I’d suspect the low “density” of context makes it prone to hallucinations. You need to load in 3000 lines to express what Python does in 3, so there’s a lot of chances to guess the next token wtong.

The other satellite players (Hughesnet, Viasat), the fixed 5G boxes (although places sufficiently rural to seriously consider dialup may not have 5G), probably some smaller boutique dialup ISPs.

Aww. My $150 Nokia G20 with a $3 Aliexpress case has served me well for several years. I’d have no qualms buying a successor.

Is it pronounced like the blood thinner/rat poison (warfarin)?

You see low voltage ones for things like memory backup on hi-fi gear. I have some 3F/5v capacitors in an old Technics tiner.

What the hell is with the “Thank you for your attention to this matter?”

You’re shitposting to a global media audience, not politely asking Facilities to restock the vending machine with Snickers bars.

Are you just in full Business Guy Autocomplete mode? A Bigly Language Model?

Try RiscOS for a glimpse of a world most of us missed.

I’d wonder if the existing amateur presence would make the bands hard to sell for “pollution risk”. There’s a lot of kit in circulation, and getting it off the market, including secondhand, would be difficult.

Yeah, they could blow a lot of time and money on FCC enforcement, but it feels like trying to unring a bell. As a telecom, would you be willing to pay for (for example) 148MHz on just the promise the existing users were displaced on paper? That doesn’t mean much when some untrained/curious person finds kit at the Goodwill and tries it out in the middle of your service range.

Of course, obviously fight for every nanometre of spectrum, but that’s probably a legit argument against reclassification: all they’d get is damaged goods of low resale value.

I wonder if the way to go is to start with the premise of “It’s a way to communicate” and work backwards. Better tooling could make it more amenable to new users, and also help make specific use cases more compelling. Once users have he reason you want to be in the ecosystem-- which I suspect, for many people, might look more like a community than a bag of one-off contacts-- then it justfies going deeper into better equipment and technique.

Discoverability is a huge thing. For example, a cheap SDR, even receive-only, is a magical thing, but you end up getting a waterfall full of “what’s this weird burst” and jumping around the dial trying to chase where the action is. I suspect better software could really help there-- a UI that decodes digital modes and CW in the right place, and archive received signals might make it easier to track the activity and reduce the problem of “I tuned elsewhere and missed something interesting”

If you start with one of the cheap 2m/70cm HTs, you might be able to find a local repeater, and once you work your way through the fidgety UI, even send a transmission. but are you just going to find empty air much of the time. Again, it’s hard to find the action, and make sure you’re actually being a positive contributor. I think this has been a problem for me; I got licensed, got my little HT, but now I have the choice of either listening to static, or waiting for a conversation and hoping I have everything configured right enough not to be an annoyance. Maybe better guide websites and scheduled events can help minimize “listening to static” disappointment times.

I could see a fun community project being an autoresponder bot-- in idle times, it would listen to an advertised frequency, detect speech and CW signals and respond with signal quality reports quickly and conveniently to make it easy for a new user to make sure they’ve got their equipment set up right without barging into a conversation. I know there are ways to test propagation, but a lot of it is “go find a second device and pull up a tracking website”

There might also be room to think of ham radio more as a “transport protocol” than as the main draw. CW and some digital modes feel like they could be packaged up in tools that more resembled modern IM/chat tools to increase accessibility and encourage understanding of best practices. (For example, let the software handle things like regular identification and responding to requests to change transmission characteristics automatically, or at least by providing helpful affordances) Or even a “dashboards and logs” paradigm for recieve-- let the software decode hundreds of hours of signals and then you can crunch it into interesting and useful visualizations.

I admit some of this could be seen as “dumbing down” or steering towards specific narrow paradigms, but that doesn’t have to be the entire universe. It could be the equivalent of AOL or Compuserve to the open internet-- making sure that you can get value out of the experience early on, so people can transition to the broader open platform as their needs and skills grow.

Fre:ac seems to run in a wine package.

ATSC 3.0 is usable. I have a HDHomerun sitting on my LAN with a couple 3.0 tuners.

