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Joined 3 years ago
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Cake day: June 29th, 2023

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  • I think it’s a perception and noticeability problem.

    I’ve been around a lot of guys who cc, and I only knew because it happened or come up in conversation or someone else told me. If I walked by them on the street, never would have noticed.

    Former friend from highschool, his whole family was military, gun nuts, who all cc and they made sure you knew it. The dude went into national guard and was ecstatic about getting deployed to the local large city during a police brutality protest.

    For a lot of people, I feel like the later is the more common experience with cc than the former, despite the former being the truly more common one



  • I think the problem is Valve lost control of the messaging, which led to bad expectations.

    At least in the US, a computer hooked up to a TV to play games means it’s a “console” and not a computer. Maybe we can blame Nintendo back in the 80s for going out of their way to avoid calling the NES a computer (despite it’s name in Japan being Famicom, Family Computer), but the distinction exists today despite technologically no real difference. You know this, I know this, Valve knows this. So Valve wants to make a computer you hook up to your TV so they can get you to use their money printing machine Steam in the living room too.

    If you read Valve’s marketing material on the Steam Machine, they don’t use the word “console” once. It’s always either by name or the terms PC, computer, or system. They likely don’t mention the word “console” because to date, video game consoles follow a different business model, one where the model subsidizes the shit out of the hardware and then make money on the back end with game sales/licensing.

    Current “console” hardware starts in the <$500 price bracket, and with so much third party media marketing calling the Steam Machine a console, that got people’s mind set on pricing expectations of that market.


  • Realistically, computational power

    The more number crunching units and more memory you throw at the problem, the easier it is and the more useful the final model is. The math and theoretical computer science behind LLMs has been known for decades, it’s just that the resource investment required to make something even mediocre was too much for any business type to be willing to sign off on. Me and my fellow nerds had the technology and largely dismissed it as worthless or a set of pipe dreams

    But then number crunching units and memory became cheap enough that a couple of investors were willing to take the risk and you get a model like ChatGPT1. Talks close enough like a human that it catches business types attention as a new revolutionary thing, and without the technical background to know they were getting lied to, the Venture Capitalism machine cranks out the shit show we have today.




  • It’s not about individual contributors using the right tools to get the job done. It’s about needing fewer individual contributors in the first place.

    If AI actually accomplishes what it’s being sold as, a company can maintain or even increase its productivity with a fraction of its current spending on labor. Labor is one of the largest chunks of spending a company has so, if not the largest, so reducing that greatly reduces spending which means for same or higher company income, the net profit goes up and as always, the line must go up.

    tl;dr Modern Capitalism is why they care



  • Someone who works in said US defense industry here

    Neither defense nor war really apply to what we do, but between the two defense is the more apt description. The DoD largely uses a strategy of deterrence, where the technology we develop and training done for the “war fighter” is just public and visible enough that no other major country wants to take the risk of going into full open conflict with the US. Since most efforts go into deterrence, and deterrence is a defense strategy, it does become the more appropriate word.

    Sure the US loves its proxy wars, but those don’t throw the entire nation into wartime. Plus, in a round about way proxy wars help with the deterrence since we get an outlet for the decades old stock piles of arms that we no longer want and want to replace with the new stuff. If our waste products are being useful in places like Ukraine, it helps build up an idea of what it is we keep for ourselves, again building up a deterrence of openly and directly attacking the US




  • You wanted an example of where the accusations of rape directly led to ruined lives, and I gave you one.

    Sure, in the example I gave the motive behind the accusations was racism, but the accusation was still about rape. The original commenter was pointing out that any and all accusations must be met with suspicion in order for “innocent until proven guilty” to function.

    What that doesn’t mean is that any and all accusations of rape should be dismissed because the accuser is a woman. There’s a difference here

    Should the police believe someone when they claim they’ve been raped and should the police investigate? Yes.

    Should the police, court of law, court of public opinion believe a rape accusation purely because the accuser is a woman? No.





  • Nothing legally stops you from listening. To transmit, you are legally required to have a callsign (which you must broadcast during transmit) and your callsign must be licensed for that frequency.

    If you break the law, it’s highly unlikely that the FCC themselves will hunt you down and fine you. If you’re using it to talk to others on the HAM bands, they’ll likely get pissed at you for not being licensed but actually tracking you down is difficult. Using it for your own personal projects, friend groups, etc, it’s unlikely anyone would notice you at all.

    A license is like $15 for life (just need to occasionally tell the FCC you’re still alive), the test will teach you some stuff, I don’t see it as that onerous to play by the rules so I’d recommend following them.


  • A HAM license realistically is for two things:

    1 the test teaches you major items you should know about how radio works 2 how to not fuck shit up for everyone else

    For the bands allocated to HAM radio in the US, as long as you’re not fucking shit up for everyone else the FCC doesn’t really care. A good example of that and my personal favorite rule is the power transmission rule of “only enough power to complete the transmission”. Functionally it’s so vague that I doubt anyone would ever actually get their license suspended over it.

    The group AFRL ARRL has a pretty restrictive “band plan” that I think is where the above comment’s salt is coming from. A perception I have and have heard others talk about is the HAM community has a tendency to be borderline hostile to newcomers and are very gate-keepy, which ARRL in my experience embodies.

    I have a license purely to play by the rules from a legal standpoint when I’m out in the rocky mountains hiking and camping with friends, makes communicating with different groups way easier

    Edit: formatting, typoing ARRL