Posts by vtcodger 2026 publicly visible posts • joined 13 Sep 2017
2G carries better because it uses the original lower frequency bands, not because of the way data is handled. ...
Yes, the lower transmission frequency surely helps considerably, but I should think that the lower bandwidth of 2G (200KHz?) vs 4G/5G (several MHz?) would result in lower signal to noise ratios exclusive of lower attenuation due to lower frequency. That's probably simplistic. What am I ignorant of/overlooking?
It should never be phased out.
A problem no one seems to mention: 2G in general provides higher signal strength than 4G or 5G. A quick internet search leads me to believe that the difference is typically about 10db. So, even if all the meters are replaced/upgraded, it's likely that some of them still won't work. That's consistent with my experience here in the US. When 2G was turned off early this year and I was forced to switch to a more modern phone, my cell phone service at home went from marginal (i.e. only in some places outdoors when the phone was held just right) to non-existent. Walking and driving around the neighborhood and checking 4G signal strength suggests that most of the homes probably aren't going to have a usable 4G signal without directional external antennae and maybe, in some cases, ampliifiers.
Not that I think it matters much. As far as I can tell, no one seems to actually know how to use "smart" metering to any useful purpose.
There are things that could be done to discourage either or both algorithmic and AI based trading assuming that doing so is desirable. For example every trade on an exchange could be delayed for a random time (seconds? hours? days?). That'd certainly have some affect. Maybe positive.
If it were my call, I'd probably want to run extensive simulations before I "fixed" anything.
Can anyone explain, in words a simple Pure Mathematics PhD can understand, how they work?
The Reader's Digest condensed version: They don't work
The Full Version: "Assume an infinite population of greedy and not especially bright entities known as investors(=Greater Fools--GFs for short) who have a property known as wealth. Assume that some investors can be persuaded to exchange wealth for entities called magic beans(MB for short) based on the premise that MBs (which can be, but are not required to be, tangible) can always be freely interchanged with wealth at an attractive rate. i.e the quantity ((1+MB/W)**time) is continuous, and always greater than one. Or, in lay terms, "There will always be a greater fool who will buy your MBs for more than you paid for them". Doesn't work. The problem? The supply of Greater Fools is large. But it is, everywhere and always, finite.
Of course a sustainable aviation future is possible although one doubts it will happen. Has everyone forgotten the zeppelins? The Hindenburg came to a spectacularly bad end of course, but the Graf Zeppelin made hundreds of flights in the 1920s and 1930s including regular mail and passenger service between Germany and Brazil in the mid-1930s. Puitting on my green glasses which make the improbable possible and everything look far easier than it is, It is easy to envision lighter than air aircraft built with modern materials and fueled by "green hydrogen" driving hydrogen-air fuel cells replacing hydrocarbon fueled jets on all but the longest routes. Of course, they'll be a bit slow, -- maybe 30-40 hours across the Atlantic, Much longer between Australia and just about anywhere And it'd be a good idea to keep them away from strong storms. But they can (on paper at least) lift and move a lot of mass cheaply and move it fairly quickly. Especially compared to ships.
I suppose that they might occasionally incinerate a payload. But airliners do that from time to time. And current EVs and large scale grid storage batteries spontaneously combust every now and then. No one seems to care all that much.
Will that happen? IMHO -- Two chances -- slim and none.
But it COULD happen.
Our electricity supplier wouldn’t accept the next reading as it was less than the previous one and used their estimates for our usage (based on history).
You are perhaps fortunate. Back in the 1960s when digital computers first started being used in the US to process meter readings, the software was likely to assume that meter readings less than the previous (due to error by the meter reader) were due to wrap around of the 5 digit readout space and to present the consumer with a bill for around 100,000 kwhr of usage. And yes, this actually happened from time to time ... think in terms of a rental or vacation cottage that is unoccupied for a month and a meter reader who had trouble interpolating the alternating backward reading dials
The thing about 1950s computers is that they quite clearly worked. And they produced useful results. No one doubted that they worked. The issue back then was that it wasn't clear that digital computers would be a cost-effective solution to most real world problems
Despite huge investments and massive amounts of hyperbole it's not clear that ANY of the current crop of Quantum computers actually work. ... Or that the next generation will work. --- Or that their great, great, ever so great offspring won't be a really promising technology just as soon as the techies conquer the last few practical difficulties -- a state that can probably endure damn near forever.
