Wired had a great article recently about weaponized consumer drones. You can get multiple-kilometer spools of fiber optic cable so your drone is totally immune to electronic countermeasures (jamming) because it's not using RF. Lots of other ways to build some serious weapons at low cost.

https://www.wired.com/story/dr...

Related: there are atomic clock oscillators now that are small enough to make a real but clunky atomic wristwatch.
One example, the AR50LC-10.000MHZ-SAA ($2k from digikey) is a rubidium-based oscillator that claims 0.05 parts per billion accuracy, which is in the range of seconds of drift over a human lifetime. Draws 6 watts so not a button cell battery, but definitely feasible (for low values of feasible).

I think having an AI that buys me stuff and pays the bill is a great idea. My question is how the AI is going to earn the money to do that.
I say that somewhat in jest, but it seems to me that an AI that's really intelligent would be able to earn money itself rather than just spend money I earn.
In other words, I want an AI that serves me, I don't want to be the servant of the AI.

How different is this from the "salt water battery" that Aquion Energy was selling a few years ago?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
Saw these units actually listed for sale in some stores before Aquion went belly-up.

To keep the conspiracy theorists and trolls wound up, there are now allegations that Sam Bankman-Fried is part of Musk's consortium of investors in the Twitter takeover.

https://www.semafor.com/articl...

More follow-up details:

https://www.doj.nh.gov/sb43/documents/accuvote-introduction-20210512.pdf

  NH voters currently blacken little circles on a paper ballot which is then scanned by a machine designed in 1986 using an NEC V25 chip (last made in 2003). It has no OS and most I/O is physically disabled. Results are stored on a battery-backed SRAM card last manufactured in 1998. Firmware is about 20k lines of C and assembly.

  So it's actually a pretty secure and verifiable system. The main problem is that they are irreplaceable antiques.

The second problem is that optical scanning isn't perfect:

https://www.doj.nh.gov/news/2022/documents/20220304-anonymous-political-mailers.pdf

  This is a mailer in support of a recent ballot question asking for hand counting of all ballots (which was defeated). TLDR: they ran a set of marked paper ballots through 4 AccuVote scanners plus a hand count and got 5 different numbers varying by a few percent.

My guess is that the differences are due to different thresholds in the optical scanners: if the little circle is partially filled in one machine sees it as a vote and another sees it as a nonvote. Hand counters might have less variability, but they would still have the same problem of distinguishing between votes and smudges.

The evidence doesn't really suggest that there is any deliberate bias to either the R or D side, but why let facts get in the way of an emotional argument about stolen elections?

This whole vote-counting controversy is partly a response to past problems with vote counting in Windham NH and others. See for example https://www.wmur.com/article/w... TLDR: Ballots were accidentally folded so that the creases ran directly through the circles that are filled in by the voter. That crease caused the optical scanner to misread the vote. The result was a 400-vote error between the machine count and the manual recount. The paper ballots are kept, so manual recounts can be done, but the error would not have been detected if a candidate had not asked for a recount.

Thanks for the link to the S-4. What little I understand is interesting. Couple of bits I like:

So Truth Social is committed to monitoring and censoring users.

So Truth Social needs "Network Neutrality."

I wonder if that pent-up demand is already easing. This is just one data point but I was just on the Lowes website looking at building materials (pressure treated wood, plywood, etc), and prices are *down* 15 to 20% from what I was paying just a couple of months ago. Around here (Northeast US) gas prices stopped rising and have actually retreated a few pennies in the last week or so. Time will tell whether that's a glitch or a trend.
And how about baby formula? Are people still having trouble getting that stuff? It's disappeared from the news sources I follow.

As of today, twitter added a nagging popup wanting me to log in. I see that as a step toward making the site less useful by improving the reader tracking.

Features I like about twitter compared to other social media are:
- I don't have to log in. I can just type in https://twitter.com/NASAWebb and see what's going on. i'm mostly read-only, so having to log in (like facebook) is just an unnecessary nuisance. Just like /., I only have to log in if I want to comment.
- A few twitter users do post follower-only tweets, but I find that to be a convenient flag that I probably don't want to read them. So I can just ignore them instead of logging in.
- If I go to NASAWebb I see ONLY posts by NASAWebb. I can click a post and see the comment thread *if I want it*. Otherwise they're hidden.
- There are real experts on twitter, with interesting posts and useful insights. There's also a huge amount of garbage, but *I don't see it* unless I explicitly go to those pages.

