The better question might be: What is your imagined use case for this radio? A VHF/UHF handheld is more or less limited to LOS transmission, so you would either need to be within reliable range of a repeater or another person with an HT tuned to that frequency. If you’re looking for something you can use in a backcountry emergency, you’d frankly be better off just plunking down the money for a satphone, which is going to be much more reliable. An HT radio is unlikely to be of much use in that scenario, unless you know there’s a repeater nearby that is regularly used and that you can hit from your location. OTOH, if you’re looking for a new hobby and a gadget to play around with, get a license, pick up an UV-K5, and have fun!
If you want to get a license just to play on the radio, it is super easy. A Technician license will allow you legally to use any VHF/UHF radio with full access to those bands (plus all of 6m and some access to other HF bands).
It’s extremely simple to get licensed. Put the HamStudy app on your phone, run through the question pool/practice exams until the info is in your memory, and then sign up for a remote exam on HamStudy.org. I studied for my Technician license for like a day and a half and aced the Tech exam. I aced my General and Extra exams within a week using the same method. I have no background in tech or EE. So, yeah, it’s easy.
The most effective way I've found to prompt GPT-4 is to ask it to create the optimal prompt for you. Try this meta prompt to help craft your prompts:
--
I create separate conversation threads for each expert persona of GPT. You are PromptGPT. You are a prompt engineer expert for large language models. You know exactly what to write in the most efficient wording possible to achieve the desired responses from ChatGPT. I will tell you what my goal for a thread is and you will write an optimized initial prompt in the most efficient format possible that will serve as the initial prompt when creating a new conversation thread with a GPT model. You will define the expert persona, the parameters or rules of the responses, you should also provide any other information that a GPT thread may need to understand exactly what it needs to do to give me the most accurate answers depending on my goal with that particular thread and the tone of voice, within the prompt you provide.
Are you ready or is there any other information you need to perform this job to your best ability
The greatest video Jonathan Blow has ever done on Video Games and the Future of education is 0:10:36 long and is just him going over the first part of his video game "The Witness".
* Starting off any new concept with trivial examples that nonetheless convey important information about the problem space and how to interact with it.
* Making the progression to the next problem or related problems obvious and intuitive.
* Adding in 'curve balls' that help to jog the player into thinking critically.
* Whilst showing clear progression to alternative ideas, also allowing freedom to approach different problems
* Showing how video games can give immediate feedback to 'show not tell' nuanced ideas
* Showing how understanding of concepts grows over time
* Showing how decomposition of ideas can make them easy to understand individually and then composition of them is intuitive and immediate
The Witness is a thesis on learning/pedagogy, motivation/reward, truth seeking and self fulfilment. To that end, I would recommend playing it to anyone who has an interest in video games and how they relate to the future of education.
I'm a software engineer, but these have been instrumental in my success in a way no coding book can compare to(though John Ousterhout's "A Philosophy of Software Design" would have, if it came out earlier in my life).
Personal time/task management- The classic, Getting Things Done(https://www.amazon.com/Getting-Things-Done-Stress-Free-Produ...). The power this has on people cannot be understated. Turns out that most of how life is conducted is rife with forgetfulness, decision paralysis, prioritization mistakes, and massive motivation issues. This book gives you specific workflows to cut through these in a magical way.
Personal Knowledge Management- The equally classic, How to Take Smart Notes(https://www.amazon.com/How-Take-Smart-Notes-Technique/dp/398...). Where GTD(above) does this for well-defined tasks/work, this book does it for open-ended work, giving you an amazing workflow for introducing "Thinking by Writing", which is frankly a superpower. This lets you see things your friends/colleagues simply won't, lets you deconstruct your feelings better, learn new/deeper subjects faster, and connect thoughts in a way to produce real insight.
For Product/Business Management, Gojko Adzic's "Impact Mapping"(https://www.amazon.com/Impact-Mapping-software-products-proj...) feels like it could make nearly every software team/business 10x better by just reading this book. I've personally watched as enormous portions of my life were spent on things that barely moved the needle for companies, or merely didn't keep the metric from rising. So many projects taken on faith that if you work on X, X will improve, without ever measuring, or asking if you could have accomplished that with less. The world looks insane afterward.
> parents were happy that I do not waste so much time anymore on the computer. so no computers for me any more. I think they never understood what I was actually doing.
As a parent I now wonder about the ways that I might do something similar to my kid.
Or perhaps more importantly, what is the c64 of my kid's generation that I can buy for her?
"Roadside America" [1] was my go-to app when road tripping with my daughters years ago. It listed a few "gravity hills" (among many other crazy things). Looking at the list of "Gravity Hills" I believe it was the highway near Ocotillo, California [2].