From "you are holding it wrong!" to "you are holding it." in 11 generations.
The next step is When it is running, you can't hold it and you'd best not try? (But for a paltry $125, you can buy Apple's patented, high-tech insulated glove which will allow full access to all phone controls. And for another $67 you can have a head shield that will allow you to hold the phone near your ear without threat of permanent injury -- assuming that you hold the phone right).
Although I largely agree with you, let me assure you that driving in Boston is a unique experience. The problem is that almost everywhere else in the world traffic operates either on a relatively universal set of rules or on an "every man for himself" basis. In Boston however, the guiding principle is "He who has the least to lose in a collision has the right of way". And yes, I think that is likely to be a problem for autonomous vehicles.
A reasonable compromise might be that Level 3 certified and below vehicles require a safety driver who is actively monitoring the environment and vehicle at all times. Level 4 requires a safety driver who can be napping studying or working on something else during normal operation, but is expected to take over if the vehicle alerts him/her or if it comes to a prolonged stop. Level 5 (if it ever comes about) can operate without a driver. Probably needs some additional nuances. Who does the certification? Is it valid in all states? And provinces? Worldwide?
BTW, Waymo and Cruise are currently Level 4. For cars anyway. Would trucks be different? Tesla is claimed to be level 2 (But Elon continues to promise "Full Self-Driving" any day now.)
YOU don't use gmail. But other people do. And they will be sending you yet more, and more complex, HTML email. Their email will be a problem for the visually handicapped. And for those who use text browsers like MUTT or ALPINE. And, of course, HTML emailis are wildly insecurable. Which may be a problem when the day comes that people actually become worried about internet security.
I'm not sure whether the problem at Google is utopian thinking or dementia or maybe something in the drinking water. But I think this is probably yet another bad idea from our digital masters in Mountain View.
BTW, I think that if the secure internet ever comes about, the rule for those who send email will be "If you MUST email HTML, put it in an attachment", and for users, the rule will be "Don't EVER open an attachment unless you need to and you trust the source."
Maybe the small, but stable, market for VR headsets will be training programs, not games. Maybe headset price isn't so critical if you're trying to teach folks to fix nuclear reactors or land aircraft at night on an aircraft carrier. My guess is that even at a few thousand per unit, time on a VR simulator is a lot cheaper than time on a real flight simulator. Or a real aircraft. Or, God help us all, on real nuclear reactors.
That assumes that VR is actually effective in training.
30 million a year? Maybe. I suppose. If they start being used in schools. And they aren't all that durable.
Welcome to rural America. Unpaved roads are far cheaper to maintain than paved roads. And as long as traffic is light and the town runs a grader or bulldozer over the ruts and washboarding every now and then, the dirt roads are often far smoother than their potholed paved cousins. Of course, there IS that week or so in early spring when the road, thawing from the top down, turns into an endless river of mud. But the locals take that in stride. They've even been known to close schools for a few days if the roads get so bad they threaten to engulf school buses.
Not sure it's relevant, but my understanding is that commercial map producers throw in a few deliberate errors in order to discourage their competitors from copying their maps without travelling the roads in question. And in fact a few years ago saw a road on a map that looked like it might be a shortcut. I took it and about a mile in, I ended up in someone's dooryard face to face with a barn that looked like it might have been there for a century or two. I doubt the rest of that road ever existed beyond that point. Certainly not for a great many years.
Moral -- maps, Google's or anyone else's -- aren't completely trustworthy.