So my interpretation is that current twitter gives too much control to the reader, so they're are starting to change it to make it more attractive to the real customers (ie, the advertisers).

Just saw this via Twitter: Conversation with a gorilla via sign language:
http://flum.blogspot.com/1998/...
Sample:
HaloMyBaby:
In case you're curious, here's how Koko is able to participate in this chat: Dr. Patterson is signing the questions from the online audience to Koko and a typist is entering for her. Rulucky asks: Do you like to chat with other people?
LiveKOKO:
fine nipple
DrPPatrsn:
Nipple rhymes with people, she doesn't sign people per se, she was trying to do a "sounds like..."

Overdue for backups, so I drag out the DVD writer and sit it on the shelf above my laptop. While getting cables connected I manage to tug on the cable, which pulls the DVD drive off the shelf. Drive lands dead center on the laptop keyboard, right above the hard disk. Head crash - disk destroyed. At least the previous backup worked, so only a month of work was lost.

I agree, but from a quick look at their page, I see a lot of problems with reaching that goal.

1: Most computers I've seen have pretty wretched audio inputs: tiny microphones near the screen, so not anywhere near the speaker's mouth. So we can expect lots of noise, echo, and other stuff. Good for simulating the real world (because it basically is the real world), but not what I would call high quality. Some gamers and others probably use good quality headsets, but I doubt they will make up the majority of the data base. Audio might be pretty good if the speakers use cell phones.

2: People reading written text don't talk the same way as in natural conversation. That's going to be a limitation for some developers.

3: They seem to be depending on the generosity/curiosity of people to generate and validate the samples. That's a hard way to get thousands to enroll. If they had some kind of game or other system that provides a psychic reward/incentive to the users I'd be more confident of a good response.

And a final comment: I hope they're sampling at 16 kHz instead of 8. To explain: Nyquist's Theorem says the sampling rate needs to be more than twice the highest frequency component in the analog signal. Speech typically contains components up to about 6 or 7 kHz, so 16k is a good number. Unfortunately, the carbon microphones that phones used for the first 100 years or so only go up to about 4kHz, so Ma Bell (remember her?) settled on an 8kHz rate in the middle of last century, and most everybody else has accepted that ever since.

I think any near state of the art recognizer is going to be pretty complicated, because the algorithms are not simple. On the other hand you're talking about complicated math turned into code by people who are scientists instead of professional programmers.

At one extreme, TiESR https://gforge.ti.com/gf/proje... is a fairly simple to use. Not state of the art, but it does use Hidden Markov Models (HMM's) and has some noise compensation built in. It comes with word and language models, so it's fairly easy to use - for US English at least. I haven't been ambitious enough to figure out how to build new models.

At the other extreme, Kaldi http://kaldi-asr.org/ is the most advanced open source recognizer that I'm aware of. Neural Nets and all the other goodies researchers have been working on the last few years. Definitely not easy to compile or use, though. And don't even think about trying to design a neural net without a graphics card to use as a math accelerator: one of the examples ran for days and wasn't even close to finishing when I gave up.

Anybody else have suggestions for another toolkit?

I've been trying to get New Hampshire information (should be simple because we only have one provider in the exchange). Being self-employed I have mediocre individual insurance, but would like to see if ObamaCare* is better and compare costs. Hints in the local news indicate that costs are pretty good but their network has a limited set of hospitals and doctors, so I'd like to get information in order to figure out whether I even want to sign up or try to keep what I have.

Tuesday I did the signup process, filled in all the information 3 times. Then I figured out that I could just hit the "back" button to go back to the security questions page and hit submit again. Finally got registered about 9PM, then got the validation email and clicked on that several times until it was finally accepted at 10:30PM.

And I've been trying and failing to login ever since.

So why should I have to go through all that just to get prices and find out which doctors are in their plan? On Ebay, Amazon, or just about any ecommerce site I can get the product description and price straight from a Google search. I only have to go through the registration/login hassle if I actually want to buy something. If they would just provide the plan information with a simple static html page I could get the information I want, stop hammering on their servers, decide what to do, and come back next month if I decide I want to buy.

* Off-topic: If the program is even moderately successful, I suspect certain politicians will regret working so hard to ensure that Obama's name is forever attached to it.