I don’t know what you are talking about. I can’t find it on IMDB.

Yah, I think that using LLM’s while ignoring all of the externalities involved is … everything Solarpunk is in opposition to? There’s a rejection of the idea that this thing that looks bad now might pay off down the road because mumble mumble mumble progress.

Take a bicycle. A bicycle allows a person to transport themselves using overall less energy than walking. You can even work through the externalities and maybe make bamboo bikes and stuff and maybe try to carefully optimize the externalities better. But it looks pretty darn good at the start, gets better.

That’s not LLMs.

Yah, out here, there’s one set of frequencies on the government bands for the officials to use and then ARES/RACES has a set of frequencies in the ham band that we’d plan on using. And, yah, the whole thing about all of community resilience is that it lets them focus more closely on fighting the problem where presumably the more interesting things we’d do is windshield surveys from a car or communications between the ARK’s (caches) and POD’s (points of distribution).

All of this depends on your geography? There’s one the need to have a communicator in a neighborhood, and there’s a separate need, maybe, for within the neighborhood.

So, for anything of medium density up, if you have a person or two in a park or other public space with a radio and a clipboard and a yellow vest, people will assume that’s the communicator? The case where either FRS/GPRS radios or T-Decks (or both) come in handy is when you can’t assume people are going to hit up the public space. And, again, having a trained communicator helps prevent the official and community services from getting overwhelmed. The local ARES/RACES has a defined standard way of using the Modified Mercali scale to collect information quickly in the aftermath of an earthquake, if everybody’s telling their stories there’s not necessarily actionable information.

Depending on geography, height does play a role. The higher-level better-trained communicators have extendable fiberglass tower thingies to get the antenna 25 feet up in the air. So you might be able to have a solar-battery meshtastic relay on a boom? Couple that with potentially some number of regular meshtastic nodes with fixed installs on buildings…?

And, on the lines of the formwork being something Meshtastic is good at, things like making it easy to collect M-M earthquake values is another potential thing?

Where I live, we’ve got a set of different community resilience groups, where one of them is CERT (which I’m not part of) and the other one is ARES/RACES (which I joined lately). And I already got a lecture from one of the ARES/RACES guys who is also in CERT that I ought to also join CERT. And, at least for us, both CERT and ARES/RACES come with a badge and background check.

ARES/RACES is, honestly, the biggest slam-dunk? Because part of the problem, at least looking at the experience of things here is that at least some of this needs to be organized ahead of time with identified people who have been background checked. And part of this is that you can generally go all-city with a reasonably priced VHF/UHF handheld, maybe with an antenna tower, worst case with a 50W base station radio.

Except that you need a ham license and you can’t just have a set of radios at the caches for people to use. There’s some arguments I guess about if the FCC ruling is meant to say that amateurs can break all rules in a life-or-death emergency or randos can break all rules in a life-or-death emergency but presumably the FCC has better things to do. But either way, you kinda need to know a bunch of stuff to use them effectively.

Which isn’t entirely a bad thing? Because there’s a world of difference between someone who can use a radio and someone who can send a message properly and quickly with the hard words turned into phonetics, etc.

Meshtastic has a lot of desirable properties for EmCom. It’s not there yet? I’d like to see it get there.

The big thing is that some solar powered Meshtastic nodes and some other random battery powered nodes have a lot of the positive attributes of a VHF/UHF handheld in that you are going all-city without using up nearly the sort of power that would be required to keep cell phones up to go all-city.

A meshtastic “repeater” is a lot simpler than a UHF/VHF repeater.

But there’s problems.

For example, there was a guy who got himself a big fine lately because he was getting on the channels that the firefighters were using and trying to convince them to save some of his land as if he was a fire department worker. Running it in amateur mode with amateur power might be nice, but amateur mode means no encryption.

I lost power on Wednesday and I couldn’t really get good cell service. Because everybody just grabs their phone for entertainment. The problem is that you want Meshtastic to have fun uses outside of merely EmCom so people use it and it doesn’t just sit there as an abstract concept, but you also don’t want it to go down because everybody’s bored.

In a comms-down situation, you cannot hand someone a LoRa board with meshtastic on it and let them use it to augment their phone because if there’s no cell service, there’s no way to get the app.