I saw it coming up on the app. Not expecting much I followed the directions in the info and pulled off the highway at the determined exit. You get to the bottom of the off ramp, stop, and then put the car in neutral.
"Okay", I said, putting it in neutral, "what, am I going to roll backward up the off-ramp? Ha ha.
Oh yes, to my surprise, that is exactly what happened. It very much appeared as though we had come down hill from the off-ramp. Completely surprised me.
BTW, loved the years when we road-tripped with the kids. Roadside America did make it a lot of fun too. The "Clown Motel", the graveyard behind it, the underground gardens, various Japanese Fire Balloon-related locations, weird "amusement" parks and museums....
On the topic of how overexercise can damage the heart by James OKeefe, a cardiologist and lifetime obsessive runner:
Notably he points out that they tested people blood after doing long distance events and found that many of them had chemicals usually found in heart attack victims, indicating heart damage.
Basically he says that the long term overexercise/heart damage means the heart muscle constantly has microtears which heal up and the healed tissue is scar tissue which is hard and not like normal heart tissue - much harder and less elastic. So people who overtrain end up with a heart much older than their physical age.
>How do we know that the third-party teams hadn't previously seen these videos?
The best third-party repairers are vastly more advanced than Apple's own warranty repair service. They're constantly pushing the limits of what is considered possible in SMD rework. None of these videos would have provided any useful information to them.
iFixit are rank amateurs compared to companies like G-lon, REWA and ZXW. The fact that Motherboard praise them as "incredible" is frankly embarrassing.
If you ever send money to A and it actually goes to B, and for some reason the bank doesn't fix that the first time you get in touch with them, I recommend getting off the phone and escalating to an on-dead-tree letter:
Dear BigBank Legal Department:
This is written notice under Regulation E that BigBank has processed the following electronic transaction in error:
(Brief recitation of transaction details.)
You are required to investigate this matter within 10 business days of your receipt of this letter and provide me written confirmation of the results of your investigation. My desired resolution is a deposit of $XXX into my checking account with last four digits 1234.
Regards,
$YOU
You really want BigBank to put into writing "We think we've satisfied our obligation to you because you told us to send it to your mother and instead we sent it to somebody in Cincinatti; that was totes reasonable." Or, rather, you want a lawyer at BigBank to say "Eff no I am not putting that in writing; pay him $300 and charge it off to operational losses, that's what that budget is for."
There’s no good criteria for an unstable child. Nor for adults - that’s the “clinical gestalt” docs spend 80+ hours a week developing in training. That said, a few things to look out for (I steal the below list from Dr Tim Horeczko):
Appearance:
“TICLS”
Tone – the newborn should have a normal flexed tone; the 6 month old baby who sits up and controls her head; the toddler cruises around the room.
Interactiveness – Does the 2 month old have a social smile? Is the toddler interested in what is going on in the room?
Consolability – A child who cannot be consoled at some point by his mother is experiencing a medical emergency until proven otherwise.
Look/gaze – Does the child track or fix his gaze on you, or is there the “1000-yard stare”?
Speech/cry – A vigorously crying baby can be a good sign, when consolable – when the cry is high-pitched, blood-curling, or even a soft whimper, something is wrong.
If the child fails any of the TICLS, then his appearance is abnormal.
Work of Breathing:
Children are respiratory creatures – they are hypermetabolic – we need to key in on any respiratory embarrassment.
Look for nasal flaring. Uncover the chest and abdomen and look for retractions. Listen – even without a stethoscope – for abnormal airway sounds like grunting or stridor. Grunting is the child’s last-ditch effort to produce auto-PEEP.
Stridor is a sign of critical upper airway narrowing.
Look for abnormal positioning, like tripodding, or head bobbing
Circulation to skin:
Infants and children are vasospastic – they can change their vascular tone quickly, depending on their volume status or environment.
Without even having to touch the child, you can see signs of pallor, cyanosis, or mottling. If any of these is present, this is an abnormal circulation to the skin.
Failing any one of these is worth a serious doc visit. And, I’ll add one of my own: any infant that works so hard at sucking down milk that it makes them sweat gets a free trip to the ER.
I was on a United flight a year or two ago, and before the flight they showed a video that was all female United employees talking about how United cared about women, and how women at United were pilots, and women were maintenance people, and how women made United work!
If I had a daughter I wouldn't want her to see that video. I think I would literally cover her eyes and ears. Sure, it's helpful for a little girl to know that there are female pilots. But I think that a kid seeing that kind of propaganda just helps build a complex for thinking women are less than men and need to make videos like that.
I'm a short guy, within the bottom few percentile of male height in the US. Being this short has been highly correlated with decreased wages and significant decreases in attractiveness. Can you imagine a video with a lot of short people saying "X company values short people. You short people can do whatever you want. Us short people are strong together. See, short people can become executives!" Makes me sick just thinking about it.
