Not sure why you're denigrating HAM radio folks. They have in fact historically already been useful and critical in emergencies, most recently in 2024 for hurricane Helene. Just because you don't see it happening doesn't mean its not. I mean RACES is even a whole thing explicitly outlined because the government realizes the value of some ham radio operators.
It takes real money and infrastructure to build resilient emergency communication networks on a county or state sized scale. And HAMs just don't have it.
Go look at the budget documents for the tower sites and entire radio communication networks that support public safety networks (police, fire, ambulance) on a scale of somewhere the size of King County, WA. Properly engineered hilltop tower sites with well maintained generators, redundant radio links, etc. Amateurs just don't have the resources to do these things properly and are a distraction at best.
My opinion is not new or novel - the people who built the att long lines microwave network in the pre fiber optic era very rarely if ever had anything to do with ham radio. Persons concerned with actual mission critical emergency communication systems learn the hard way that amateur dilettantes just don't have the financial resources or time to do it properly.
If you want to build an emergency communications network, it's going to cost money in real equipment and paying for the man hours of full time equivalent employees to build and run it.
You're moving goalposts here. They have already been involved in emergency communication numerous times, its not the most optimal emergency communication, but critical nonetheless because of it's decentralized and among-the-people nature. Some elmer with 80ft tall tower in his backyard sometimes has a better chance at communicating with random operators that are at the location of a post-disaster scenario. If you don't want to look at helene, look at 9/11 where they became the primary communication for some red cross, medical facilities and personnel, and even new york's OEM.
This is the correct info. Anyone in an emergency is allowed to use the amateur frequencies. Just got my technician license a couple weeks ago, emergency use is even actually on the test!
> No provision of these rules prevents the use by an amateur station of any means of radiocommunication at its disposal to provide essential communication needs in connection with the immediate safety of human life and immediate protection of property when normal communication systems are not available.
That rule applies only to amateur stations (it says so right in the text!), not unlicenced individuals. What an amateur station is is defined in the beggining of the document, and yes, that requires the a duly-authroized (licenced) operator.
The last thing you want in an emergency event is some prepper with a baofeng transmitting on a repeaters frequency without a subtone set (because he's too stupid to pass an exam that 10yo kids can pass) effectively jamming it for proper emergency users. The other thing is, that chances are no one will actually hear you, especially on simplex. With tools like garmin inreach, carrying an HT with you instead of something proper and relying on that to save you in a time of need is just stupid.
Ham radio is like driving, you need experience to do it, and even some experienced people still do it badly. Trying to figure out how to drive by reading a car manual while the flood waters are rising is going to be a pretty bad experience.
Well, according to multiple times where people have checked with FCC enforcement folks, the spirit of the ruling covers unlicensed users operating in amateur bands for real emergencies.
The rules are clear here, there is no "spirit" in the law. The problem is, that the myth of somehow being "saved" by having a baofeng with you is spreading and people will die because of that. Hopefully only the baofengers and not others, affected by people who would effectively jam multiple others operating on eg. a repeater.
Ham radios don't just appear, someone has to buy them, buying one without getting a proper licence is just stupid.... but many (especially americans) do so. There is GMRS, there is FRS, people could take those radios, try them out when not in an emergency, but nope... everyone wants that uv-5r for some reason.
Every one of those preppers should get licenced first, go to some hiking trail, some remote..ish pota park and try to do an unspotter POTA activation there... and after failing horribly, they'll rethink their emergency communications. Somehow even licenced hams (about which I assume none actually tried doing an unspotted pota from some hiking trail) support and spread the "just buy a baofeng for emergencies". In reality... they're useless in most cases. If you're somewhere remote, no one will hear you anyway, and if you're stuck at home, having something like a starlink will actually help you reach someone, much better than a radio, especially a handheld 2m/70cm one. You might get some good but useless DX with an HF one, but you won't be setting up an NVIS antenna in a snow storm.
the rules arent clear, which is why 97.403 and 97.405 have been argued nauseam for a VERY long time. It's intentionally vague so that some people cant claim being out of soap as an emergency. But during a real emergency (someone had a heart attack on the floor, you're being chased by an axe murderer, etc) every single representative has said that the spirit of those parts covers the person. I don't disagree that people should get licensed, mostly so they know how and where to operate the radios or god forbid we do have a collapse and do have to fix up our own radios and antennas.