One fairly concrete problem that hits me is that in ARES/RACES we do packet radio. Part of the thing is that if they do activate CERT and ARES/RACES in an emergency, there’s a lot of paperwork to attend to, and it’s required because afterwards the insurance companies gotta do their stuff and the city needs to declare how much the disaster cost and everything. Obviously paper sucks and is bulky so the emergency center has packet radio in case the internet is down to send messages. To me it feels like there’s a very Meshtastic-friendly application for that specific part of the puzzle. And I think part of that is pub-sub and store-and-forward.

tl;dr: dono. VHF/UHF radios with FM-encoded audio still wins on the “will always work” whereas meshes can fail to work because they are too thin or too oversubscribed. But Meshtastic has a bunch of positive attributes that make it a worthy tool for emcom, with a bit of work.

My dad designed jet engines and nobody made him design a jet engine on the whiteboard. So you are starting from the right place.

We are here where we are today because we spent too much time thinking that acting like the right kind of nerd meant you were a good programmer. There’s nothing wrong with going to a job, working hard, and then doing something else. I know very productive engineers who don’t have a favorite science fiction book who were great to work with.

Given things lately, I think it’s healthy that a lot of people have had to take a step back and realize that their employer would totally harvest their organs for profit if they could get away with it. Providing people the right “tech subculture” cues has resulted in a lot of people working themselves to death and never seeing any income windfalls.

I actively hate a bunch of my old science fiction books from when I was a kid because they were written with what is, to my adult mind, a not-very-subtle fascist bent. There’s, obviously, some great novels out there that expand your mind … but at the same time, there’s a lot of the science fiction canon where I’d probably hate working with people who took those books seriously.

And, likewise, there’s a lot of people who simply don’t have time because they are smart people actually trying to get into the lucrative field of computer science and a good scifi novel reading session is a luxury they just don’t have.

“Tell me about your favorite science fiction book” is pretty much a textbook case for how to have good intentions but conduct an interview that’s, when you step back and think about it some more, biased. It’s checking for subculture-fit in ways that have nothing to do with how they are at work.

On the other hand, whiteboard tests are also useless.

If you want to make a better interview, I’d suggest you have an interview guide. Not a manager? Just write your own for your interviews and keep to it. This protects you from unconsciously giving the person who looks the part easy questions.

If you want to check for culture fit, talk about things at work that matter. Are you worried someone is going to talk down to a junior engineer? Make them talk about a time they had to mentor a junior engineer. Did they succeed? What did they do? Ask them about the best project manager or doc writer they worked with. Are you worried that they aren’t serious enough about getting shit done at work? Talk about the worst incident they ever were part of, but not the technical parts, just how they made sure it got fixed. Are you worried that they aren’t a good team player? Ask about their best collaborations. Or how they organized work on a large project. Or the time that they took one for the team. If you think through how the last crop of yuppies pissed you off for a while and break it down into questions that they’d not have a good answer to, you should be able to make a nice set of behavioral screening questions and a set of attributes that you want the person to display in their answers.

The way I’ve been looking at it, if you want a chance at the starships, start with the spandex.

If we want a good and honest chance of being able to do interstellar travel of any sort, we’re not going to get there by building an Enterprise and then hope that someone cooks up a warp drive for it before we finish ruining our only planet.

Maybe physics is all wrong and there really is a warp drive to be had. If there is one, it’s not the sort of thing you can count on. We have to survive as a species until it happens.

Conversely, there’s a real easy bet to be had. In 1.29 million years, Gliese 710 will be 0.17 light years away. The GAIA mission has identified some other candidate stars that are going to get fairly close sooner. So there’s a solarpunk space travel bet of simply providing a stable society over the long term such that we can surf the stars.

Solarpunk is kinda the version that starts with the spandex. I’m at the point in my life where I kinda hate the whole Eugenics-wars/World-War-III thread to Trek because it kinda mutated away from the hopeful idea that we can survive a downturn into the idea that the collapse will create a new world which is … risky.

IoT devices are, to be quite honest, a shitshow. Where your Sovol counts as such.

Either the device needs to call upstream to get updates or it’s going to ship with a security bug that can be exploited. Or, in may cases, it’ll have an unpatched security vulnerability and it’ll call upstream to get updates.

It costs money to keep the necessary cloud infrastructure in place, both in terms of hosting costs as well as devops time. Either they will eventually need to brick the device, leave it unpatched forever, charge you some maintenance fee, go bankrupt, or fund the whole thing by selling your data.