Indeed, if parody is OK -- and it seems to fall under the category of "Fair Use" -- then using other people's characters, style, and plot line would seem to be something that you or I or that monster computer over there are free to do. (So long as we don't misrepresent who wrote the text).
@Adair: That's an entirely reasonable assumption. But I think it's somewhat flawed. For example, metal-air (Zinc-air, Aluminum-air) have significantly higher energy densities than Lithium-ion and aren't (anywhere near as) subject to thermal runaway. So why are we messing around with Lion? Simple. Currently practical metal-air batteries are primary cells -- not rechargeable. Pretty much restricted to hearing aids and a few similar applications. Lion OTOH is not only rechargeable, if not abused, it can be recharged a lot of times before performance degrades significantly.
Choice of battery chemistries involves juggling a bunch of considerations. Energy density, temperature range, self-discharge rate, tendency toward thermal runaway, outgassing, toxicity, number of recharges, etc, etc, etc.
I'm not an expert on batteries. Probably others around here know much more than I and might tell us more.
FWIW, my impression is that the holy grail of transportation batteries would be a metal-air battery (possibly Aluminum-air?) with mass, range, safety parameters comparable to fossil fuel. The vision is that you'll haul into a service station, make use of the facilities, buy an overpriced snack, pull out your old degraded Aluminum anodes, throw them in a recycle bin, insert new ones, and be on your way. "They" have been working on that for 40 years. They can't even run a demo today. ... Maybe in another 40 years. ... Maybe never.
You can never be too rich or too thin or have too many Lithium reserves.
Seriously, Lithium batteries have some problems -- especially their lamentable tendency to, on rare occasions self-immolate, often destroying not only themselves but everything remotely combustible nearby. But they are the best we currently have for many applications where energy density is important. They are likely going to be around for a long time. 7 or 8 ir 10 billion humans are probably going to want/need a lot of Lithium. Discovery of deposits is almost certainly a good thing even if the aren't currently economically viable.
I've long felt that humans in space is mostly a really dumb idea. We're mediocre investigatory probes with huge support requirements -- (food , oxygen, waste disposal/recycling, radiation protection, etc, etc,etc). Lots of mass. Lots of expense. Lots of things to go lethally wrong, Mechanical probes are much cheaper. The machines get better every year. Humans don't. And no one sheds all that many tears if a few billion dollars worth of hardware is inadvertently reduced to useless scrap by misjudgment or pure bad luck.
That said, the space shuttle had a failure rate under 2% -- two failures in 133 launches. Y'know what. That's damn impressive considering the complexity of the effort. The problem with the space shuttle wasn't so much safety as outrageous costs. Looks to me like the SLS is headed down the same road. By way of contrast, the much less ambitious Russian Soyuz program has had two lethal failures ( and a couple of near misses) in 1900 launches. There's an interesting list of human spaceflight failures and near misses at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_spaceflight-related_accidents_and_incidents
I think there's a lesson to be learned here. People do not, for the most part, belong in space. And for the rare exceptions -- Skylab, Hubble Repair -- KEEP IT SIMPLE.
Oh yeah -- And there's a reading assignment. Personal Observations on the Reliability of the Shu琀le Richard P. Feynman -- https://www.refsmmat.com/files/reflections.pdf
Now that you mention it, yes, Rube Goldberg -- master of wildly complex "solutions" to simple problems -- would no doubt find much to admire in the computation of spreadsheet cell using a distant computer and an elaborate communication network.
BTW, I'm pretty sure that Open Office has had Python scripting in Calc for a LONG time. My vague impression is that it works fine (and without the cloud) but isn't very useful for most people most of the time.
The idea that rural users need 100Mbps seems bizarre to me. What most rural users need from the government is access to essential services -- emergency communication and warnings, weather, tax filing, medical information and the like. I think that most of the people pushing high speed access everywhere and always are folks who want to extend the Internet of Garbage (IoG) to everyone. And they want someone else to pay for it. I would want that too if I were a IoG provider.
