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Cake day: March 15th, 2024

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  • The way I’ve been looking at it, if you want a chance at the starships, start with the spandex.

    If we want a good and honest chance of being able to do interstellar travel of any sort, we’re not going to get there by building an Enterprise and then hope that someone cooks up a warp drive for it before we finish ruining our only planet.

    Maybe physics is all wrong and there really is a warp drive to be had. If there is one, it’s not the sort of thing you can count on. We have to survive as a species until it happens.

    Conversely, there’s a real easy bet to be had. In 1.29 million years, Gliese 710 will be 0.17 light years away. The GAIA mission has identified some other candidate stars that are going to get fairly close sooner. So there’s a solarpunk space travel bet of simply providing a stable society over the long term such that we can surf the stars.

    Solarpunk is kinda the version that starts with the spandex. I’m at the point in my life where I kinda hate the whole Eugenics-wars/World-War-III thread to Trek because it kinda mutated away from the hopeful idea that we can survive a downturn into the idea that the collapse will create a new world which is … risky.


  • IoT devices are, to be quite honest, a shitshow. Where your Sovol counts as such.

    Either the device needs to call upstream to get updates or it’s going to ship with a security bug that can be exploited. Or, in may cases, it’ll have an unpatched security vulnerability and it’ll call upstream to get updates.

    It costs money to keep the necessary cloud infrastructure in place, both in terms of hosting costs as well as devops time. Either they will eventually need to brick the device, leave it unpatched forever, charge you some maintenance fee, go bankrupt, or fund the whole thing by selling your data.

    It’s not hard to write a bot that would scan for signs of a Sovol printer, try the default SSH password, and do nefarious things. And people are generally really bad about the default SSH password regardless.

    There’s not really a good answer here for IoT devices. There’s not even a really great answer for home brew IoT devices with the thing where Home Assistant’s reverse-tunnel service had a nasty vulnerability that let you remote HA instances.

    Aaand… IPv6 is great. But unfortunately the way things are now means that giving everything on your network a publicly routable IPv6 address is a very bad idea.

    Klipper provides a lot of protections but all of that hinges on the microcontroller, so presumably an attacker can upload a substitute firmware using the update mechanism that would go full send on the heaters, which has the potential to actually melt some things.

    The problem is that if you want Klipper, you need a full Linux. This is not actually a problem for the Klipper devs, mind you, because they wrote a cool tool for people comfortable modding their printers and only BTT and Obico sponsor Klipper. This was a lot less of a problem when we were talking about Marlin printers. Except that if people weren’t using Klipper, it’s just too damn easy to write a two-piece controller software in the same fashion of Klipper and get the expediency of writing code in Linux instead of in an os-less microcontroller.

    tl;dr: there is no safe way to buy a printer with klipper on it, it just looks like it works right now.




  • I guess it depends on your aspirations and where you live?

    A radio that can hit the bands longer than the 10 meter band is pricey. Which is why Ham has traditionally been the sort of hobby that a distinguished older white gentleman does, not a thing for regular people.

    On the other hand, a cheap VHF/UHF handheld radio can be really quite cheap (Baofeng radios being an example). You will only be able to talk to the local area but most areas have a repeater in convenient geographic locations (mountaintops, ideally) that will listen on one frequency and then transmit at higher power on another frequency so that you can reach a wider area. So in my area for the EmComm use-case, there’s a whole organized VHF/UHF system of volunteers.

    Oh yeah, and you can also screw around with putting custom firmware on WiFi devices or Meshtastic in Ham mode.

    I dono… I’d like to think that there’s useful things especially these days to be done with Ham radio and that it’s not just a thing that is just for distinguished older white gentlemen, but it’s kinda hamstrung (LOL, pun) by the present-day audience that’s preventing people from seeing what it could be.


  • Funny you ask because I literally just got my ham license because of this.