It's not actually vague, if they wanted "everyone" to do that, they'd use "everyone","anyone" or some similar wording, not specifically limit the exception to amateur station. Someone chose that for a reason, and it's a good reason... even licenced hams can cause trouble (eg. forget to turn off a simplex repeater on a radio, "mars mod" it and then jam the fire department frequencies with it,... a few weeks ago), and people who can't pass the simple exam don't need such radios, they can get by with GMRS (if they're from US and able to fill out an online form) for FRS/PMR (if they're not) or even MURS (again in US). There is no real difference in range between an uv-5r and a uv-5g (ham and gmrs radios), and a very small difference with frs/pmr (you need a line of sight anyway).
If someone had a heart attack, somewhere remote enough, that there is no cell signal, using a GMRS radio will have the same effect and range than a ham radio (i'm talking about 5W HTs here). Using something like a garmin inreach would actually get them help, but still, preppers want their baofengs, and for some reason don't want the *g models. That's why i get bothered when people promote ham radios, especially baofengs for emergencies, because they'll be useless in most cases and people who don't know that, will rely on them instead of getting a proper tool for the job. Many of those even have that in their pockets right now (some samsungs and iphone can do satellite communications already). Promoting the "you don't need a licence in emergencies" and then turning to "you'll be breaking the law anyway but who cares" mentality means that people don't learn even the basics (if they did, they'd be able to pass the exam) but still rely on those radios to get help.. and in turn, people will die because of that.
As i said before.. if you have a heart attack in the middle of nowhere, a baofeng won't get you help. If you went with gmrs/frs, you'd test it out and see the limited range and that no one is actually listening out there (unless arranged, and that person is in simplex range), if you get licenced, then you'd do the same, call out cqs into the void until you got bored, but if you do the "just buy one, you don't need licences..." (even if you do need to be licenced), people will be using that radio for the first time during an active emergency and fail in getting help with them. Stop promoting the untrue myth of getting help with a ham radio, instead offer proper tools for the job and people will actually be able to get help.
You're arguing for why people shouldn't buy a ham for prepping without a license or weirdly arguing that someone who is totally unprepared should've just happened to have a garmin on them. Realistically most people aren't toally prepared. A wife went to a remote cabin with their husband who is a ham op and has a heart attack, someone falls off a cliff while taking a photo of someone with their phone and the only thing is a mobile vhf/uhf radio in their car, etc etc etc. there are countless reasons why someone unlicensed might end up needing to transmit on amateur bands in an emergency, which again is why it's vague. You're claiming its not even though FCC enforcers themselves have said otherwise, so you should probably go argue with the fcc instead of strangers on the internet.
I'm equally confused as the other person above. Why not just ask participants to report what type of sauna they used? Sure humidity/duration/temp would be awesome to have, but at the very minimum knowing if a dry sauna would get the same results as a traditional steam sauna.
There's quite a wide range of variation between "full dry" (no added humidity whatsoever) and "full steam" (an actual steam room, rather than a sauna). Just asking people was it dry or was it humid won't capture much of that variation. I have a steam room at home and have been a near-life-long lover of them - they are wildly different than a sauna. But I'd still rank a sauna where someone had dumped 1L or so of water over the heater to be "humid", and consider it also very different from a totally dry sauna.
A lot of people view that as pretty costly for what is incredibly small amounts of data in the scope of things. for half that cost you can get 100gb of storage through google and have it synchronize all my docs AND my pictures and videos and anything else I want, so by comparison $4 can seem like a lot for note synchronization.
The main value proposition of Obsidian Sync isn't storage. Obsidian is primarily used with text files which are tiny. My 20 year old collection of notes is only about 1GB for 19,000 files and a few images/pdfs.
I'm biased but I'd say the benefits over Google Drive are: 1. end-to-end encryption, 2. seamless integration with the app (e.g. version history), 3. granular control over what settings and files are synced for each device, 4. shared vaults.