I think it would probably be a lot more cost effective for the governments to spend some money to make sure that essential services are not bandwidth hogs then spend a lot less than $700,000,000 dollars to try to get, say 1 Mbps, (I think that's about the maximum ancient copper wire systems can do even with modern technology) to as many folks as possible. The relatively few users who actually need more can probably pay for satellite. And if the IoG folks want 100Mbps to everyone, no problem -- they can write a (very large) check.
On top of which there is the reality that communications providers in the US seem to be an infinite money sink. For decades, they have been promising rural broadband, taking money for rural broadband, and largely failing to deliver rural broadband. BTW, I don't think this situation is limited to the US.
The NASA launch sites in Florida are relatively low latitude. Useful if you want to end up in an equatorial or near equatorial orbit. And you pick up significant free velocity from the Earth's rotation when you launch Eastward from a low latitude location. There is an extensive downrange tracking network in place for Florida launches, so you know if the launch vehicle malfunctioned slightly -- which you don't always for launches from Vandenburg where the new satellite's orbital status can be something of a mystery until it turns up over a tracking station (or doesn't) several hours later. And your classified payloads are less likely end up in a lab in Russia or China in the event of a launch malfunction when you don't launch them in trajectories passing over, for example, Cuba or Venezuela. The three letter folk probably sleep better at night if you refrain from doing that.
"What is this actually doing?"
Probably nothing that wasn't previously being adequately addressed by the US Air Force, US Navy, and the "black" agencies. It's a Trump initiative and gives every appearance of being neither necessary nor useful. But I don't think it actually costs very much. It's budget is around $30B out of a total "Defense" (i.e. War Department) budget of $1770B. And that $30B is mostly funding for things that would be (and were previously) done by some other part of the military.
Not a stupid question at all.
The short answer is "they couldn't figure out how to build it."
A long answer is at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strategic_Defense_Initiative
"it was technically a 'very hard thing' for the hardware and software to account for cross traffic."
Would it be rude to ask what other things us meatbags think to be fairly trivial -- stuff we do all the time while driving while not thinking much about it -- might be technically a "very hard thing" for Tesla hardware and software to handle?
I don't really disagree, but 780 days is , I believe, the interval between when a minimum energy (Hohmann) transfer orbit from Earth to Mars is possible. The actual flight duration for a Hohmann flight would be around 250 days? Moreover in an emergency situation -- getting a critical part there SOON -- a higher energy orbit would likely be possible. In practice, I should think that most of the supplies for the first manned Mars mission will be prepositioned, and that the Astronauts will follow several years later after it is certain that everything they might possibly need for the mission is in place.
Not that I think that, based on what we know today, there is any actual reason to send humans to Mars. But I'd be delighted if our rovers and probes turned up something that justified sending someone out to look at it.
Indeed, I think we've all read too much Science Fiction and watched too much Star Trek. It's hard to see much reason for sending people anywhere outside the Earth's atmosphere other to wave a flag and make a memorable speach. Frankly, we're lousy exploratory probes requiring elaborate support systems to function at all, having limited sensory capability and not functioning all that well even on our best days. Moreover, exploratory hardware devices are evolving rapidly. They get more capable every year. I can imagine that in a few decades, we may have rovers reporting back from truly hostile environments like the surface of Venus. People, on the other hand are going to need tens of millions of years of evolution to get adequate radiation hardening, the ability to function in a vacuum, etc, etc, etc. A few more arms might help as well. I don't think humanity will evolve in that direction anyway. No reasons to
An intelligent race would probably simply kick back, work on improving their society and, in their spare time, build better and better probes and automated systems to explore their planet and nearby objects. I doubt humanity will do that, preferring instead to spend vast amounts in order to send humans forth to do jobs for which they are poorly suited. And I suppose both roads lead to much the same place. It's just that one is a lot bumpier, tedious, and dangerous than the other. Little doubt in my mind which road humanity will pick.