    Radio works without infrastructure. Okay there’s some ham stuff that is internet-connected et al but overall you are just spewing radio waves into the ether with a variety of simple encodings and someone else can pick them up. So powering a few radios off of a dinky solar panel and battery combo is no biggie, whereas powering cell towers, routing infrastructure, et al is a bunch of generators that need to be fueled and whatnot.

    Like… you can hit the 20-meter-and-longer wavelengths with a radio and a random bit of wire and some ingenuity and get your signal all over the place. And the maximum power you are ever allowed is 1500 watts and most folks can make do with far less power than that.

    Also, amateur radio has fun stuff to do other than mere EmComm needs. Part of why Twitter used to be handy in a pinch for lesser-disasters in days past was that it could be used for EmComm needs but also had other fun stuff to be done with it. Things that are “just” for EmComm infrastructure tend to get forgotten about and abandoned and rot away to nothingness.

    A lot of areas in the US have ARES/RACES orgs to provide an already organized group of people… but some of the fun games that hams play like POTA/SOTA, Field Days, et al also serve to make it fun to have a portable setup.



  • So… I’m not sure if this is an entirely rational thought.

    I’d always wanted to do ham radio but hadn’t bothered. Before my time, ham radio let you do amazing things that weren’t otherwise very easy. Like have a group chat with a bunch of people all over the world. Except when I was looking for things to do, you could get on the Internet and chat with a bunch of people all over the world … without the antennas and hardware and all.

    Lately some stuff happened and my spouse’s friend who lives near Asheville NC and lived through the flooding there where ham radio was the only working form of communications, so my spouse got pressured into buying a radio, which means that I got myself a license because … well, radio works without much infrastructure?

    Mostly I figure I needed to fill the void that was getting on Twitter if something happened locally.



  • The hard-to-solve problem with the news is that reporting on suicides causes suicide (as in: more people commit suicide, not just people who were on the ledge decided to go) yet people also want to know things.

    I’m unclear if the usual disclaimers added to the article actually help or just are the only sounds-like-it-might-help thing that comes to mind so at least the publisher can feel better about the added deaths that, statistically speaking, they might be causing. I just remember it being covered in one of my college gened classes and the way it was presented was that everybody threw up their hands in frustration and gave up.

    An acquaintance who screwed up her leg really bad and went through a whole process of getting bolted back together et al decided that she wasn’t going to tell people what happened. Because everybody always asks “how’d you do it?” as if it was some curse that she had personally triggered that they could avoid. And I thought about how the first question in my mind was “how’d you do it?” and I guess it made me think about the inanity of making sure to check for flying herring while traveling backwards hanging out the window of a train going between Albuquerque and Phoenix after having signed up for a triple indemnity life insurance plan… or something like that.

    The only exception, of course, is you are doing something that the news orgs consider “wrong” like doing drugs or being certain categories of mentally ill or riding a bicycle for transportation.


  • I’d ended up having a conversation with an archivist about the somewhat related question of “What was the Soviet Union’s history of itself, absent the editorializing that the rest of the world has been doing?”

    For example, Tamim Ansary wrote Destiny Disrupted: A History of the World through Islamic Eyes that explained a lot of things about the middle east through that sort of lens, so I was hoping that someone would write a history of the USSR in a similar fashion, which I didn’t find.

    One of the problems we have when approaching the more successful world governments is understanding … well, I guess good intentions? There’s kinda two sides to the story of Dear Leader. On one side, the self-aggrandizement as the father of the country, on the other side the act of actually trying to be the father of the country. Obviously a strongman today is mostly running the show almost entirely for selfish reasons but what you kinda see in the USSR and modern day China is at the same time an attempt to make the state better off. Which, of course, falls prey to effective use of power. “Do this or you will be executed” doesn’t work very well… not with the US approach to the death penalty, not to the totalitarianism of the attempted Communist state.

    But, even today, there’s tons of “Good idea, bad implementation” things that the Chinese government does where the rest of the world governments just let things get worse.

