I'm curious as to UK end of the link now. I would guess somewhere on the hills around London to get line of sight for a microwave link down to the city.
Having just checked the Ofcom Spectrum Information System [0], it does not appear that they could have a transmitter for the opposite direction due to the frequency allocation to MoD and Amateur. Maybe they have a contract with the shortwave broadcasters to embed trading data into their broadcasts.
I found it sometime last year, looking for data on a Philips video IF processing chip, I thought about posting it. Great site from an interesting guy, a rather sad history of the decline of electronics manufacturing in western europe though, death by bean counters.
What was the IC you were looking for, PLL synthesizer or Demodulator?
I was just curious about the chips inside one of these tuner modules, so I searched up their label and went to images. The two things are TDA5737 and TSA5522, which seems to be mixer and synthesizer.
That might have been true in Jefferson's day, lifespans were shorter. Now most western democracies are effectively gerontocracies, the young are bound to the wishes of the old. See Brexit.
I agree that it ought to be that way, however those with power tend to want to hang on to it. How do you solve it? The US has a term limit for the President, but you can stay in Congress/Senate/Parliament for life if re-elected.
> but you can stay in Congress/Senate/Parliament for life if re-elected.
It gets even worse when you look at the actual approval ratings and re-election numbers, this a system created to serve career politicians and nothing more. When you see the approval rating is in the lows 30s, abut approval rates are in the 90s, something is definitely wrong as in need of a massive correction.
Andrew Yang found this out the hard way and his lobbying efforts in Washington to help get the 2nd stimulus checks approved can be pretty much summed up as congress was oblivious that the People needed further financial assistance. That is how far detached they are from reality, I think this recent stunt pulled in the capital by blind ideologues served as a warning to how fast things can devolve.
The US experiment showed great promise and had amazing prospects for a desirable model that Human Civilization could aspire and achieve, but much like its predecessor (Rome) it too decayed into oblivion due to the inherit and predictable fact that power corrupts. Human's cannot to be trusted with such power and to believe otherwise is to fall back on to this absurd notion of a chiefton caste system, that really on serves the upper tier of Society and creates a poorly incentivized system that ensures by the time you're even a possible candidate you're already so marred by the corruption you're just as bad as you what you wanted to change.
I really do want things to get better, not just in the US, but on the entire Earth as we have such a limited window of opportunity to live up to our potential as Species; but so long as we abide by these whimsical make-believe popularity contests--with people we frankly couldn't or wouldn't leave our pets under even the most dire circumstance--who then in turn act as the arbiters of everything aspect in Life that matters and use the pubic purse for personal largess we will always succumb to the same result.
Software engineers at FAANG really should be working on a protocol of governance that automates all the decision making congress could and would do with it's priority on rolling out a proper beta in the next 5 years, that could actually be suitable challenge for them to redeem their squandering talents and skills instead building this horrible panopitcon.
Remember, those rabid Q-anon/conspiracy guys are just as much your fault as they are Trumps/Fox news when you look at what most of you people do everyday. And it isn't until they do something as stupid as they did this week that it becomes obvious to those who did it.
> Software engineers at FAANG really should be working on a protocol of governance that automates all the decision making congress could and would do
Technocracy is much worse than even representative democracy. We could barely even imagine the horrors that would come from being subject to laws generated by rigid computers.
> Technocracy is much worse than even representative democracy.
I never said anything about implementing, simply creating a proof of concept would be enough to show that we have tools to make them irrelevant should be enough of a deterrent effect and should in some ways ensure we don't have a repeat of 2020 again. And start to test it to the low hanging fruit: UBI and Universal medicare is is overwhelming supported by the majority of the populace, yet the regulatory capture (who themselves benefit from State issued medical care and salary even in stalemates along in with all the 'contributions' from donors and are exempt from insider trading conflicts of interest cases) refuse to even consider it on either side. Hell, even the $2000 stimulus seems to be defied yet again by this time a Democrat, Joe Manchin, despite the highly contested Republican majority in the Senate. Again, its all theater, and no one there has the best interest of the people in mind regardless of party affiliation.
