vk6flab

vk6flab , 1 day ago

It doesn’t. I recall an experiment a few decades ago where they turned the world upside down. Didn’t take participants long to “normalise” the image.

When they removed the experiment, took even shorter to flip back.

I seem to recall it being done in a train carriage, as art, but I’m not sure.

vk6flab , 3 days ago

Start with reading Wikipedia articles.

This won’t answer all your questions, but it will give you paths to investigate.

Some articles will be written as if you already know the subject matter, but they should give you enough stuff to keep digging.

This won’t give you a degree in any of this, but it will give you plenty of puzzle pieces to build on as you see fit.

vk6flab , 4 days ago

The 2FA codes are just images. You can save them where you like. No requirement to backup your 2FA “to the cloud”.

Just make sure that your storage is backed up.

vk6flab , 5 days ago

You realise that this is because Microsoft spent billions of dollars on what amounts to a new version of “Clippy” and it’s just as helpful as the original.

If you’re unfamiliar with the abomination, it’s a dumber version of Copilot.

en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Office_Assistant

vk6flab , 5 days ago

Yeah, “Microsoft helpful”, not actually helpful.

vk6flab OP , 5 days ago

ARRL statements:

• www.arrl.org/…/arrl-systems-service-disruption

Suggestions that the ARRL “incident” is considerably more significant:

• w2lj.blogspot.com/…/interesting-speculation.html

LoTW status page:

• status.lotw.arrl.org

I also note that I received a response from the ARRL that instructed me to read their announcement linked above.

vk6flab , 6 days ago

You used to be able to run Apple Music on Android. I used it for a while. Not sure if it still exists.

vk6flab , 6 days ago (edited 6 days ago)

Are the people who work at OpenAI smoking crack?

“Over the last year and a half there have been a lot of questions around what might happen if influence operations use generative AI,” Ben Nimmo, principal investigator on OpenAI’s Intelligence and Investigations team, told members of the media in a press briefing

Here’s a clue, look around you.

ChatGPT isn’t the only fish in the sea and state actors using a public service like it deserve to be caught. Running your own system privately, without scrutiny, without censorship, without constraints is so trivial that teenagers are doing this on their laptops, so much so that you can docker pull your way into any number of LLM images.

Seriously, this is so many levels of absurd that it’s beyond comprehension…

vk6flab , 7 days ago

A magnetic loop is literally just a loop with a tuning capacitor at the feed point.

There should be several to be found on the ftroop website. ftroop.vk6flab.com

vk6flab , 7 days ago

Wow, those comments are a dumpster fire.

Not sure what Derek 's best response might be. I’m thinking that this video will likely be taken down and replaced by one without a sponsor.

vk6flab , 7 days ago

Not just burnout, opportunism features with several users I’ve spoken with. The level of ignorance surrounding ChatGPT is staggering.

One egregious use I know of was a developer who used it to write software to analyse a government dataset despite their department having put in place specific and targeted restrictions specifically against any such activities.

Their workaround was to use their private email to exfiltrate data and subsequently introduce the code.

Their rationale was that it didn’t harm anyone and their ICT department would vet any code. They were not concerned about this private data showing up on the ChatGPT public log, nor were they concerned about the accuracy of their code.

I think that this is just the tip of the iceberg and I think it’s going to take a serious data breach of identifying information before people lose their jobs over this type of misuse.

vk6flab , 7 days ago

For a period the interactions you had with ChatGPT were public and a live stream was available.

At the time when I looked at it, there was an astonishing amount of non-english traffic, but that might have been due to the fact that my UTC+8 timezone in Perth is the same as mainland China.

I had a quick search just now to see if I could find a link, but all I can locate is posts about new privacy controls, so perhaps that "feature"went by the wayside at some point.

vk6flab , 7 days ago

I’m fairly certain that it was ChatGPT, but I’m going from memory. I have a hunch that I saw a Hacker News show and tell post.

Update: It was in my bookmarks.

www.kaggle.com/…/89k-chatgpt-conversations

vk6flab , 5 days ago

www.kaggle.com/…/89k-chatgpt-conversations

vk6flab , 8 days ago

I’d email it as an attachment.

In Australia the local post office has fax facilities.

vk6flab , 8 days ago

The comments here in relation to the arcane nature of fax machines might not be aware that often this relates to legal requirements to receive physical proof.