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The one mission where I could see humans in space would be command and control of Mars (and other deep space object) rovers without a 3 to 22 miniute speed of light delay. Send a crew out to a nearby rock (a moon in the case of Mars). Hollow out a radiation safe habitat and prosper. If you need a staff of 3 on duty 24-7 to manage the rovers, you'll probably need four shifts, plus a bunch of support folks to handle medicine, cooking, clean up, maintenance, etc. -- about 40 folk. Give or take. It'll cost a pretty penney. I doubt it will happen.
"Current tools may not end up being much use to the military, however, considering their tendency to generate false, misleading information that cannot be trusted"
If the folks quoted in the article are any sample of the thought processes of whoever is in charge, false and misleading might be an improvement. If "they" are actually thinking of using generative AI in strategic planning, I think our optimum strategy might be to seek out an enemy and surrender. In the long run, it'll likely save a lot of grief and money.
It'll be interesting. I'm not sure how much how much experience the folks proposing these controls have with kids.
The controls probably won't work any better than most things digital. There will probably be ways to get around the controls. Probably lots of them. And even with a remarkably low birthrate, there are a lot of kids in China. Hundreds of millions of kids in China. Some of them will be pretty clever. So I reckon we can expect that some kid somewhere in the Middle Kingdom will quickly figure out how to bypass the controls. And I can pretty much guarantee that within 48 hours of that happening, half the kids in China will know how to bypass the controls. It might take as much as a week for the knowledge to diffuse out to most of the rest.
More likely than not, the Chinese don't want to "rule" anything outside the traditional boundaries of their "Middle Kingdom". The rest of the planet being occupied by vast numbers of noisy, uncultured barbarians. Really and truly, if you look at their history, China hasn't been expansionist for a long time. They even gave up exploration back in the mid 1400s. They'll trade with the rest of the world. And maybe "help" with some infrastructure in some developing countries although there may be a strings attached.
But "rule" the world? Who in their right mind would want to rule the world?
How is the ability to query an unvetted stream of text going to increase any employee's productivity ?
I'm guessing you are fortunate enough not to have had much experience with large bureaucratic organizations. Let me assure you that in such organizations, the average productivity of an employee is around -2.3 on a scale of 0 to 10. Not that I think that AI will contribute anything useful or actually increase productivity. But it might give the illusion of utility and/or increased productivity. And in that world, illusion is everything.
FWIW -- There were actually two groups working on cold fusion in Utah in the 1980s. One was Fleishmann and Pons notorious effort at Utah State. But 100 miles away at BYU, a guy named Steven Jones was working on something called Muon-catalyzed fusion. Also cold and theoretically perfectly sound if some practical problems can be overcome. Jones was only able to get about a third of the way to where he needed to be to have a possibly practical device. Others are still working on the concept. It's possible that some day they'll have real success. I wouldn't hold my breath while waiting.
There's a Wikipedia article https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Muon-catalyzed_fusion
I upvoted you because I agree with the sentiment. If you're going to build a society that depends on ubiquitous digital services, you better make sure that the necessary communications services are provided. And by this time it should be clear that the major communications operations have minimal interest in providing them. They'll take money and maybe make some token efforts. But they are driven by sales and profits, not by any actual interest in providing service.
OTOH, I don't think you appreciate how big and thinly populated much of North America is. I'm not at all sure that fibre to every farm, mine, campground, and village of a few hundred souls is realistic, affordable or even possible. The alternative -- cellular phones -- is not currently all that great. And I'm far from certain it's practical either. Cell service here in Northwestern Vermont is not great. Lots of not-spots. And this is in an area with enough people to qualify as a Census Bureau Metropolitan Statistical Area. I can only imagine how poor it is in the Great Basin or Western Plains once you travel out of the few large metro areas. Canada and Australia have even worse situations I should think.
Satellites? Maybe
Anyway, I think we need more engineering, less marketing, and perhaps some political leaders who are a bit less clueless.
By way of contrast, the independent directors of Berkshire-Harhaway -- net worth just under $1T in 2022 -- are paid either $3300 or $7300 a year. They include Bill Gates and a number of other folks with fairly impressive sounding bios. I'm not sure what that indicates. Maybe that you don't have to pay a lot for quality. Or perhaps that directors don't contribute much of value to corporate operations.