It’s not hard to write a bot that would scan for signs of a Sovol printer, try the default SSH password, and do nefarious things. And people are generally really bad about the default SSH password regardless.

There’s not really a good answer here for IoT devices. There’s not even a really great answer for home brew IoT devices with the thing where Home Assistant’s reverse-tunnel service had a nasty vulnerability that let you remote HA instances.

Aaand… IPv6 is great. But unfortunately the way things are now means that giving everything on your network a publicly routable IPv6 address is a very bad idea.

Klipper provides a lot of protections but all of that hinges on the microcontroller, so presumably an attacker can upload a substitute firmware using the update mechanism that would go full send on the heaters, which has the potential to actually melt some things.

The problem is that if you want Klipper, you need a full Linux. This is not actually a problem for the Klipper devs, mind you, because they wrote a cool tool for people comfortable modding their printers and only BTT and Obico sponsor Klipper. This was a lot less of a problem when we were talking about Marlin printers. Except that if people weren’t using Klipper, it’s just too damn easy to write a two-piece controller software in the same fashion of Klipper and get the expediency of writing code in Linux instead of in an os-less microcontroller.

tl;dr: there is no safe way to buy a printer with klipper on it, it just looks like it works right now.

FYI: Text sometimes work when calls don’t. Text use much less bandwidth.

Sure… but… not all municipalities let you text 911. And with the way modern phones are being implemented with VoIP+LTE and iMessage/RCS and some of the very exciting failure modes of modern networking… I’m having a very real concern that even if my municipality lets me text 911 (I don’t remember offhand but I think mine does) that if I actually needed to dial 911 under relatively prosaic emergencies like a silly little power outage, I might be out of luck.

I’m not convinced on the cell phone thing. Every time there’s even a minor thing around where I am, like a dinky little power outage, everybody grabs their cellphone and my service goes to crap, so much so that when I’ve tried to work through a power outage with my phone, I’ve worked out of my wife’s car after having driven somewhere that does have power.

Also, a standard ham radio uses a lot less power than the entire chain of phone plus network equipment. So, sure, there’s cell tower trucks with generators but a ham rig needs a dinky little solar panel.

I guess it depends on your aspirations and where you live?

A radio that can hit the bands longer than the 10 meter band is pricey. Which is why Ham has traditionally been the sort of hobby that a distinguished older white gentleman does, not a thing for regular people.

On the other hand, a cheap VHF/UHF handheld radio can be really quite cheap (Baofeng radios being an example). You will only be able to talk to the local area but most areas have a repeater in convenient geographic locations (mountaintops, ideally) that will listen on one frequency and then transmit at higher power on another frequency so that you can reach a wider area. So in my area for the EmComm use-case, there’s a whole organized VHF/UHF system of volunteers.

Oh yeah, and you can also screw around with putting custom firmware on WiFi devices or Meshtastic in Ham mode.

I dono… I’d like to think that there’s useful things especially these days to be done with Ham radio and that it’s not just a thing that is just for distinguished older white gentlemen, but it’s kinda hamstrung (LOL, pun) by the present-day audience that’s preventing people from seeing what it could be.

Funny you ask because I literally just got my ham license because of this.

Radio works without infrastructure. Okay there’s some ham stuff that is internet-connected et al but overall you are just spewing radio waves into the ether with a variety of simple encodings and someone else can pick them up. So powering a few radios off of a dinky solar panel and battery combo is no biggie, whereas powering cell towers, routing infrastructure, et al is a bunch of generators that need to be fueled and whatnot.

Like… you can hit the 20-meter-and-longer wavelengths with a radio and a random bit of wire and some ingenuity and get your signal all over the place. And the maximum power you are ever allowed is 1500 watts and most folks can make do with far less power than that.

Also, amateur radio has fun stuff to do other than mere EmComm needs. Part of why Twitter used to be handy in a pinch for lesser-disasters in days past was that it could be used for EmComm needs but also had other fun stuff to be done with it. Things that are “just” for EmComm infrastructure tend to get forgotten about and abandoned and rot away to nothingness.

A lot of areas in the US have ARES/RACES orgs to provide an already organized group of people… but some of the fun games that hams play like POTA/SOTA, Field Days, et al also serve to make it fun to have a portable setup.