The big problem is:

• the 3.0 broadcasts are still mostly tests, so you get mostly a respin of a 1.0 channel

• the audio is AC-4 and a lot of software doesn’t support it. There was stuff for Windows but when I looked, the usual suspects (VLC, mpv) on Linux didn’t support it

Why not an aerial for Jeopardy? It’s usually on local broadcast, so you could plumb together a DVR setup if you want it within a unified experience.

There’s some shared delusion that without a HOA to block it, everyone is just champing at the bit to leave a rusted out Pontiac on blocks in their front yard, which will totally cause their neighbour’s property value to fall.

Personally, the next model-home exhibit I visit, I’m asking up front if they mind my plans for a 1:3 scale reconstruction of the Westward Ho

I’m hoping for MacroSD. About the size of a 3.5" floppy so you won’t lose it easily.

Seriously, it’s interesting that now that we have the tech to make a useful-capacity storage device the size of a credit card, we don’t. Not like those crappy giveaway flash drives printed with a card design, where they had a captive USB head and were 4x as thick as a card, but something with just contacts like a chip card, so you might need to use an external reader but it really preserves the wallet-size concept.

I’d love to have a cheap 16GB card in my wallet with all my health records and a cryptographically signed copy of my will as a one-stop, no cloud required, emergency kit.

If you have a LS-120, it will eject the floppy disc like you were on dome fancy-pants Macintosh!

Steam runs fine. I think I had to install some Vulkan packages manually because I was getting some hallucinogenic colours in Genshin Impact (installs fine via Lutris). I have a few minor issues with games not loving losing the mouse cursor if you move it onto another display, but I think you can tame most of them by running in Gamescope so it doesn’t realize there’s a second monitor the mouse can leave to.

Runit works well enough for me; I’ve only added one nonstandard service (launch a custom tool to drive an external stats display) and it works fine. My ,xsession has to load some polkit and pulseaudio stuff but that could be because I’m not using a full desktop like KDE/GNOME/XFCE that do those things for you.‘’

I don’t really try to do custom package recipes because I tend to ./configure;make;make install stuff I want at random.

EFI boot is no problem. I think my root is btrfs, but the /boot/efi is vfat. Refind is pretty first-class, but sometimes it has stupid conditions where it tries to default to the wrong kernel version if you have multiples installed (I think it sorts by timestamps or filenames in a way that sometimes work counterintuitively; discarding old kernels largely fixes it)

Haven’t really had too many showstopper problems with xbps. I probably sledgehammer it a bit-- occasionally when it says a repo certificate is out of date, I usually end up doing a full update rather than selectively upgrading packages.

I feel underrepresented as a Void user.

Although the absurd number of hours I’ve played a certain popular gacha under Lutris might not trigger the Steam metrics, I demand credit for dumping 45 hours into a poorly translated RPG Maker looking project!

Yeah, he was one of a long string of lunatic leaders, which evidently “democracy” has done little to temper. The thing I recall about him was a bit in a reference book to coins and currency: at one point in the 1950s, the central bank issued a 500-hwan note that had a large central portrait of him (the overall design looked like a cheap riff on US currency of the time), and rapidly replaced it because he concluded people folding it in half across his face (as people do with banknotes) was some symbol of defiance to him personally.

They don’t teach that style of crazy in dictator school.

As for the “Korea is a puppet and exists only as long as the US props it up”, duh, but I figure there’s perhaps some chance to exploit some “we’ve been under the yoke so long we no longer notice it” and “we’re a big strong country that thinks it can actually engage internationally” mentalities to loosen the fixation with copyright and chasing those imagined license revenues that will never materialize.

You’d think there’s a whole soft-power paradigm being missed here.

The value of export content well exceeds the license fees you negotiate with the English repackagers. Think of how entire generations view Japan favourably after a steady diet of anime, samurai/ninja stereotypes, and kaiju movies.

Flood the market. Free international rights for all. Sponsor your own damned fansubs if you have to. Use it to soft sell your culture, history, and branding. We need 24 episodes of an isekai animation featuring a bishounen Syngman Rhee stat.