Honest question, as I've just recently started fiddling with Meshtastic: could it be that the mesh is not set up correctly for a dense environment? (e.g. using LongFast rather than MediumFast, or not having more nodes configured as client_mute?) I know the conditions may be wildly different, but just as an example, the guy in this video says he saw no big issues on a hamvention with 300+ nodes: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aBfHAPpjtk4
My wife and I tried to use Briar to communicate after we had been reallocated two seat rows apart in a flight. It didn't work at all. Messages arrived hours later, when they arrived.
In a recent project I was asked to create a user story classifier to identify whether stories were "new development" or "maintenance of existing features". I tried both approaches, embeddings + cosine distance vs. directly asking a language model to classify the user story. The embeddings approach was, despite being fueled by the most powerful SOTA embedding model available, surprisingly worse than simply asking GPT 4.1 to give me the correct label.
Despite being theoretically possible, much of the signal directed at the Moon would be absorbed in the upper atmosphere at this wavelength. On the other hand, the 10-40m bands are fantastic for long-range "earthly" communication (when the conditions are proper).
I used that website everyday when I was prepping for my ham license upgrade and got reasonably good after a while, being 25 WPM my most comfortable speed. But then I learned that the CW exam in Brazil was carried out at 5 WPM. When I tried that speed, much to my surprise I couldn't understand a single word. I had to relearn slow Morse on lcwo.net from scratch weeks before the test. My takeaway was that our brains seem to get super specialized, so if you're studying for a CW exam yourself, I do recommend immersing yourself in CW at roughly the same speed as the exam.
Only after I've got my ham radio license that I learned how these USB switches are annoying sources of RFI, even the more expensive ones. KVM switches are fine though.
For the best part of my life I use a controlled set of tags[1] rather than hierarchical categories. This is mostly due to the fact that stuff can be a lot of things at the same time.
That said, one of the best use cases for Johnny's system I've found is when you have to share an online drive with hundreds of people, where you can't use tags, and even if you could, there would be no consensus. Strangely, nowadays I can find my way around a huge project's online files quite easily just by the prefix numbers of each categorical level.
> Anyone who has ever used IRC knows that there is nothing even remotely complicated about using it, but the terminology and the steps required to use one are ostensibly terrifying enough to reliably keep the technically illiterate at bay.
This remark, topped with the author's piece on "normiefication", is the kind of intellectual elitism that reliably keeps me away from IRC whenever I think of coming back to it.
This person’s view is so insular and so self-centered that they truly seem to believe that IRC is not complicated. This is an excellent illustration of how important it is to stay grounded and connected to your real-world user base.
This is a silly statement. The technology doesn't embody any 'elitism', back in the day there were many channels/networks with non-technical users. Back when Shoutcast was a thing, servers often had an associated IRC channel where people would make requests, or just talk music, just as one example. This also makes the "keep technically illiterate users away" statement silly, I've seen middle school age kids connect to IRC channels without any apparent difficulty.
I stopped being engaged when the author uses "normalcattle" in a unironic, disdainful tone. Then later on there's praise of RMS. I like the overall message, as a long time daily IRC user, but the contempt seeping from the whole article is a turn off.
At least for this particular case it was not a matter of teaching journalists statistics or anything STEM-related. If it weren't for the leaked messages, we'd never hear about it. Epistemic sincerity and a good notion of statistics are important for sure, but giving whistleblowers legal cover and a means of releasing this kind of material is just as important.
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