gazter @ gazter @aussie.zone

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3

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385

Joined

2 yr. ago

Here, at least, flying above people is illegal. Surely the operators in this case will be at least losing their licence, if not facing charges.

OP was just talking about one job post.

You could always go to the old school version of general intelligence, and ask your family, friends, and mentors to offer advice.

Can you run the local llm at all? Just ask the question, go make a cup of tea, ask the next, go for a walk, ask again, play fourteen hours of Factorio...

Otherwise, there's services like hordeai (I think that's what it's called) where you tap into people who volunteer compute resources to run your own model.

I wonder how many people from the States would prefer that the US become a Canadian province.

I was partying at a friend's house, that night I slept in the back of my van. I must have forgotten to lock up when I got in, because I woke up to the sound of the front door- closing. I slammed straight from deep, morning after sleep to a massive adrenaline surge of fight-or-flight. I distinctly remember coming up with more than one plan almost instantly- There was a curtain between the front and back, so I couldn't see the intruder, and they couldn't see me. I didn't know if they had heard me wake up, so my first plan was to get the jump on them by bursting out of the curtain throwing fists. The second was to stay quiet, wait until they turned the engine on, then use that distraction to sneak up and choke hold them against the headrest. The third plan was to immediately scream like fuck and hope they bailed. In that half a breath of time, I had a bunch of plans made. But I distinctly remember being totally frozen and unable to move at all, like a stiff, useless dishrag. I eventually realised that there was no-one in the car, and stuck my head through the curtain. In the dawn's light I could see some random drunkard staggering down the road, leaning against cars for support. He must have noticed mine was unlocked, and his drunken curiosity led him to open the door. Thankfully, he must have had a moment of clarity and just walked away instead of trying to drive off using the keys that stupid past me just left sitting in the front seat. I'm also super grateful to his moment of sobriety for the decision to not take my wallet, which was also just laid out for anyone to grab.

So yeah, minor compared to other real violations, but it certainly had an effect on me.

What the fuck did you just fucking say about me, you little shit? Ill have you know I graduated top of my class in the Navy Seals, and Ive been involved in numerous secret...

Oh. Oh wait. I think the shock of what I just read reverted me to default internet discussion... Was that just a polite exchange where we saw the others point of view, then both admitted we could have done better? Nice!

That would be great, sure- but all I really want is boarding passes to be the same size as the passport. They go together, so why don't they make them so they actually go together?

Angrily tries again to read seat number, obscured by the rumpled creases from the bit that sticks out from the passport getting folded in a pocket

Ah, so you're a wizard. Meddling in unseen, invisible powers, using arcane diagrams and mysterious runes...

I'm just going to go with the scenario of 'the specific part of the EM spectrum that we use for comms is no longer accessible to us'.

So, mobile data and GPS are out. A heck of a lot of people suddenly get very lost, and the immediate aftermath would include a lot of car crashes- mostly from people trying to play with their phone while driving, or just generally being distracted. Long term, people would get used to having to find themselves on a map. I doubt street directories would make a comeback, as it's relatively straightforward to download a map to a phone by plugging it into to a computer, or USB to Ethernet. Oh, in that regard- The shortage of USB to Ethernet adaptors would probably hit before the toilet paper shortage.

There's a large portion of the world's population who like to stay inside and listen to the radio or watch TV, the internet still being an unwieldy thing that the yung'uns use. These people will start getting their entertainment and news by walking outside and congregating - At least until they get a computer or phone setup wired. Hopefully, many will continue to go for walks around town to see their friends and eat a meal. A lot of households are going to have a whole lot of Ethernet cables run all over the floor for quite some time. People will start buying switches and routers to get more outlets next to the couch, for example.

Massive queues will form around the few existing payphones, until businesses and homes at central locations will start offering up ethernet ports. Because this started soon after the Blackout, rooted in generosity and helpfulness, this will just become a free service.

Taxi drivers will start congregating at these spots, plugging in and updating their location, moving to other locations where there is few drivers- and hoping that others aren't getting the same idea, unable to know that until they arrive. The old guard of taxi drivers, who worked pre-Uber and have an encyclopedic knowledge of the local streets are in high demand, and people seek them out.

A lot of scientists are out of a job. People who worked with radio astronomy are suddenly having to peer through optical telescopes again, and keep talking about the good old days. Whole divisions of people at space agencies, responsible for things like monitoring and control of satellites, space probes, and rovers are suddenly retasked to creating ways to create autonomous return probes to find out what the fuck just happened. Some start trying to work out ways to replace radio by using giant scaled up versions of television remote controls, putting giant infrared lights on mobile phone towers, with smaller repeaters on top of houses and cars. (For funsies, I'm assuming point to point microwave comms are out- which has the implication that microwave ovens don't work any more, with the associated knock on effects of house fires from people melting microwave dinners in ancient, unmaintained conventional ovens).