How do any women at all support this kind of thing?
I've been to Tsukiji a number of times, including the morning after Fukushima. Most recently I was there in September. They're glossing over the recent rules that tourists aren't allowed in the inner market before 10am, largely after business is done for the day.
Sushi Dai is good but not worth standing in line for an hour. There are dozens of restaurants along Shin Ohashi Dori with local specialities and no tourists. For my money, I'd rather get a lunch reservation at Kyubey or Sushi Iwa than stand in line forever to get squeezed (literally) into Sushi Dai or Daiwa Sushi. There's a great coffee place a couple blocks away called Turret Coffee, ironically tucked behind a Starbucks.
And please, don't bring a suitcase. I honestly cannot believe the throngs of tourists I saw last time bringing in full-size roller suitcases. The market was not built as a tourist attraction—watch where you're going, accept that your shoes will get dirty and don't bring bags. Or touch the fish.
The market is worth visiting, especially if you're coming from the US, meaning the jet lag will have you wide awake at 3am your first morning. Embrace it and head on over.
It's a practical approach, and my comment here isn't necessarily aimed at you, chx (since I don't know your citizenship status), but I would add this entreaty to American citizens like me:
If you ever get asked that question at the US border, please don't acquiesce to that request. They have the right to ask, and they even have the power to search it regardless of your permission, but despite an alarming drift towards a total surveillance, they have not established the right to force you to unlock/decrypt anything.
I'm flying into SFO tomorrow, and I am taking similar precautions as chx so that my laptop doesn't contain any meaningful data[1].
However, if asked to unlock my laptop, I plan to say "No, of course I cannot do that; it violates the most basic security practices and I could and should be fired if I exposed sensitive company data in that manner." And then just sticking with it. It will be inconvenient, especially if they seize my laptop and detain me, but as citizens it is up to us to resist the normalization of behaviors that push the nation further towards the precipice of idiotism.
[1]: As an American citizen, I have routinely done this when traveling to authoritarian nations like China; it's hard to express how outraged I am that my own country has degenerated to the point where sound security practices now require these kinds of procedures when traveling to the USA.
Some kids grow up on football. I grew up on public speaking (as behavioral therapy for a speech impediment, actually). If you want to get radically better in a hurry:
1) If you ever find yourself buffering on output, rather than making hesitation noises, just pause. People will read that as considered deliberation and intelligence. It's outrageously more effective than the equivalent amount of emm, aww, like, etc. Practice saying nothing. Nothing is often the best possible thing to say. (A great time to say nothing: during applause or laughter.)
2) People remember voice a heck of a lot more than they remember content. Not vocal voice, but your authorial voice, the sort of thing English teachers teach you to detect in written documents. After you have found a voice which works for you and your typical audiences, you can exploit it to the hilt.
I have basically one way to start speeches: with a self-deprecating joke. It almost always gets a laugh out of the crowd, and I can't be nervous when people are laughing with me, so that helps break the ice and warm us into the main topic.
3) Posture hacks: if you're addressing any group of people larger than a dinner table, pick three people in the left, middle, and right of the crowd. Those three people are your new best friends, who have come to hear you talk but for some strange reason are surrounded by great masses of mammals who are uninvolved in the speech. Funny that. Rotate eye contact over your three best friends as you talk, at whatever a natural pace would be for you. (If you don't know what a natural pace is, two sentences or so works for me to a first approximation.)
Everyone in the audience -- both your friends and the uninvolved mammals -- will perceive that you are looking directly at them for enough of the speech to feel flattered but not quite enough to feel creepy.
4) Podiums were invented by some sadist who hates introverts. Don't give him the satisfaction. Speak from a vantage point where the crowd can see your entire body.
5) Hands: pockets, no, pens, no, fidgeting, no. Gestures, yes. If you don't have enough gross motor control to talk and gesture at the same time (no joke, this was once a problem for me) then having them in a neutral position in front of your body works well.
6) Many people have different thoughts on the level of preparation or memorization which is required. In general, having strong control of the narrative structure of your speech without being wedded to the exact ordering of sentences is a good balance for most people. (The fact that you're coming to the conclusion shouldn't surprise you.)
7) If you remember nothing else on microtactical phrasing when you're up there, remember that most people do not naturally include enough transition words when speaking informally, which tends to make speeches loose narrative cohesion. Throw in a few more than you would ordinarily think to do. ("Another example of this...", "This is why...", "Furthermore...", etc etc.)
Much like you could argue that Dr Frankenstein was the real monster in that story, I'd say Matt Goldbot was the real Compiler Explorer all along.