Getting a laugh out of life

I still have a nice shortwave radio that operates on AC or batteries. I used to collect QSL cards.

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I wanted to collect but never did…

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Looks cool! From what I understand a very decent one too, and hackable!

I don’t have much when it comes to shortwave, just some more regular portable AM/FM I got for a few bucks a while back. I think it’s from the early 80’s.

I also have this cheap, very hackable multi-band transceiver, just not great at shortband with the antenna I currently have. Fun to mess with, just have to be very careful not to transmit :grimacing: I have yet to learn a lot about working with these though, but great fun to mess with and try different software on.

Luckily enough, we hardly ever get power outages here, but I’m prepared regardless

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I bought a gadget to roll wire onto so I could run out an antenna that would catch the waves better. I forget the formula but there is one. It is based on the frequencies your receiver can pick up and the bandwidth you are wanting to catch. I will have to look for it. You can actually overload your receiver.

Long story short, I never have gotten the wire. I can’t even remember what gauge I was going to use.

Guess I should look into all of that again…

My radio was a Radio Shack purchase. Sigh…I still miss that store

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I can’t say I know Radio Shack, but I have heard a lot about it, believe I understand the sentiment.

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Pure electronics. Need a capacitor, maybe an adapter or a jack to fit your stereo or your walkman player…:laughing: Rows and rows of all kinds of electronic bits.

Oh I totally forgot about this antenna. Used this one time while living in an apartment

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:grinning_face_with_smiling_eyes: Way to go! Get the antenna in before the wallpaper! Oh my, can imagine friends asking why you have alligator clips attached to the wall…

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I am all outta :heart:Back then, people looked at you weirdly just for buying alligator clips. Unless you were buying them at Radio Shack

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I never did that. I was too concerned about attracting lightning, even if I thought it was properly grounded. But the unit I had did an incredible job with the extendable antenna and (I think) coils around the thick and heavy handle inside.

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I have a chalk line ready to go. (A carpenter’s tool for marking straight lines. Remove the chalk line thread) One day I may load it with wire. It is easy to wind up and take the wire down so I can avoid the storms.

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I just learned yesterday that I can type on my phone by sliding across the keyboard with one finger from letter to letter and I can do it quickly and with minimal effort. It has changed my life. It is also far more accurate. So, long-winded posts inbound. :smirking_face:

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Really… :face_with_raised_eyebrow:


(Search engine LLM confidently mixing up No Man’s sky with Wynncraft)

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Don’t you just love AI?

The other day I was watching a TV show about AI surgeons. Now that’s a terrifying thought - “Now we stitch this bagel into the head cavity…”

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Is it LLM or a specialist model? I’ve heard some good things about the latter.

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Whenever I do that I don’t know what I do to do it, but I keep getting a capital C or V in the text. So if you see spurious letters in my posts, that’s what it’ll be. :slightly_smiling_face:

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They didn’t go into details. It was a little magazine piece. We currently do have AI advising human surgeons, and we have genuine robotic surgery - but under human control. It was a short piece about research into marrying the two - AI driving a robot surgeon. As I understand, speculative ATM.

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Thanks. I know someone who worked on a specialist model for some image analysis and it was great. The problem seems to be, to me, when people try and shoehorn LLMs into stuff they’re not designed to do.

My favourite was a paper on LLMs doing really well at the image recognition benchmarks when the researchers forgot to uncomment the code that actually fed them the images. Think I’ve lost the link though.

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That doesn’t seem practical. No hospital will ever let anybody do surgery that cannot legally be held liable and professionally executed on the spot to clear the hospital’s name when something goes wrong…

:rofl:

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And no government vehicle licensing authority will ever allow a vehicle on the roads if the driver can’t be held criminally liable for his actions.

But they do.

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I just had a groundhog run across my yard, jump onto a tree and climb it. Now it is just laying on a limb stareing at me. This isn’t an omen is it?

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