    The vibes I was getting in the days of Lenin from my reading was interesting. Lenin was the leader of the USSR but not in the way that Stalin was. The Bolsheviks of the time insisted that things be discussed and debated and worked through and not even Lenin was above that. And there was a very forward-looking idealistic sort of viewpoint. They could reject everything and do things right for once and many of them were new to power so they were freed of that worldview. And a lot of those things didn’t pan out as well as they wanted it to and people started to need to be “convinced” to do the new thing. First the “useless” hereditary upper-class, but then everybody else. And then eventually Lenin died and Stalin didn’t have that much patience for the Bolshevik old-guard and took over.

    tl;dr: In a sense, it’s as if a bunch of Star Trek fans had toppled a government and were trying to build the best government ever for the future, using whatever means necessary.


  • I had a booth about this at the Bay Area Maker Faire lately.

    If we’re all printing the same object on our 3D printers, it’s proooobably a lot less trouble to just have someone injection mold it and save us all the trouble. 3D printers are really great for one-offs and mass-customization and things like that. Aaaaaand, I feel like it’s kind of an under-appreciated problem in 3D printing. Because, yeah, CAD is hard and we’re never going to reach a world where every 3D printer owner is very very comfortable with CAD, and so it should be more of a concrete goal for the 3D printing community to make sure that we’re focusing on this problem. It’s important that every 3D printer owner can do at least some amount of tweaking and customizing, otherwise we’re failing as a community.

    Now, I don’t Tinkshame. I spent a lot of time learning Blender, FreeCAD, and OpenSCAD to prove Naomi Wu’s assertion that we should all just get over ourselves and use TinkerCAD. The only real problem with it is that it’s not really free, it’s “free at the pleasure of AutoDesk” where they could raise the “Mission Accomplished” banner at some point and turn it off. And there’s not really an open source version of it for roughly the same reason that random thingiverse models are always kinda halfassed and bad. Doing a good TinkerCAD-but-actually-free-by-some-definition is actual work to get everything right and polished and documented and bug-free and nobody really wants to pay for it.

    Also, maybe I am pedantic and obsessive, but I don’t really like screwing around too heavily with models in a slicer, so I’d rather they take some of the magical code in the OrcaSlicer/PrusaSlicer/SuperSlicer tree and actually organize it into something that could be TinkerCAD-esque?

    Anyway, the core of the talk of my booth was systems and libraries of 3D printable objects. So, for example, there’s the Honeycomb Storage Wall system and some of us have been writing some neat lil OpenSCAD libraries and models for it (and another group of people have been doing similar things in Fusion) where you can make a parametric model so you can measure your flashlight and print a cute 40mm holder for it based on the measurement without having to model things from scratch and it’ll click into the HSW wall and it’s fine unless you are married to someone who has ommetaphobia and then you need to make sure that the honeycomb is the same color as the wall. And the same is true for Gridfinity, just you can put that in the drawer.

    And there’s also a lot of parametric models. I’m not sure what you are looking to print, but there’s a decent selection of people who have done stuff in Fusion or FreeCAD or OpenSCAD where you can download the model and change the parameters to get it a lot closer to what you want without going through all of the drama of making it all over again.

    I love using OpenSCAD. I’ve got a buncha years of experience using various 3D modelling tools at various times and so I can use Blender or FreeCAD quite well actually, but in the end, I do a lot of functional bits and it’s so darn easy to just write some code because, actually, I’ve been working as a professional software engineer for quite some time.

    So… dono, it depends on your aspirations? There were a good number of Gridfinity-like systems that were around before Gridfinity came out and they were … ok, but not great, but then Gridfinity came along and did a boxy-box system just like was already there but with some interesting tweaks and making it more amenable to real customization and suddenly everybody went gonzo over Gridfinity in particular. So you might not be just making a thing that exists in a dozen forms better if you borrow an idea and make your version of it.

