I've definitely never seen any old Thicknet networks in use, though I have seen Token Ring in active use semi-recently. I never learned anything about Token Ring other than I remember old CompTIA mentioning it existed.

I do have a fondness for seeing this old tech that was way out of my reach or just barely too old to encounter back in the day being used, it's so neat to learn about. ClabRetro on YouTube is one of my few "drop everything and watch a new video" creators.

Ubiquiti mesh stuff works very well and is an overall polished experience. Supposedly their APs are at least distantly descended from OpenWRT but they are not open source. Their platform is pretty open in terms of integrating with other stuff and not locking you in, at least.

And yeah, can't run Linux on it either to try and salvage it because of all the weird and undocumented hardware.

--new TOS

Then, a few months later x.ai announces a new SOTA frontier model, FeetGrok.

The timing and electronics for doing position sensing of the gamma path through the detector (i.e., what you need to reconstruct an image) are... complex. Dead time and false correlates (e.g. another gamma in the detector at the same time, aka false coincidences) are a thing and they are factors that contribute to uncertainties. There's a bunch of statistical analysis you have to do to try and correct for these effects and pull the signal out of the noise. In a Compton camera, you can correlate the first scatter's trajectory back into a cone of possible incident directions, which you then stack up to form a picture. Hence why I said the image you get out is very blobby and more like a heat map than an image. But you pay a price in efficiency, as you can only count some fraction of the actual interactions in the detector now. I'm a bit rusty on the really nuts and bolts details, I don't work with this type of detector anymore. We mostly try to avoid using this type of detector for our localization, because they are crazy expensive and complex.

Gammas tend to act more like particles in the detector. They don't stop all at once, they tend interact multiple times and deposit their energy in multiple places along a line via a ton of different physical interactions. My description was simplifying and conflating things a bit, you can look up optically segmented detectors, as well as Compton scatter cameras if you want a better answer. There are other imaging approaches, too.

Imaging detectors can get a lot fancier than just two planes. One design is basically segmented crystals and you look at the timing between the separate segments light up as a gamma ray passes through each quadrant. You can then work backwards from those sub nanosecond time difference to get the direction, and stack up a bunch of events to make a sort of picture (more like a blobby heat map).

For neutrons there is an even crazier imaging technique called a coded aperture that I won't even try to describe here. Suffice to say it's very clever and unintuitive.

Radiacode detectors are about the only affordable detector with actually useful performance out there, and they are around $300. Which is also drastically cheaper than anything else out there, the next cheapest actually useful detector out there that I know of is 10x that price.

These sort of loss events happen much more often than is reported widely. Not like something that happens every day, but there are a non negligible number of events every year. The Nuclear Threat Initiative catalogs publicly known events if you want to browse.

At least in the US there is also a pretty substantial network of teams and equipment for providing radiological technical support in an emergency. Examples of this are DoE RAP and the USNG CST. Now part of the motivation for this work was that a lot of the techniques for actually doing a search are fairly primitive, but there is a major support network with most of the tools and skills ready to go 24/7. It tends to all be very low key and fly under the radar, mostly because even a hint of one of these teams being deployed tends to cause a panic.