Hacker News: dearing

New comment by dearing in "Private Equity Finds a New Source of Profit: Volunteer Fire Departments"

dearing — Mon, 15 Dec 2025 18:25:26 +0000

This is my experience as well. Local issues, local gossip and local struggles.

New comment by dearing in "Bag of words, have mercy on us"

dearing — Mon, 08 Dec 2025 19:37:10 +0000

This is where I sit too. Obviously language is an expression of thought but the Library of Babel is a great example that language without intent is just garbage. You got me thinking of reading before the internet. You'd grab a book and internalize the subject, later refining over time with more books, experiments and other forms of conversation. That journey of developing your own model is undervalued in understanding. That first book could of be absolute shit but you couldn't know that.

I've been learning more about roses lately and the amount of information on them varies so much because the world roses live in is equally varied. LLMs make for a better search engine but you still need to develop your own internal models, worse yet - if LLMs continue to be refined off of cul-de-sac conclusions then all the wisdom of the journey is lost both to the consumer and the LLM itself.

New comment by dearing in "Kill your Feeds – Stop letting algorithms dictate what you think"

dearing — Sat, 08 Mar 2025 19:46:27 +0000

Without online advertising most of the drivel would disappear.

There will still be communities and fringe opinion and that is healthy. You won't have content generated just to push advertisements alone which is not.

New comment by dearing in "Asahi Linux lead developer Hector Martin resigns from Linux kernel"

dearing — Fri, 07 Feb 2025 16:23:16 +0000

Mixing codebases in the Linux core.

I think the conversation is more about people equating R4L as validation for rust or even themselves.

New comment by dearing in "The Origins of Wokeness"

dearing — Mon, 13 Jan 2025 23:34:54 +0000

> For me, it sparked the insight that wokeness parallels the rise and fall of the attention economics, with the premise that attention is the real bottleneck in social justice.

This was mostly my reading too. Maybe more cynical, but I walked away thinking that wokeness itself isn't good for business unless you are in the business of selling rides.

New comment by dearing in "A messy experiment that changed how I think about AI code analysis"

dearing — Sun, 05 Jan 2025 15:02:24 +0000

Its being cute but speaking about politicking at code review.

New comment by dearing in "Ham radio operators receive signals from Voyager 1 on Dwingeloo telescope"

dearing — Fri, 20 Dec 2024 06:38:52 +0000

That's the game, more sensitive receivers receive more noise too. The game is sending something that will not look like the noise. The longer the sequence, the more likely to decode something but the slower the symbol rate (bandwidth)

Imagine your array popped out SHORT-SHORT-SHORT-LONG-LONG-LONG-SHORT-SHORT-SHORT

You just heard a morse code for SOS! The shorts where detected over 100Mhz (FM) +30db for 1 second each and the longs were 3 seconds each on a carrier that sites at +10db. That's amplitude modulation and that looks like intelligence but unless you knew morse code - it wouldn't make any sense.

The further away you get from the source, the more those decibel spikes weaken and will eventually be no different than the noise floor. Your super computer with a billion ears, only hears ~static~.

Try this, imagine instead if there was no free space loss in the electromagnetic field - we'd wouldn't be hearing humming but SCREAMS from all the noise sources from EVERYWHERE as if we were right next to them, forever. It would impossible to decern anything from anywhere. Communication is defined by its distance because signals have differing origins. Sensitivity, or lack there in, is a feature not a failure.

Who's to say a quasar isn't just a lovely time clock for signals encoded in the noise and we haven't figured out what the breakpoint from noise is yet?

New comment by dearing in "HAM radio operators receive signals from Voyager 1 on Dwingeloo telescope"

dearing — Fri, 20 Dec 2024 05:45:56 +0000

Each of the small detectors need to decern what is noise and what is not. They wouldn't know static from a station and having more clueless detectors wouldn't give you more any information in that regard.

An AU cubic grid of detectors would inform you where a signal originates from by comparing free space loss over the area of the coverage. IF you could discern a station from static.

New comment by dearing in "HAM radio operators receive signals from Voyager 1 on Dwingeloo telescope"

dearing — Fri, 20 Dec 2024 05:27:19 +0000

If's fun to think that our Sirius tech cousins at the BBQ under a Texas sized parabolic dish aimed at Austin would be jamming Nelly's "hot in here".

Over distance its about fighting the noise in between the source and the receiver while also fading because of the free space loss, think of a flashlight - not a laser. So nelly volume ticks down while the local stations ramp up..

To keep your car jamming you'd build a growing antenna attached to your ford festiva that as you made your way would compensate for this loss by collecting more signal to focus back to a feed horn, a parabolic - like a larger magnifying glass focusing more ant burning heat in the winter versus the summer.

Very roughly it seems it would be the size of Texas when you arrived at the BBQ, assuming you are traveling the speed of light and left in the early aughts.

You wouldn't hear the song until you hit the break because its the frequency over time that pumps the jam.