In addition Obsidian Sync helps keep Obsidian 100% user-supported. Obsidian is not subsidized by advertising or any investors. And you can actually contact the team if you need help. See also: https://stephango.com/vcware
Interesting! Unfortunately, the smallest Hermes 4 model I can see is 14B, which would really strain the limits of my little laptop. The only way I might get acceptable performance would be to run it extremely quantised, but then I probably wouldn't see much improvement over the 9B Qwen.
i assume based on their concerns of the hetzner pricing that they didnt want to pay for voyage/turbopuffer. unless there are free versions of those products that I'm unaware of, but I'm only seeing paid.
If you have some proof of astroturfing you should write a blog and then share on hn, it might make for a very good post here. otherwise it feels wildly inappropriate (not to mention incredibly unlikely that they would spend marketing money on astroturfing here of all places). Andy Weir has written some books that are incredibly successful in the tech industry circles with Hail Mary being the current most popular if not slightly under The Martian, chances are there's just going to be a lot of talk about it. But even if there is astroturfing, telling people to not watch the movie in a thread where someone is showing off their space photography is inappropriate and misplaced.
The author of the great Astrophotography is not the OP of the HN post.
And that is already one starting and possible isolated indicator of astroturfing, ....when the movie related posts got no traction, they went looking for related subjects...
Under the assumption that amazon has decided to astroturf on this niche tech news site, that is still okay and allowed to do as long as the article provided is interesting. There are countless posts here which are just blogs from various companies, sometimes posted here by the companies themselves. Meta, Apple, small startups, movie companies, whatever. It's all allowed here as long as the content posted has substance and is interesting, thats all. What's important is that the comments are productive and interesting and not being used as a soapbox, which is likely why your parent comment is negatively voted. There are countless platforms for you to suggest others not see a movie, but a hn post about astrophotography is not that.
>> Under the assumption that amazon has decided to astroturf on this niche tech news site
Even Microsoft astroturfs here...
Satya Nadella, Microsoft FY2019 Q1 earnings call [1]:
“In fact, this morning, I was reading a news article in Hacker News, which is a community where we have been working hard to make sure that Azure is growing in popularity and I was pleasantly surprised to see that we have made a lot of progress..."
there is a stark difference between a division aimed at developers attempting to astroturf on a tech industry (mostly developer) news aggregator and a movie studio.
There are many other reasons someone might want to run a model locally outside of cost savings, ownership of data flow and use in locations without internet to name a couple.
This is so incredibly accurate. I see all these side projects people are spinning up and can't help but think "Sure it might work at first but the first time i have to integrate it with something else i'll have to spend a week trying to get them to work. Hell that'll probably require an annoying rewrite and its not even worth what I get out of it"
I think this is a fundamentally flawed perspective on the role and experience of a senior. It's a managers role to coordinate junior engineers. The difference between junior and senior is knowing where and when to do what at an increasing scale as you gain experience.
> It's a managers role to coordinate junior engineers.
Due to AI this is now my job. My company is hiring less juniors, but the ones we do hire are given more scope and coordination responsibilities since otherwise we'd just be LLM wrappers.
> The difference between junior and senior is knowing where and when to do what at an increasing scale as you gain experience.
Many juniors believe they know what to do. And want to immediately take on yuge projects.
e.g. I decided I want to rewrite my whole codebase in C++20 modules for compile time.
Prior to AI, I wouldn't be given help for this refactor so it wouldn't happen.
Now I just delegate to AI and convert my codebase to modules in just a few days!
At that point I discovered Clang 18 wasn't really optimized for modules and they actually increased build time. If I had more experience I could've predicted using half-baked C++ features is a bad idea.
That being said, every once in a while one of my stupid ideas actually pays off.
e.g. I made a parallel AI agent code review workflow a few months ago back when everyone was doing single agent reviews. The seniors thought it was a dumb idea to reinvent the wheel when we had AI code review already, but it only took a day or two to make the prototype.
Turns out reinventing the wheel was extremely effective for our team. It reduced mean time-to-merge by 20%!
This was because we had too many rules (several hundred, due to cooperative multitasking) for traditional AI code reviewers. Parallel agents prevented the rules from overwhelming the context.
But at the time, I just thought parallel agents were cool because I read the Gas Town blog and wasn't thinking about "do we have any unique circumstances that require us to build something internally?"
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