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> "It is not the direction one arrives at in a few days by giving a model the problem statement."

Can they back up this statement somehow?


yes, this is ultimately nothing but a claim.

Buckmaster did also mention, for example, that a team of people was employed to solve the problem, which supports this claim. but that is another claim whose veracity could also be questioned. but at some point we must trust other people, unless we can be satisfied with only believing what we personally see.

(also, IMO, the coincidence of both discoveries in time is pretty suspicious. this one doesn't need you to trust many people i guess)


We have a similarly converted rotary phone at my local astronomy club's observatory, used to receive visitors. It's driven by an arduino if I remember correctly. The main issue is that the sound quality of its built-in speaker is quite poor, especially compared to modern cell phone speakers we're used to nowadays, with a narrow frequency window and frequent echoes.

In contrast, I've been messing around with some old analog phones and VOIP stuff recently, and I've been blown away with how good the quality is over what I was expecting. The audio bandwidth is low yes (it's G.711u, so 8 KHz), but the actual quality is great, with no hyper-compression artifacts or over-applied background noise filters. And yes this is on the original 60's carbon microphones.

The regular phone calls I normally make on my cell still all sound like they are underwater for some reason, except for those rare times when the better connection is actually working.


I've seen projects that swap out the rotary phone speaker with a speaker from a pair of on-ear headphones.

The Secret Life of Machines TV show has a fun demo of how the speakers in old telephones produce sound https://youtu.be/MCgCSMq5Xpo?si=CT5aOGttBpPk9tEM&t=458


Interesting. I remember voice clarity being exceptional on old handsets and being really subpar on gsm and later. Only now we FaceTime voice and discord the quality seems to be coming back.

How can that be if the speakers in phones ubiquitously were so bad?


My understanding is that at some point the audio of phone calls ended up being compressed multiple times on its way to the receiver as it went through different voip setups and such.

Prior to that, uncompressed or compressed once calls weren't so bad on bad speakers.


Could be that it wasn’t bad but has gotten bad because of aging of the speaker, capacitors, resistors, etc.

Wikipedia has an article listing some of the notable (walking) straight line missions: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Straight_line_mission

edit: and the article already notes this longest possible path from Portugal to China, citing a 2023 article: https://bigthink.com/strange-maps/these-are-the-worlds-longe...


Note that the 2023 article also cites the submission, which is five years older.


> Figure 9: Longest Drivable Straight Line Path on Earth.

Walkable, maybe, but definitely not drivable (it crosses directly over the Alps, for example).


Presume for a moment that you don’t drive on tyres…


This is mathematics, the Alps is drivable like a manifold is smooth.

There might be icebergs or sandbars or rocks or volcanic activity or wars blocking the sailing route too. They seem like equivalents.

The longest mettled straight route with minimal deviation would also be an interesting exercise.


Extremely highly inprobable vs 100% there and directly impassable unless walking & doing some proper alpinism is hardly equivalent


This is also a problem with Google Maps navigation. It is always showing the perspective looking straight ahead of your current direction, even when you're approaching a sharp turn. Instead, the perspective should be along a vector connecting your current location with the point where the navigation's path crosses the edge of the display, pointing straight up.


So why not use 2D maps, have people lost the ability to read North up maps? I swear ever since paper maps have not been used in cars, people have gotten spatially dumber.


I love north-up maps because I find they give me way better spatial context. My truck’s nav system gives north-up as an option but my phone and my truck map both suffer from the same problem on different axes. My phone sits in its holder vertically, so I have way more north-south context than east-west. The truck screen is landscape, same problem north-south! A square map north-up would be amazing!


Obviously the answer is to get a square phone. One of those foldables?


2D map would work the same way with my proposal. The "north is up" part is the issue for me, I'd like to have the rotation oriented in such a way that (the visible part of the path to) my destination is up.


That seems very wrong and unintuitive for U-turns.


It does.

Let us embrace this minor imperfection by simply excluding U-turns from this presentation method.


Of course it could still have some maximum allowed rotation threshold.


Having any kind of threshold now makes your idea too complicated to implement, and more importantly, too complicated for mere mortals to understand.


I realize I've been spoiled by finally having the ability to tailor almost anything to my exact personal preference. Related: https://vibingwithai.substack.com/p/software-for-one-how-vib... and the HN discussion, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49096605


Took me a while to figure out what you're saying, now I assume you're using the "up is direction of motion"?

I use map view / north is up, which makes it reasonably easy to get he big picture - I encourage everybody to try it :).


>"up is direction of motion"

Yes, this is how it's currently implemented. My proposal is "up is the intersection of the path with the edge of the screen". Here's a mock comparison of the current behavior with my proposal: https://i.imgur.com/AmUnzfS.jpeg (The mocked perspective is wrong because I just cut out and rotated the image, but hopefully you get the idea)


Can you describe with a bit more detail how you're approaching the BIOS reverse engineering?


I just grabbed my laptop's BIOS packages and told Claude and now Sol to statically analyze them. By now it's at around 80% done. Some stuff needs hardware validation, but the AIs were quite capable of doing most of the grueling work on their own. I'm having them reduce the problem as much as possible so I only have to deal with the hardware verification.

I'll also ask the AI to reverse engineer the LattePanda Mu BIOS later since I want to use the Mu on my handheld cyberdeck project. Nearly out of usage for the week, sadly. Wish Tibo would push his reset button yet again.


https://gshock.casio.com/europe/products/mr-g/

The MR-G models are priced in the thousands.


Time is necessary for change, not existence.


Time is change that happens in a continuous manner. It’s still possible to conceive of change happening in an unordered unpredictable way that is not like the smooth ordered time that we experience.

In a gravitational singularity spacetime breaks down. You could argue that time stops, but it’s also valid to argue that causality breaks down and we can no longer make any predictions about the future. Just because we don’t have a theory describing what could happen, doesn’t rule out that something could happen.


Maybe it's time to develop new sealing materials?

edit: thanks for the downvote. I should've said "Maybe it's time to _invest into developing_ new sealing materials?" ;)


Maybe it's time to stop burning food as fuel. What are the jets going to do anyway, bomb Iranian children?

Remember when George W Bush signed into law the corn ethanol bill. Corn tripled in price within 8 years. Fuel didn't get cheaper. In fact it cost more to produce the ethanol.


Ethanol was always a political thing, and not technical. It was passed because it would triple the price of corn.


Not just corn. Farmers would grow more corn in place of other plants reducing the supply, and shorter supply generally means higher prices, This is happening in India right now.


Fair play, also we need to stop using palm oil in food.


But how else am I going get orangutan flavour in my ice c̶r̶e̶a̶m̶ confection?


All water under the bridge. Ethanol is now a paying proposition. And it uses corn we used to dump.


Maybe they should have said something like "These are solvable backwards compatibility issues, but not in the short or medium term."


Aviation is notorious for having long product cycles. Look at how long GA pilots have been spraying their communities with lead.

There's simply no economic feasibility to replace every seal on every aircraft.


Does anyone have any real photos of the reflective asphalt?


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