"Exactly none, would be my guess."
Well, it does have -- on paper at least -- a much higher payload than a presumably cheaper F150 (3500 lbs vs around 2000 lbs). Maybe a few people will have a valid work-related use case.
A question: A lot of work and recreational use of pickups involve driving through fairly deep water. Crossing streams. Launching and recovering boats, etc. Water and electricity are a notoriously poor fit. Is that going to be a problem?
From that it's obvious they aren't in serial production so the truck produced in Austin is very much a test piece ...
Indeed. Production lines for complex products need debugging just as the products do. Presumably, Tesla will fix whatever glitches they observed in producing this vehicle, then fire up the line, produce one or a handful more, identify more problems, fix them ... repeat a few times. And finally they will presumably start stamping these (rather weird if you ask me) vehicles out in volume.
"ISTR they did rehearse their presentation."
Sounds plausible. I think anyone who runs demos quickly learns to walk through the script at least once before going live. The worse the product, the more walk thrus.
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As for who is going to buy these things. Tesla fan bois of course. And if they are actually bullet proof, the Mexican drug cartels might take a few hundred. Denizens of Chicago might want one, but I expect there might be an affordability problem. Maybe the Ukrainian military? Can you mount a machine gun in the back? How are they at clearing landmines?
A somewhat less frivolous Buffett quote on airlines from the 1990 Berkshire-Hathaway annual letter.
Since our purchase, the economics of the airline industry have deteriorated at an alarming pace, accelerated by the kamikaze pricing tactics of certain carriers. The trouble this pricing has produced for all carriers illustrates an important truth: In a business selling a commodity-type product, it's impossible to be a lot smarter than your dumbest competitor.
There's more in the following years newsletters. They're available at https://som.yale.edu/sites/default/files/2021-12/Module8-Readng.pdf if anyone is interested.
I would imagine that once the dust settles and the blood has been mopped up, Musk will come up with some clever quote similar to Warren Buffett's assertion that investors would have been saved billions of dollars if someone had shot the Wright Brother's plane down. Buffett in NOT a fan of the airline industry. I wouldn't overlook the possibility that almost all tech companies are enormously overvalued by the financial markets and that Elon is just one of the first to discover that the hard way.
I doubt Elon cares who, if anyone, advertising goes to. His only concern is whether he gets paid by his advertisers.
In fact, it sort of looks like ads that go to no one at all might be quite profitable.
"The cost of promoting a tweet is between $0.50 to $2.00 for every first action. On average it falls around $1.35 every time a Twitter user clicks, replies, or retweets your content. This makes Promoted Tweets a perfect match for brands that want to capitalize on high-performing tweets."
AdsTargets https://adstargets.com › Home › Online Advertising
Of course, I haven't a clue how Twitter or Twitter advertising works. I don't go near Twitter (or Facebook) or anything similar any more than I'd patronize a bar where customers are routinely ejected through the plate glass window.
"Would you run a Ferrari on Boudica's chariot wheels?"
No, but I probably wouldn't drive a Ferrari on dirt roads or on ice or snow covered roads here in Vermont. Neither would I use it to plow a field unless the alternative was pulling the plow myself. If I HAD to drive a Ferrari on Roman roads and I had a choice, I probably would select something quite different than the factory wheels and tires and perhaps closer to chariot wheels. And I'd probably try to do something about the road clearance.
I'm curious what you think has changed in the past three decades that requires upgrading from X11. It's not like GUIs have actually done anything other than repaint and rearrange the deckchairs in that timespan.
If you actually have a use case that requires Wayland, by all means use it. That's one of the virtues of Unix. It's relatively easy to replace even major subsystems. But I have to say that from the point of view of running applications and getting results -- which is what I use computers for -- systemd and to a lessor extent wayland -- look to me like solutions in search of a problem.
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