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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: June 29th, 2023

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  • 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



  • I don’t think the term AI has been used in a vague way, it’s that there’s a huge disconnect between how the technical fields use it vs general populace and marketing groups heavily abuse that disconnect.

    Artificial has two meanings/use cases. One is to indicate something is fake (video game NPC, chess bots, vegan cheese). The end product looks close enough to the real thing that for its intended use case it works well enough. Looks like a duck, quacks like a duck, treat it like a duck even though we all know it’s a bunny with a costume on. LLMs on a technical level fit this definition.

    The other definition is man made. Artificial diamonds are a great example of this, they’re still diamonds at the end of the day, they have all the same chemical makeups, same chemical and physical properties. The only difference is they came from a laboratory made by adult workers vs child slave labor.

    My pet theory is science fiction got the general populace to think of artificial intelligence to be using the “man-made” definition instead of the “fake” definition that these companies are using. In the past the subtle nuance never caused a problem so we all just kinda ignored it


  • I think a better definition would be “achieve something in an unintended or uncommon way”. Fits the bill on what generally passes in the tech community as a “hack” while also covering some normal life stuff.

    Getting a cheaper flight booked by using a IP address assigned to a different geographical location? Sure I’d call that a life hack. Getting a cheaper flight by booking a late night, early morning flight? No, those are deliberately cheaper

    Also re: your other comment about not making a reply at all, sometimes for people like us it’s just better to not get into internet fights over semantics (no matter how much fun they can be)


  • That’s kind of the point though, isn’t it?

    If I were to post with “Extend the plank!” there’s a near zero chance that even fans of the movie, or even the franchise, I’m thinking of will get the movie right. If I instead say “Who am I to argue with the Captain of the Enterprise” a normie might guess Star Trek, a true nerd and fan of the franchise will peg that instantly as from Star Trek Generations

    Edit: That said, there are several lines in this thread that aren’t necessarily only recognizable to fans or people familiar with the movie, but instead just pop culture references.



  • You don’t. In C everything gets referenced by a symbol during the link stage of compilation. Libraries ultimately get treated like your source code during compilation and all items land in a symbol table. Two items with the same name result in a link failure and compilation aborts. So a library and a program with main is no bueno.

    When Linux loads an executable they basically look at the program’s symbol table and search for “main” then start executing at that point

    Windows behaves mostly the same way, as does MacOS. Most RTOS’s have their own special way of doing things, bare metal you’re at the mercy of your CPU vendor. The C standard specifies that “main” is the special symbol we all just happen to use


  • It’s soooooooo boring. I’ve suffered through it twice and both times I was completely checked out waiting for the movie to end to go do something else with my friends.

    To make things worse, I work in the aerospace industry on spacecraft so this movie regularly comes up in conversations and inevitably I end up having to explain how I did not like it



  • I hadn’t thought of that before, and I can think of several characters who’ve said things I doubt the writers would want attributed to them. I just want to see quotes from fiction being clearly labeled as such, and not using the grandiose of a character’s title to add weight to the quote.

    For example when I see people quote Admiral William Adama on how when the military becomes the police, the people become the enemy of the state. That was Ron Moore writing a character for a show set in a post apocalyptic universe where the only survivors are hanging out on military ships, not a real world seasoned officer’s opinion. Is it an interesting point worth discussing? Sure, but I’m not putting it in the same category of 5-Star General Dwight Eisenhower’s warnings about the military industrial complex




  • I’ve taken to using an old cake pan, a desk fan, and a towel. Fill up the pan with water, stick one end of the towel in the water, drape and clip the other end to the fan and let it sit running for a few days. Before the towel gets gross, toss it in the laundry when it’s dry and grab another towel

    It works so well I’m completely confused as to how/why there isn’t a commercialized product like that, it completely solves the cleaning/highschool biology experiments problem