There has to be some incentive here and all I'm asking is for a better stick if 'representative democracy' is to remain. Furthermore a trawler of all known conflicts of interests of every politician should appear via QR code every time they speak in the house.
We talk about how all of these jobs/Industries are going to be automated and are never coming back, but I have a very hard time understanding that the most corrupt of all (politics) is some how a given that it will remain intact. We deserve better and those in FAANG really should be self-reflective after what occurred and start asking what they could do to prevent it instead of just deplatforming, which is really the worst thing possible as it only emboldens those q-anon imbeciles into thinking they're 'being censored for telling the truth.'
Those riots we saw last year are really just waiting to happen again as we've seen that nothing has changed since then, and now the Trump factions now think they have a just cause and a martyr to back their 'cause' this really is a ticking time bomb.
I think you're right about the problems you see, but technology is in no way near to being able to help.
Technology at this time can only be used to enact decisions that humans have taken after deliberation. We're nowhere near to creating an algorithm that could be trusted with deciding if we should go for Medicare for all or stick with the system we have (I'm absolutely in favor of the first one), to what extent speech should be censored online and how, or nay other political decision whatsoever.
We are absurdly ill equipped technically for even attempting to attack such a problem. I for one am thankful that no one is yet trying to sell such bullshit.
No machine messiah can help us - we need to get our acts together as humans and fix some of these ills.
> No machine messiah can help us - we need to get our acts together as humans and fix some of these ills.
Its impossible to expect the very cause of the issues, Humans, to solve an issue with any realistic timeline as we are drawing ever closer to our own collective demise as a Species.
We've proven that much: we knew about climate change since the early 2000s and did nothing it was seen to adversely effect the economy, we knew about the dangers of nuclear plants like Fukushima in 2011 and did nothing and now it continues to spill nuclear waste into the Pacific unabated while Japan plans for the Olympics, we knew about our over reliance on fossil fuels and pesticides but our voracious and seemingly insatiable need to consume cheap trinkets from the China and reliance on nutrient deficient and processed foods that made the CCP and Big Pharma even more powerful and did nothing.
No, I think its clear tech may not be the entire answer (Human conduct is ultimately dependent on free will and compliance) but is the only thing that scales enough to align certain incentives in such a way to actually make progress, we just need to iterate in such way that we start from low hanging fruit on to more important substantial policies.
And that in turn means phasing out the Nation State model as that seems to be the source for most of these problems.
Then the answer is extinction. Current tech is completely incapable of even attempting to help. We may as well try to solve the issue of governance with steam engines or the wheel - they're as close to being helpful as any other tech we have today.
Then why don't you sign up to be the first to sign up for that then?
For all of Humanity's flaws I think its an amazing thing and worth preserving; Humanity is in dire need for it's incentives to be properly aligned as they have gone so far beyond sane levels long ago. But I firmly believe it's worth doing and have dedicated a significant part of my adult life toward that end.
We already built an immutable ledger that relies on distributed consensus with Bitcoin, now what is neede is to build off of the layers into a self-governing system that rewards participants for playing by the rules/parameters.
Having arbitrators for certain truths alleviates a massive amount of the burden for other mechanisms to solve the more sticky issues in Society, but their is good reason for hope and I feel deep sorrow for anyone who cannot see that despite all the horrible things that have occurred as of late: it's an amazing time to be alive and I don't think I would want to be born in any other!
If you don't mind me asking: what do you do in tech, and why are you on YC if you are so averse to it?
> If you don't mind me asking: what do you do in tech, and why are you on YC if you are so averse to it?
I am not averse to tech, I just don't think that it currently has a place in (or instead of) politics.
