The people of Earth live relatively cushy lives at the expense of the belters. The UN and corporations extract resources from the belt, they overthrow democratically elected leaders to prop up corrupt puppet leaders to do Earth's bidding. All the while, the belters see little of the riches that they're force to extract. Also, unfortunately for the poor of Earth, that wealth also doesn't trickle down to them.

It is a pretty accurate analogy of the current state of affairs of Earth today, but the divide is between the Global North and the Global South.

The people of Global North live relatively cushy lives at the expense of the belters. The governments and corporations of the Global North extract resources from the belt, they overthrow democratically elected leaders to prop up corrupt puppet leaders to do Global North's bidding. All the while, the working class of the Global South see little of the riches that they're force to extract. Also, unfortunately for the poor of Global North, that wealth also doesn't trickle down to them.

The Earth of The Expanse is a warning, not an aspiration.

Not only our their websites painful which discourages use, websites are more sandboxed.

We have SSB, audio in/out, and cat control, so all the pieces are there.

A programming language without sum types and exhaustive pattern matching in its type system is unable model this real world concept in its type system.

Whenever we pass by value as opposed to by address, Go makes a copy. Use .clone() in Rust, it is fine most of the time. Optimize it out if you find it is a performance bottleneck.

https://go.dev/play/p/Cm7mzRbva-5

If there was a version of Rust was garbage collected, I think it would be more popular.

I'd love TypeScript if it didn't inherit the foot guns of Javascript and didn't have the ever changing tool chain.

Getting into the hobby, I was looking to unlock exclusive frequencies that would give me more range than FRS and isolation from FRS traffic.

While it did that, I found that benefit largely went unused. My comms aren't private. What I wanted from the ham bands didn't benefit me in the ways I wanted them to. Heck my identity isn't even private. In addition, anyone I want to communicate with have to be hams as well.

Like you said, outside of an emergency, there are more reliable, private ways to communicate by using the Internet. The use case I was trying to solve for is better suited using VOIP on a phone.

What I found instead in ham radio is the a world of experimentation. I'm building antennas and radios. I'm hooking radios up to computers to communicate across the planet. I'm hooking up my phone to a walkie-talkie to send messages over APRS and Winlink without the Internet. Not because I need to, but because I can and it is fun to figure out how to do these things.

On top of all that, it is just enjoyable to turn on the radio with a cup of coffee and call out and see who can hear you. It is reminiscent of the early days of IRC and ICQ when you just turned it on and someone interested in the same thing as you was just waiting to connect. For the most part hams are just happy to have someone to geek out with and that's reason enough to connect.

Josh of Ham Radio Crash Course did a talk the various things you can do with a technician's license

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FV3nzEdXhbw

I have an HOA, so every time want to get on HF at home I put up the 10m dipole. I stick three 7ft wooden stakes in the ground, tie the dipole to them with paracord, and talk to people all over the world.

That dipole is just 2 pieces of 8 foot wire soldered to a SO-329 connector. It probably cost me $10 at most.

You can get a low powered portable HF digital rig for less than $100. With less than 20W and a homebrewed antenna you could be making contacts all over the world.

If you need more power, you can get a mobile 100W HF rig <https://www.dxengineering.com/search/part-type/mobile-transc...> for a little more than an XBOX. A 100W HF base station for the cost of a mid-range laptop <https://www.hamradio.com/detail.cfm?pid=H0-015268> <https://www.hamradio.com/detail.cfm?pid=71-002065>

Admittedly, I'm currently making contacts all over the world right now on Hacker News. As children of the Internet, radio, at first, seems like a silly, antique hobby when the Internet has connected us together. Maybe it is just me, but there's something really fun and geeky about radio. I've been a maker for decades and I've grown a bit bored of making LED blink. HAM radio has given me a practical reason to get the solder iron out again. I really love building the crappiest equipment out of scraps and see if it'll work.

Parks on the Air is another really fun aspect of the hobby. Almost every weekend since I got my license, I go out to a nearby state or national park. I pack up my FT-991a base station in a cheap harbor freight hard case. I bring a battery, some coax, an EFHW antenna I built. I throw in antenna in a tree and sit in the park and play radio. I find it quite relaxing to get outside and see who I can talk to.

KB9VBR has a nice video what a POTA activation is like. If you're an outdoorsy type or want to be one, POTA is a fun excuse to get outside.

https://youtu.be/LL6R4U9ualI?si=KH4ZRssscpd7ooyb

America looks like paradise in comparison.

‘We will coup whoever we want!’ - Elon Musk.

I only have so much time in the day. I can only consume so much content. I don't need AI or machine learning to filter a firehose of content.

My friends provide a human scale stream of recommendation that I trust much more than a profit driven algorithm.

It is more geared towards a group of trusted people communicated with each other than a general purpose network anyone can use.