I think the consensus is that anime style mechs are physically impossible given how fast and nimble they usually are, but if physics were no object would they be a viable solution to any real world problems?
early_riser
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Joined 14 days ago
Cake day: October 24th, 2026
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NGL he seems like he’s having more fun than I’ve had with a game in decades.
Also “Mario from the future with a business suit” is a phrase that lives rent free in my head now.
This sort of follows on from my semi-satirical “real” ham radio post. I first heard about QSO1 while lurking on the Brandmeister Worldwide talkgroup. It’s a very nifty app to be sure, but sometimes I do wonder if I’m fooling myself. Like what separates the average QSO1 experience from, say, Discord, besides worse audio and fewer text chat features.
Yes, you are potentially transmitting over any number of repeaters on RF, but if QSO1 becomes the path of least resistance for rag chewers like myself and everyone ends up using it, what makes it “real” ham radio?
Every now and then I’ll come across a comment to the effect of “FT8 isn’t REAL ham radio”. That got me thinking what exactly IS “real” ham radio. After mulling it over I’ve come up with a way to quantify whether a given communication counts as “real” ham radio.
To get the percentage of “real” ham radio-ness of a given act of communication, simply use the formula H=100*R/T, where H is the percent ham-radio-ness, R is the total distance traveled over radio frequencies in the ham bands, and T is the total distance.
So let’s say Alice has an FT8 QSO with Bob, and they live 1500 miles apart. Both are using FT8 software on PCs connected to their respective radios. In this case the distance traversed by RF is 1500 miles and the total distance is also 1500 miles. Divide the two numbers andjmultiply by 100 to get 100%. So Alice’s QSO with Bob is 100% “real” ham radio.
Now let’s change the scenario. Alice and Bob are still 1500 miles apart, but they’re talking over a DMR talkgroup via linked repeaters. Alice is 5 miles away from her local machine, and Bob is 10 miles away from his. The two repeaters are 1485 miles apart, and for the sake of simplicity we’ll say that all four points form a line.
So that’s 5 RF miles from Alice’s HT to her repeater, plus 10 RF miles from Bob’s HT to his repeater, for a total of 15 “real ham radio” miles. The other 1485 miles “don’t count” since they’re over the internet. This means their DMR QSO is 1% “real” ham radio.
I hope this clears things up :P
8 daysLOL I can’t tell you how many times I wanted to share an audio somewhere but reddit/random forum/whatever site wouldn’t let me. I’d have to make a video with that as the audio track. I don’t get it. Audio invariably takes up LESS space than a video with the same audio. Not even uploading but just embedding, too.
Months ago I ran across an interesting trick for quantifying the purchasing power of a wealthy person vs an average person, by scaling down their net worth (or salary IDK I’m not a money-ologist) then compare the thought process you’d undertake when purchasing an item of equivalent value.
So to get in the mind of a billionaire, lets say you have a net worth of $60K, so divide 60,000/1,000,000,000 to get 0.00006. Now how much does a jet cost, let’s say 1.5 million, just pulling a number out of thin air. Scale that down using the 0.00006 multiplier we get just $90. So a billionaire puts about as much thought into buying a jet as you might purchasing an OK pair of shoes or a water flosser. Not quite trivial but also not something you’re likely to mull over for weeks.
But let’s reverse that. What’s something you wouldn’t think twice about bying? Maybe a $2 candy bar from a vending machine? Divide that $2 dollars by .00006 to get over $33 thousand dollars. That’s a pretty common yearly gross salary for a lot of skilled workers, and a billionaire treats it with the same care you’d treat with a $2 vending machine purchase.
I’m into ham radio, which can be a deceptively expensive hobby. Some of the other guys in my local club have a significant amount of money, or at least a lot more money than I do, and that really does effect how they think and act. They’re all perfectly nice and helpful people, but sometimes they give advice that simply isn’t useful for a guy in my tax bracket. “Just get a resonant antenna” or “just put up a tower” they say, as though I have the land for a massive HF antenna with ground radials or a 40 ft tall mast. Bruh I live in a single-family home in an HOA.
Disclaimer: I only speak for myself. Blindness does not respect class, creed, or culture, so every blind person will have their own opinions and experiences. In my case AI hasn’t shown much tangible benefit beyond what clever algorithms are already doing, for optical character recognition etc.
Beyond blindness My knee-jerk reaction to AI is strongly negative simply because it’s another locus of concentrated societal power (Who else is there besides Open AI and Anthropic and maybe Groq? IIRC everyone else is just using one of those on the backend. So that’s what, three people, a few dozen if you include the other C-suite folks at each company, pulling a lot of very consequential levers) But that opinion is probably par for the course for your average Lemming.
When looking for videos to listen to in the background I always prioritize “low quality” stuff. They don’t have the perfect mic or studio setup, don’t meticulously edit out background noise, talk in a less polished manner, don’t have a background music track. Prior to the rise of AI it was because such videos were less overstimulating and felt more down to earth, now it’s because I know they’re humans.
Don’t have any recommendations you haven’t mentioned. As a blind person I listen to synthesized speech nearly all day long, so I’m pretty good at catching AI voices. I think the ones trained on IRL people have a “choppy” or “quavering” quality. I’m not an audiophile or computational linguist so I’m sure there’s a term for this I’m missing, but the overall audio has a particular tell to it.
It’s getting harder, though. Now I listen for things like odd prosidy, stuff like odd pauses or inflections or inconsistent pronunciations.
For example, the phrase “So I went to the store” could have a number of inflections that encode info about the ongoing conversation, whether I intend to continue speaking or whether I’m yielding the floor, whether I’m asking a question, indicating surprise, etc. AI is getting better at this but it’s not perfect.
Pronunciation of proper nouns or words that are spelled the same but pronounced differently in different contexts is a good indicator. Just the other day my mom was watching some AI-generated listicle and the voiceover mispronounced the name of a city after correctly pronouncing it every time before.
I just hated my old job (inbound call center agent) so hard that any anxiety about going back to school was overshadowed by relief at not having to talk nonstop 8 hours a day again.
Unfortunately I’m at a bit of a crossroads with my current job (IT) because both Pearson and Cisco make test-taking miserable if you have a disability. My current job isn’t under threat, but I let all my certs lapse because I’m just sick and tired of their nonsense.
Pfft listen to this young’un with multiple cells over here.
Listen to this hairless bipedal whipper-snapper. Back in MY day we THREW poop at one another. 🐒
It’s pretty seamless, honestly. You make an account and enter any details for the various networks (Echolink/D-star stuff etc)