I work for a company on network testing software (packet generators), as a principal software engineer on the middleware of one such product. Nothing world-changing, B2B, far away from any kind of societal shaping effects like ads or social networks.
I am mostly on YC because of my interest in tech itself, and because I am interested in the political and social views of the tech community, not because I think we tech people have some special insight, but simply because I am part of this community.
For the rest of your post, I will reiterate my position: we can't outsource governance or politics (what ought to be) to technology, until we have something close to AGI. We don't have the required knowledge to create software that can arbitrate social or economical truths, we would need a working formal mathematical model of society or the economy before we could even start to write software for that. Any attempts would probably end up more like 'predictive policing' (racism with a technical veneer) than any positive outcomes.
Bitcoin is a failed experiment at creating a digital currency, it is just a speculative asset with some appeal to black and gray markets.
The kind of civil liberties they like are the rather limited kind, or only for the right kind of people (their voters). During the debate on the November lockdown, the word 'arbitrary' was used a lot, yet they are quiet on the arbitrary nature of the classification of Cannabis, no civil liberties for users of Cannabis (wrong kind of people).
Actually there are a fair few Tories in favour of legalisation of cannabis. Crispin Blunt and Peter Lilley spring to mind as having been relatively forthright on this but quite a few quietly hold these views.
I was thinking people like Steve Baker (who as it happens is also a member of the All-Party Parliamentary Group for Drug Policy Reform - you might like him!)
No, not a specific political difference, more of a differnce of socio-economic/age/class/possibly even race. As we saw at the last election Corbyn wasn't that popular with some traditional Labour voters.
Perhaps we will see some changes now that we are getting stories of Hard Working Families (TM) having to spend large sums of money to buy Cannabis based medications for their children.
>The hardware companies are still stuck way in the past.
If only. In the past it was common to provide schematics of your hardware in order that people could repair it. This was common for consumer products, industrial, instrumentation, test gear, almost everything. For example, the manual for the Amiga 500 had the schematics in it.
Also "hardware companies are still stuck way in the past" is only true for some hardware companies. Recently got into music production and lots of hardware comes with schematics of the inner workings with descriptions on how it all works and is connected, together with implementation guides for MIDI and more. Night and day if you compare to how computer hardware gets sold today.
I don't know if this is only with music hardware or with 'professional' hardware in general, but yeah you get a lot of schematics and such.
While I was at University I made some money by repairing DJ-hardware. Controllers, CD-Players and Turntables. There things are often expensive, but they are quite easy to repair because there are detailed service manuals available. Not on the official sites, though.
I had noticed that the UK distributors that I use on a regular basis, RS and Farnell, have stopped hosting TI's datasheets on their sites. It makes it quite annoying to make a quick check to see if the part does what I want.
Whats up at TI? They used to be great for datasheets and Appnotes.
Why use the Rpi at all (Nothing against them, I have a few)?
If the Pi is just writing graphics to a screen, why not handle that directly with the STM32? Running an RTOS, it should be able to manage a low priority GUI task along with the real-time ventilator tasks.
I believe any enforcement Ofcom do these days is reactive, and in response to reports from licensed operators.
A lot of the new "shared" access licenses do not give guarantees of interference protection though, so I imagine Ofcom enforcement would be on a best-effort basis there.
http://superkuh.com/radio/ . In that directory you'll find most of the recorded radio history as well as the bash script and depends to do it yourself (http://superkuh.com/radio/deps/). The top of the bash script has a readme in the comments.
For 70-1000 MHz it's just a homemade discone antenna hooked to an rtlsdr dongle running rtl_power. I have written a little bash script that automates calling heatmap.py to render the 30k pixel wide image, imgcnv to slice it into image tiles, and generate an PanoJS HTML page to display the tiles.
Slough has a large number of data centres, would that be the location of the servers for London Stock Exchange?
Also, don't forget the recent post about a HFT intrusion into the 20m amateur band.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25733406