The last time the fires hit my area I was watching the fire progress via Purple Air sensors. If this one sensor was still sending, then my friend’s place up in the mountains was probably OK. Seems … kinda obvious almost?

So… I’m not sure if this is an entirely rational thought.

I’d always wanted to do ham radio but hadn’t bothered. Before my time, ham radio let you do amazing things that weren’t otherwise very easy. Like have a group chat with a bunch of people all over the world. Except when I was looking for things to do, you could get on the Internet and chat with a bunch of people all over the world … without the antennas and hardware and all.

Lately some stuff happened and my spouse’s friend who lives near Asheville NC and lived through the flooding there where ham radio was the only working form of communications, so my spouse got pressured into buying a radio, which means that I got myself a license because … well, radio works without much infrastructure?

Mostly I figure I needed to fill the void that was getting on Twitter if something happened locally.

My household celebrates two different winter-related holidays, Christmas included.

I have some connectors there on my ESPHome devices to string up intelligent LED strands. I even got some RGBW LED strands so that I can have more pleasant-looking lights.

I’ve got a fake tree and some other decorations, plus a blob of older LED and incandescent strands.

…and I just haven’t felt any real holiday spirit the past few years so none of it’s been put up.

The hard-to-solve problem with the news is that reporting on suicides causes suicide (as in: more people commit suicide, not just people who were on the ledge decided to go) yet people also want to know things.

I’m unclear if the usual disclaimers added to the article actually help or just are the only sounds-like-it-might-help thing that comes to mind so at least the publisher can feel better about the added deaths that, statistically speaking, they might be causing. I just remember it being covered in one of my college gened classes and the way it was presented was that everybody threw up their hands in frustration and gave up.

An acquaintance who screwed up her leg really bad and went through a whole process of getting bolted back together et al decided that she wasn’t going to tell people what happened. Because everybody always asks “how’d you do it?” as if it was some curse that she had personally triggered that they could avoid. And I thought about how the first question in my mind was “how’d you do it?” and I guess it made me think about the inanity of making sure to check for flying herring while traveling backwards hanging out the window of a train going between Albuquerque and Phoenix after having signed up for a triple indemnity life insurance plan… or something like that.

The only exception, of course, is you are doing something that the news orgs consider “wrong” like doing drugs or being certain categories of mentally ill or riding a bicycle for transportation.

I’d ended up having a conversation with an archivist about the somewhat related question of “What was the Soviet Union’s history of itself, absent the editorializing that the rest of the world has been doing?”

For example, Tamim Ansary wrote Destiny Disrupted: A History of the World through Islamic Eyes that explained a lot of things about the middle east through that sort of lens, so I was hoping that someone would write a history of the USSR in a similar fashion, which I didn’t find.

One of the problems we have when approaching the more successful world governments is understanding … well, I guess good intentions? There’s kinda two sides to the story of Dear Leader. On one side, the self-aggrandizement as the father of the country, on the other side the act of actually trying to be the father of the country. Obviously a strongman today is mostly running the show almost entirely for selfish reasons but what you kinda see in the USSR and modern day China is at the same time an attempt to make the state better off. Which, of course, falls prey to effective use of power. “Do this or you will be executed” doesn’t work very well… not with the US approach to the death penalty, not to the totalitarianism of the attempted Communist state.

But, even today, there’s tons of “Good idea, bad implementation” things that the Chinese government does where the rest of the world governments just let things get worse.

The vibes I was getting in the days of Lenin from my reading was interesting. Lenin was the leader of the USSR but not in the way that Stalin was. The Bolsheviks of the time insisted that things be discussed and debated and worked through and not even Lenin was above that. And there was a very forward-looking idealistic sort of viewpoint. They could reject everything and do things right for once and many of them were new to power so they were freed of that worldview. And a lot of those things didn’t pan out as well as they wanted it to and people started to need to be “convinced” to do the new thing. First the “useless” hereditary upper-class, but then everybody else. And then eventually Lenin died and Stalin didn’t have that much patience for the Bolshevik old-guard and took over.

tl;dr: In a sense, it’s as if a bunch of Star Trek fans had toppled a government and were trying to build the best government ever for the future, using whatever means necessary.

I had a booth about this at the Bay Area Maker Faire lately.

