from other users. No wonder it's so good at beamforming, spread spectrum use, channel hopping, and so on.
The silver particles in the film aren't very transparent and you can see this for yourself with a microscope. All tonal representations of B&W film, whether a scan or traditional enlargement, depend on limitations of resolving power to blur or alias the grain into a tone.
Correspondingly, you will see a difference in apparent grain from different scanners at different resolutions. If you think there is nothing to be gained by scanning on a drum or virtual drum, pick one of your best negatives and pay to have it professionally scanned!
That's a fair question. The time slots I called out above are occupied by learners in the CWops academy. The density of transmissions can be so high that the waterfall resemble the opening to the Matrix. But clearly demographics are stacked against this part of the hobby.
And if you want to hear what morse telegraphy sounds like in 2022, you're in luck because it's still alive and well. Simply tune your shortwave radio to 7.028-7.045 or 14.028-14.045 MHz every Wednesday between 1300-1400z & 1900-2000z, and every Thursday at 0300-0400z & 0700–0800z. Or, try 7.050-7.060 MHz any evening to listen for operators using straight keys.
If you do not have a shortwave radio there are plenty online at http://websdr.org/.
I worked on a project once involving divination from texts and wrote Terry about this topic. Here's what he told me (2015):
"""The easiest way to pick a random passage is to read timer that is in the random 1-20Mhz.
If you have a faster timer, then divide by a number.
The Bible is 4Meg. You want a random number from 0 to 4 million.
The Bible is 100,000 lines of text.
If you have the Bible in memory being edited, broken down by line number, you can pick a random
line number from 0 to 100,000.
If you flip 17 coins, you get a random number from 0 to 120,000. I use that for picking a line number.
God can do pretty-much any technique. The simplest and best is probably just randomly opening the Bible by hand."""
I share your concerns. I created a dedicated-purpose Microsoft account by following Mojang's official migration link. The process went smoothly and I have not been asked for a phone number. I am using Fastmail with a custom domain and set up an alias. Everything works including the custom launcher. I completed the entire process on Linux.
I agree with other observations on this thread that individual accounts and phone number authentication would not be safe assumptions for many minecraft households. It will be difficult for Microsoft to tighten this process further.
Three extraordinary examples from the earlier days of the internet.
taxi1010.com. A veteran taxi driver (?) organizes his thoughts around "verbal self defense," creating a highly crosslinked database of adversarial conversational openers, and possible ways to deflect them. Reasonable starting point: http://www.taxi1010.com/stargate01.htm#sitemap
everything2.com: another free-form database mixing facts, fiction and personal notes written by an unusually literate subcommunity. Adjacent to slashdot and h2g2, even documents some early reactions to wikipedia. https://everything2.com/
My Boyfriend Came Back From The War: net artist Olia Lialina crafts a poem in the browser by exploiting properties of the medium. Remixed dozens of times by other net artists. Archived by Rhizome with a simulated slow load over Netscape. https://sites.rhizome.org/anthology/lialina.html
Background noise - that's one way to put it! The path loss is around 250 dB, so a practical amateur moonbounce station makes use of a very powerful RF amplifier feeding an array of yagi antennas, all mounted on an altitude/azimuth rotator - in other words, it's a radio telescope, and the receiving side hopefully has something similar. You can do a google image search for "moonbounce," the setups are kind of amazing. A lot of investment mostly to exchange morse and specialized low-bandwidth digital modes.
The upshot is that you can communicate with any station that can also see the moon - somebody on the other side of the planet, 12,000km away. Plus there is the unique experience of hearing your own transmission echo, two seconds after you cease.
This kind of setup is well within reach for a commercial enterprise but will never be practical for IoT owing to the laws of physics. On the other hand, there is SNOTEL, a system that bounces snowpack telemetry off of the ionized trails left by meteors...
In a way you are describing state of the art robotic arms, but computer vision in that domain is less about economizing and more about coping with everyday materials and objects that are difficult to characterize.
The OP is coming from the CNC milling world where positional accuracy is more or less solved: you use cheap steppers or servos but expensive, precision-ground ballscrews; then you swear on Machinery's Handbook not to drive your machine too fast.
The real demons in dimensional accuracy come from things like spindle runout, deformation of the tool, and flexing and vibrations of the machine, fixture and workpiece (that are often different going in one direction than another!). Certain operations like drilling can't be corrected in real time. There are additional concerns like minimum amounts of material that can be removed with each pass - too little and you are just burnishing the workpiece.
Machinists actually do solve these problems in software when they generate toolpaths and fixturing.
I don't, personally, have this internal monologue. My interior world is a roiling foam of images, feelings and intuitions, memories and imagined possibilities that slosh around solid concepts and facts like boulders in the surf. I have no trouble thinking of words when I need to but I must first conjure up an audience or sit down to journal.
Before these kinds of interpretive posts, I thought the idea of talking to one's self was just a metaphor.
I would expect LLMs to develop some similar non-verbal structure deep within their black boxes, but I know from my own experience that there's more to cogitation than language.