Interestingly, nobody has to my knowledge challenged the wisdom of this requirement in court. At the end of the day, there is no real way to prove your identity using either a letter or a fax.

Using email, you could exchange an electronic key in person and know that the sender has the agreed key. Note that it still doesn’t prove the identity of the sender.

vk6flab , 8 days ago

Yes and no.

At the frequencies that HDMI operates, the path a signal takes can interfere with that signal. It’s why sometimes a cheap HDMI cable causes issues, where one certified for 4K or 8K doesn’t - the requirements to carry more information, means higher frequencies and thus better shielding.

A connector is a potential location where signal can be affected if the connection between two conductors is poor.

In general, less connectors and less joins will give you a higher chance of success and less chance of interference, but it depends entirely on what type of distance and signal you’re trying to send across it.

In general, the shorter the connection, the less loss.

It might be that a single longer cable is worse than a connector and a short cable.

If you already have a connector and a HDMI cable, try it. If you have issues, start by reversing the HDMI cable. It won’t make the electrons reverse or anything like that, but the connection might be slightly different.

If you have neither, I’d get a cable without a join. Buy from people who take returns.

Budget will be the determining factor for most people.

TL;DR; try it.

vk6flab , 10 days ago

A better headline:

“Visitor to Taiwan attempts to break biosecurity law and is hit with a fine”

vk6flab , 11 days ago

I doubt that anyone has researched the origin of such junk in detail.

If it doesn’t fit in your rubbish bin, generally it costs time, effort and money to properly dispose of things. Tossing it off a bridge is efficient.

Likely there’s a not inconsiderable proportion of anti-social behaviour, like stealing a bike and throwing it into a waterway afterwards.

vk6flab , 13 days ago

DRM is one potential reason, but not the only one.

Content is licensed under specific conditions, resolution, audio tracks, closed captions, etc. Two organisations might have licensed the same title, but not the same conditions.

You can see this clearly during the Olympics where some channels only have secondary rights, or only certain events, but only free to air, not online, etc.

Added to that are marketing and exclusively deals and in the end it’s anyone’s guess what you actually end up with.

vk6flab , 13 days ago

How many people are obviously wankers?

How many times have you seen glasses like this?

You do the math …

vk6flab , 13 days ago

This seems like a good way to keep people off your front lawn. Wonder if you need to be specific, or if you can nominate a whole class of “human”, say, anyone who is a climate denier, or loves having tea parties, or has orange skin with very small hands…

vk6flab , 14 days ago

I’m guessing that at some point your rectum cramps closed and the foreign object ends up being trapped behind the sphincter.

Note that I’m not a medical professional, nor do I pretend to be one on the internet. I do have personal lived experience of constipation induced cramping and it’s not fun, not to mention, painful to the point of passing out.

vk6flab , 14 days ago

My semi-immutable OS is based around a Debian installation where every application is installed in a separate Docker container.

When you launch the application, it volume mounts an appropriate directory that contains only the data related to that application.

Chrome for example launches with a single subdirectory inside ~/Downloads, so each instance can only see its own directory.

I can also test compilation of random repositories inside a container, without affecting the underlying OS.

The OS itself has only got a minimal Debian and Docker installed.

Been using it for several years. I can’t recall when I last rebooted it.

vk6flab , 15 days ago

Actually, Xitter is the worst social media app for society, not just LGBTQ+ people.

vk6flab , 15 days ago

Yeah, I’ll believe it after it’s done. I’m not expecting progress in my lifetime.

vk6flab , 15 days ago

It seems to be heading that way…

vk6flab , 14 days ago

😇

vk6flab , 15 days ago

I can just see an alumni from another institution waiving their fees just to go after Harvard for this “decision”.

vk6flab , 15 days ago

Or you could point a flamethrower at the sensor…

For less drastic response, put your hand on the sensor.

vk6flab , 15 days ago

Key distribution is a solved problem.

