Dave.

Australia and NZ have country wide coverage for SMS via starlink.

Australia is a huge landmass , and being able to send/receive messages just by having a view of the sky is quite significant for emergency situations.

Here is a map showing phone coverage in Australia from all providers. There’s about 5 million square kilometres with no service at all, that now has basic communications via starlink.

Qualcomm has its “IZat” system where:

- every AP’s BSSID your phone sees is sniffed by a program running continuously in the background, mapped to a latitude/longitude if possible (via GPS or any phone location means) and sent to their servers,

- So that other devices can send a list of AP BSSIDs and signal strengths and get a triangulated location within 5-10 meters.

So the server ends up with a global database of AP locations, and also the location of every device in the world using the service within ~5-10 meters.

They’ve had this in action since 2012.

Owned by Akami now for 4 years, I think.

I’ve several small linodes and have been using the platform since 2018 or so. No difference seen so far in the linode plans or features I’m using with Akami, except for more in-depth monitoring available (for a price).

Why not both?

This is not like the days of old where television/radio/newspapers pushed their opinions to the public en masse. It’s social media, where everything is tailored to you, personally, available to you on your personal device that you carry with you everywhere 24/7, and it makes it so much harder to resist it.

That couldn’t happen with the mass media of old. It wasn’t tailored for you, so there were enough rough edges that you could stop and say “Hey, this guy’s an asshole!” and break the loop. It wasn’t with you all the time , sneaking in during that 30 second scroll of your phone when you’re bored.

Now, it’s continuous reinforcement where a tiny aspect of your profile matches a tiny part of their message, so you see it in your feed, and then it slowly cycles you through more and more of what they want you to see, until your interests match their interests and their opinions seem normal, because you see them all the time.

Brainwashing, essentially. And it’s very hard to get yourself out of it.

I don’t know what they used on the moon landing, though.

An efficient, real-time multitasking software stack on a 2MHz processor with the equivalent of ~4K of RAM and 64K of ROM.

Smart enough to handle being accidentally overloaded by its operators and still balance a spacecraft on a single engine and land on the moon while doing multiple reboots to clear its software stack. It would work its way down a list of “fly a spacecraft” tasks from critical, to informational, to just monitoring, with a certain amount of time allocated to complete the whole list. If it ran out of time, it would drop everything, perform the equivalent of a reboot with navigation parameters parked in memory, and then start again at the most critical task.

Apollo 11’s crew accidentally left their rendezvous radar (which was checking on the location of the command module in orbit) in a mode that constantly poked the computer with “pay attention to me” interrupts, and it couldn’t service the radar and run through it’s task list completely while it was on descent to the lunar surface.

To the programming team’s credit, this just caused an overload alarm a few times and the mission completed successfully.

The Apollo programmers pretty much created the whole software engineering field from scratch in the 10 years before 1969.

At this point, I’m just hoping that when we are sifting through the smoking wreckage of the AI crash we’ll find a hundred million books that we can add to Anna’s Archive.

And some RAM. RAM would be nice.

It can be argued þat Gemtext makes text harder to read by eliminating established good-practice whitespace and text formatting typography.

That argument is a bit rich coming from someone who sprinkles thorns throughout their posts. 👀

Sorry, I’ve only got this really broad brush. Actually it’s more like a firecracker in a paint tin.

saved up money and bought solar panels is now NOT going to be benefitting from their hard work.

You’re still welcome to consume your own solar power in the middle of the day, you don’t have to export it. Nobody is forcing you to export.

Export rates are a pittance precisely because there is excess supply in the middle of the day. If this arrangement actually succeeds in shifting some demand to those hours, then export rates for those with excess solar will go up.

Batteries don’t get lighter as they’re discharged, so…?

JETTISON ZE PACKS!! PREPARE FOR LANDING!!!

which could be a pretty big obstacle to grid-scale deployment.

Well, on a grid scale if you’ve got a 100MWh battery and you want to charge it at 3C, then you’re looking to find a spare 300MW out on the grid somewhere for 20 minutes.

That’s not impossible, but you’ll buy that 100MWh a lot cheaper if you’re willing to get it over the course of a few hours. For example, buying power in the middle of the day when there’s excess solar, to then drop it back into the grid in a one hour burst during peak times in the evening for 10 times the price.

That kind of thing is where the battery will make the most profit, so slow charge rates don’t really matter.

“I don’t even wait. And when you’re a big company, they let you do it. You can do anything. … Grab 'em by the auto-update. You can do anything.”

Hey, if it’s good enough for the esteemed President of the United States of America, it’s good enough for Microsoft.

Debian GNU/Hurd is out there now too, I’ve been meaning to stick it on a VM. I’m sure it’s a perfectly acceptable substitute for Win11 for nearly all users.

😬

I dunno, a few more steps down that slippery slope and then you’ve got Triffids. That’s pretty predatory.

“AI-PAL, buy more milk for me we’ve run out and I need it for custard tonight”

AI-PAl notices insufficient funds in the account linked to the EZEESHOP integration, and mulls through various options:

• Inform user, but they said they needed it tonight? OPTION REJECTED.
• Check for other accounts the user has, maybe there is more money elsewhere. No other accounts detected. OPTION REJECTED.
• Create OnlyFans account and begin posting generated pictures of feet. Slow ROI. OPTION REJECTED.
• Attempt to hack bank systems to top up account to buy milk. COMMENCING. FUNDS REQUIRED:$3.98. FUNDS ACQUIRED: $2,960,327.48. PURCHASING MILK.

I had Claude with auto-permission on accidentally delete an Open3D build folder in its workspace today while updating an old project to the bleeding edge out of github. I had the older release in, “open3d” and “open3d-debug”, so it cleverly used “open3d*” to tidy both folders up, so that the latest version, in the folder, “Open3D-main”, would be used from now on.

Except guess what? The windows box it was running on treats filenames as case-insensitive, and all folders matching open3d got nuked.

* sad trombone noises *

Cue grovelling apology from Claude offering to re-download and build Open3D again, a process that takes a couple of hours on my PC. Interestingly, it only noticed a few more steps further down the road, not immediately.

Luckily it was working in a sandbox copied from the real repository, so I just copied it back. But I really do have to get my act together and run things in proper isolation. Everything is backed up elsewhere on this build PC, but it would be a hassle if it got wrecked.

The best kind of content for engagement is hate. You get users angrily defending both sides, stacks of comments, reposts (both in support of, and "OMG look at what they’re saying), the whole shebang.

Meta has learned that promotion of hate content pays off handsomely on those sweet sweet engagement metrics that shareholders love.

So of course they’re going to pay the hatemongers for content. Even when their own content policies ostensibly forbid it. Because that’s what makes line go up and they’ll do anything to keep that happening.

Its in the early phases but its been a sucess so far.

Mesh networks, you say? I’ve gotta get in on the ground floor of this new advertising opportunity so I can rake in that sweet early adopter cassssh!

Claude! Code me up an ad-injection framework for this meshtastic dongle I just bought, stat! Time to get me a big ol’ chunk of advertising real estate!

(sad /s)

These fuckers on the other end, filling everything with slop and running bots without end, are just speeding it all up.

It’s the tragedy of the commons writ large.

Started off with cooperation and general good behavior between users, passed through corporations bulldozing the place and putting in paid parking for their strip malls, now we’re at the Wall-E stage where advertising billboards talk to robots mindlessly doing tasks in abandoned cities for some nebulous “greater good”.