People who worked with wireless stuff- from FM radio DJs to antenna design engineers are all out of work. Perhaps they start selling coffee to people stopping by those public ethernet locations? Unfortunately, there's a noticeable economic downturn from so many vacant jobs, people being out of work suddenly, and commerce becoming so much more difficult. Cash becomes much more useful, and those handy dandy wireless payment terminals don't work so good anymore, and while waiting for wired replacement terminals to arrive, people get used to cash again. There's a knock on effect of people keeping cash to themselves, despite the government being almost completely unchanged. This downturn, along with jobs that don't exist any more, puts a lot of people out of work. However, they are likely to start filling the jobs left vacant by the thousands of people who perished in the utter chaos that was every aircraft on the planet trying to land at the same time in utter confusion.

A couple might make it safely down, but it only takes one accident- say a little Cessna coming in low, not seeing the 747 coming in faster from above, to turn the runway into a total mess of burning jet fuel, wreckage, and stunned people slowly bleeding out, surrounded by smashed bodies and assorted socks. Aircraft block major highways attempting to use them as runways, often causing huge multi-car pileups by giving already already distracted drivers a totally insane thing to have to deal with. Many pilots take the opportunity to 'do a Sully'. Hundreds die as waterways around major airports become congested with crashed aircraft, with many potential rescue personnel sleeping through the whole thing, because who the heck has their landline phone number, even if they have an actual phone plugged into the wall?

In short, I'd watch that movie. Maybe a series in three parts, immediate, a few months later, and then years after. Great question OP, thanks!

Oh, also- people who made special effort to get a phone that has a headphone jack will be smug as fuck for a very long time.

I really appreciate your comment- Do you work with RF day to day?

What I like about these kind of questions is how different people take things in a totally different direction. I find it absolutely fascinating to see detailed replies about connotations I never thought of. It's the whole reason why I love xkcd's What If. If you're unfamiliar, do yourself a favour and have a read. I particularly enjoy his answer to the question of everyone standing in one spot and jumping at the same time. He more or less ignores the core question and focuses on the societal & environmental impact of a mass human migration to one point, resulting in a fantastic read.

We may be discussing slightly different things here, I'm not sure if I follow the application of your math in this context.

My point is that a thinner wire will get much hotter than a thicker wire, given the same amount of current. Is this not the case?

My comment was intended more to praise OP than to deride the person who replied. It was probably worded badly. I guess I should have said something more along the lines of 'You know your argument is good when the only fault to be found by internet strangers is too many commas'.

Yes, that is a risk. Don't forget about voltage drop, though! A short extension is generally quite a thin conductor, and the thinner the cable, the more resistance you get in the cable itself.

British cables are fused in the plug, and it's a pain in the ass. I don't see the problem with a breaker that just drops the whole circuit if something goes whoopsie.

You know you explained a topic pretty damn accurately when the Stranger On The Internet can only use the good ol' "too many commas'" argument to bring you down.

Not sure if you've ever used fuse wire before. It's what was used before capsule fuses and breakers. Essentially, if too much current goes through it, it will melt, breaking the circuit as protection. The thicker the fuse wire, the more current it can pass through without melting. The length of the wire doesn't come into it. 1cm of 10 amp fuse wire will melt at the same current as 1 meter of 10 amp fuse wire.

The super simple explanation is that the wires are too small. The water hose analogy breaks down fairly quickly, but I'll try using it. Imagine a garden hose, with a regular nozzle on the end. But it's not a perfect world, and our hose doesn't transfer all the water that goes into it. Think of this as ten pinprick holes along every meter of hose. If we have ten meters of hose, that's fine, we only need to turn on the tap a little bit to get a decent spray out of the nozzle, and a little bit will dribble out these holes. Now let's join another hose on. We lose more water to leakage, so to get the same amount of water out of our nozzle, we have to turn on the tap more, giving it a bit more water flow. Now, our pinprick holes are not just dribbling, they're flowing freely. Now let's take it to the extreme- we join a thousand garden hoses together, all leaking a little bit. We have to turn the tap on A Lot More, and suddenly our pinpricks are spraying a serious amount of water everywhere. Now imagine we use a bigger hose. Let's take it to the extreme again and say it's a big stormwater pipe. But the key part here is that it has the same amount of holes, ten pinpricks per meter. This way, we can get heaps more water down that pipe, more than enough to give that water nozzle everything it wants. Also, because our pressure can remain low, those pinpricks are only leaking a little bit, not spraying everywhere. This is getting pretty wordy and unwieldy to type out on my phone, so I'll try and bring it into the real world a bit more. An electrical load, like a motor (say a compressor in a fridge, a circular saw, etc) is like to our nozzle. It will pull more current (amps, or water flow) to maintain the same amount of power output (water coming out of the nozzle). As we get a longer conductor, the voltage drop (pressure reduction due to water lost to the pinpricks) gets larger, and our voltage at the end of a conductor gets lower. Power = voltage * current, so if that voltage is lower, to get the same power we need more current. More current means more heating. More heat in a small cable means melting. Physics has a way out for us, thankfully! The thicker a cable is, the less voltage drop it has, kind of like our stormwater pipe. So the voltage remains at a normal level at the motor, and consequently the motor draws a normal amount of current. This is why longer extensions are generally a lot thicker than shorter ones. If you're interested in the math, let me know, it's actually pretty fascinating, and ties into why long distance power lines are all super high voltage, among many other things. The basic equations are also not too hard to work with.

I just know that I'm going to get so focused on the detailed work that we can do now, that I'll never actually finish any builds.