Key distribution at scale is not.

vk6flab , 15 days ago

There are literally libraries full of them.

vk6flab , 14 days ago

Poor diddums…

vk6flab , 16 days ago

Can’t wait to read the headlines in 20 years:

“My 401Kids account was hacked and now I start with nothing”

And

“Dad uses 401Kids account used for hookers and blow”

And

"Buy now, save later, 401Kids account available for lay-by purchases "

vk6flab , 16 days ago (edited 16 days ago)

Can’t wait to hear the next headlines:

“AP reports that their seized equipment was damaged beyond repair”

And

“IDF apologies for inadvertent destruction of broadcast equipment during seizure”

vk6flab , 16 days ago

The underlying issue with an LLM is that there is no “learning”. The model itself doesn’t dynamically change whilst it’s being used.

This article sets out a process that gives the ability to alter the model, by “dialling up” (or down) concepts. In other words, it’s changing the balance of the weight of concepts across the whole model.

Altering one concept is hardly “learning”, especially since it’s being done externally by researchers, but it’s a start.

A much larger problem is that the energy consumption is several orders of magnitude larger than that of our brain. I’m not convinced that we have enough energy to make a standalone “AI”.

What machine learning actually gave us is the ability to automatically improve a digital model of things, like weather prediction, something that took hours on a supercomputer to give you a week of forecast, now can be achieved on a laptop in minutes with a much longer range and accuracy. Machine learning made that possible.

An LLM is attempting the same thing with human language. It’s tantalising, but ultimately I think the idea applied to language to create “AI” is doomed.

vk6flab , 16 days ago

Breaking your neck when your head hits the ceiling would be the highest probability.

In my experience, many passengers ignore the instructions to keep your seatbelt loosely fastened during flight.

I’m guessing that this incident is going to change a few things in relation to that lax attitude by having flight crew enforce seatbelt warnings.

vk6flab , 16 days ago

One of my colleagues managed to accidentally run something like rm -rf /var/tmp/ * on a Solaris machine that was the mail server for the entire organisation.

After the command finished they realised that the inadvertent space in front of the asterisk meant that the command did slightly more damage than intended.

They were told to leave the machine running to be able to fix it from a backup, but they rebooted instead.

An open file is still usable even after it’s been deleted, so the kernel and shell were still up and running … before the reboot …

If I recall, it took weeks to fix, involving floppy disks, Sun engineers and much egg on face.

vk6flab , 15 days ago

Yeah, except for root that is exactly how it works.

As root you are permitted to shoot your own foot and are expected to know how to aim.

vk6flab , 16 days ago

It’s going to take some time. I’ve been there as have plenty of people who came to me for support when it happened to them.

While right now you’re thinking of it in terms of loss, you can also celebrate the lightness that comes from not having the data anymore.

There’s more…

What was the funniest thing you remember that was in there?

Now consider that you remember it. You don’t need to check, you remember the things that made that memory funny.

So, take a deep breath, add it to the list of stupid things you’ve done to date that didn’t kill you and then go and drink a glass of water and go for a walk.

This too will pass.

vk6flab , 17 days ago

Not to alarm you, but things like that make me wonder if that’s because it fell on the floor and the employee just stuffed it back into the loaf, or did the bread cutter lose several cutting wires, and if so, where did they go?

vk6flab , 17 days ago

If it’s like any other Facebook monstrosity, the processes that “detect” such things are purely based around USA morals and values, such as they are.

In other words, show a nipple and the thing is gone. Show something racist and it’s fine as long as it doesn’t show a nipple.

In Australia FB doesn’t care one iota about highly offensive content towards first nations people, perfectly fine with permitting the Australian equivalent of the USA “N” word, just as long as it doesn’t show a nipple.

Oh, yeah, the banned nipple has to be attached to a female, preferably white caucasian. The rest seems fine, especially in an “indigenous setting”.

In other words, FB only cares about its USA morality police and is perfectly fine with extracting money from everyone else, regardless of local sensitivities.

LinkedIn is the same. Not sure if that happened after Microsoft bought it, because until then it was not really a social media site, even if it did horrible things with extracting contacts from unsuspecting users who discovered that everyone in their address book had been invited, even if they were on the address book block list.

vk6flab , 17 days ago

I love the (currently one) down vote on your post. Clearly not a connoisseur of René’s work.

Your shower thought on the other hand is on point!

Nicely done.

vk6flab , 17 days ago

Update: Their website now appears to be loading again. I have contacted their media team for comment in relation to the data for global LotW users.

vk6flab , 16 days ago

I must say that the ARRL has been less than forthcoming in their communication with the amateur community.

If you want to track LotW availability: status.lotw.arrl.org