If we’re all printing the same object on our 3D printers, it’s proooobably a lot less trouble to just have someone injection mold it and save us all the trouble. 3D printers are really great for one-offs and mass-customization and things like that. Aaaaaand, I feel like it’s kind of an under-appreciated problem in 3D printing. Because, yeah, CAD is hard and we’re never going to reach a world where every 3D printer owner is very very comfortable with CAD, and so it should be more of a concrete goal for the 3D printing community to make sure that we’re focusing on this problem. It’s important that every 3D printer owner can do at least some amount of tweaking and customizing, otherwise we’re failing as a community.

Now, I don’t Tinkshame. I spent a lot of time learning Blender, FreeCAD, and OpenSCAD to prove Naomi Wu’s assertion that we should all just get over ourselves and use TinkerCAD. The only real problem with it is that it’s not really free, it’s “free at the pleasure of AutoDesk” where they could raise the “Mission Accomplished” banner at some point and turn it off. And there’s not really an open source version of it for roughly the same reason that random thingiverse models are always kinda halfassed and bad. Doing a good TinkerCAD-but-actually-free-by-some-definition is actual work to get everything right and polished and documented and bug-free and nobody really wants to pay for it.

Also, maybe I am pedantic and obsessive, but I don’t really like screwing around too heavily with models in a slicer, so I’d rather they take some of the magical code in the OrcaSlicer/PrusaSlicer/SuperSlicer tree and actually organize it into something that could be TinkerCAD-esque?

Anyway, the core of the talk of my booth was systems and libraries of 3D printable objects. So, for example, there’s the Honeycomb Storage Wall system and some of us have been writing some neat lil OpenSCAD libraries and models for it (and another group of people have been doing similar things in Fusion) where you can make a parametric model so you can measure your flashlight and print a cute 40mm holder for it based on the measurement without having to model things from scratch and it’ll click into the HSW wall and it’s fine unless you are married to someone who has ommetaphobia and then you need to make sure that the honeycomb is the same color as the wall. And the same is true for Gridfinity, just you can put that in the drawer.

And there’s also a lot of parametric models. I’m not sure what you are looking to print, but there’s a decent selection of people who have done stuff in Fusion or FreeCAD or OpenSCAD where you can download the model and change the parameters to get it a lot closer to what you want without going through all of the drama of making it all over again.

I love using OpenSCAD. I’ve got a buncha years of experience using various 3D modelling tools at various times and so I can use Blender or FreeCAD quite well actually, but in the end, I do a lot of functional bits and it’s so darn easy to just write some code because, actually, I’ve been working as a professional software engineer for quite some time.

So… dono, it depends on your aspirations? There were a good number of Gridfinity-like systems that were around before Gridfinity came out and they were … ok, but not great, but then Gridfinity came along and did a boxy-box system just like was already there but with some interesting tweaks and making it more amenable to real customization and suddenly everybody went gonzo over Gridfinity in particular. So you might not be just making a thing that exists in a dozen forms better if you borrow an idea and make your version of it.

Also, I learned 3D modelling tools mumble mumble years ago in a failed attempt and/or dodged-bullet because I’d wanted to do games or special effects as a kid. The software I learned on is long gone, but it turns out that once you are thinking about things, it tends to stick? Which means that I learned pottery while visualizing the objects I was making on the wheel as if they were in the CAD window of my mind, got good at photographic lighting based on what I’d observed in the 3D program, and then transitioned back to CAD because I wanted to make things, so it’s kinda one of those things where you probably won’t waste the time spent.

tl;dr: I learned OpenSCAD, FreeCAD, and Blender to prove that Naomi Wu is right and we should all get over ourselves and use TinkerCAD and … she’s still probably right, LOL.

OTOH, Divergent3D / Czinger Motors has 3D printable (with caveats) hypercars that are more … reasonable?

Apparently the Local Motors Rally Fighter (made by the same folks as the Strati) has downloadable files in this Reddit thread: https://www.reddit.com/r/carmodification/comments/kztg6l/localmotors_rallyfighter_plans/?rdt=40977

It’s not necessarily that useful, mind you, but at least it’s exciting.

I guess the thing to note is that if you are looking for a project, you probably could create some really good downloadable plans for an e-Bike that could have the key important parts printed on someone else’s SLM metal 3D printer and it wouldn’t even be especially silly or that absurdly priced, which would be a nicer argument for the superiority of bikes over cars if I haven’t been unable to bike because of wrist problems for the past few years.

I feel like Starfleet in Trek accidentally but directly led to the modern US Space Force.