    Also, I learned 3D modelling tools mumble mumble years ago in a failed attempt and/or dodged-bullet because I’d wanted to do games or special effects as a kid. The software I learned on is long gone, but it turns out that once you are thinking about things, it tends to stick? Which means that I learned pottery while visualizing the objects I was making on the wheel as if they were in the CAD window of my mind, got good at photographic lighting based on what I’d observed in the 3D program, and then transitioned back to CAD because I wanted to make things, so it’s kinda one of those things where you probably won’t waste the time spent.

    tl;dr: I learned OpenSCAD, FreeCAD, and Blender to prove that Naomi Wu is right and we should all get over ourselves and use TinkerCAD and … she’s still probably right, LOL.





  • Trek always had to soft-sell some of the socialist ideals (e.g. “we don’t need cash” without really explaining how things really do work) and then also a lot of science fiction that was popular in the more literary side of things during the 80s was actually frighteningly right-wing.

    There’s not really a good version of conservatism that works in this modern era, especially when you come to where the parties are staked in the US, but even in general. You can’t have a modern society with all of the complexities and interrelations and cost and then have it be entirely hands-off conservative capitalism. This is why even when you talk to people who are nominally part of the right wing and actually go through the checkboxes of things that they must necessarily adhere to, you see a lot of people who are so-called RINO people … and then a bunch of weirdos who nobody likes.

    The brain’s got a bunch of structures probably to prevent us from spiraling into depression when we were hunting the African savanna when our buddy got eaten by a tiger and there wasn’t anything we could have maybe done about that that cause today’s cognitive dissonance.

    So basically the only way you can get a frighteningly actually unpopular platform through the electorate is by taking advantage of cognitive dissonance. Because you have to project this idea that a fundamentally backwards idea is going to move us forwards somehow.

    If Copyright hadn’t been extended for so many centuries, Trek characters would already be in the public domain and we’d see them fictionally used much in the way that we use all of the characters from actual public domain works. Shakespearean heroes, for example. But, even as things are now, the characters of Trek have had such a presence in the media scene that they do kinda take that aspect on. Thus, basically repeating the plot of part of the Babylon 5 episode “The Deconstruction of Falling Stars” where you have the crew of Babylon 5 being used by a new fascist empire being holographically simulated to say 1984-esque things… one of the weapons to maintain a state of cognitive dissonance is to go back and kinda put fascist words into leftist mouths.

    So it’s a bit of an accident on the part of the person, who is being dragged along politically, but it’s very much part of the conservative movement to “reclaim” old media and the relatively milquetoast treatment of alternatives to capitalism and a complete abandonment of queer issues in middle-era Trek makes that kinda easy, which I guess is why NuTrek does go through some pains to state things a bit more forcefully.



  • Engineering leaders have to work as bullshit detectors. People aren’t even necessarily trying to lie, they just built up an unconscious tower of their own ego and it’s hard to step back far enough to get them to realize that maybe the surefire solution they are emotionally invested in that’s theirs is actually super-sketch. Presumably there’s a bunch of people on the Boeing team working thrusters who were totally convinced that they understood it well enough, the simulations all showed it was fine, etc.

    But you can’t, as a leader, inspect everything in deep detail. So you have to have a shortcut, which is you detect bullshit.

    Boeing triggered the bullshit detector. (Or, depending on how you see things, “Boeing finally triggered the bullshit detector”) And once you’ve triggered the bullshit detector, now everything’s going to be checked for bullshit.


  • So, there’s a lot of things to unpack here.

    First, the idea that your spouse is your primary sole emotional connection is a relatively weird new concept on the scale of things. There’s been a huge period of history where your primary emotional connection was your male companions and your spouse was infantalized by comparison. If you were well-off you might be so lucky and have your group of emotional companions, your group of romantic companions, and the person who bears your legitimate children.

    Second, there’s really not much of a good underlying working model for actual modern conservatism. The frontiersman/“house on the prairie” sort of rugged independence was never actually a thing back then and a lot of big issues like medical bills were a lot simpler when the answer to having any sort of illness was that you either get over it after relatively inexpensive and simple treatments or you die. So the conservative movement must necessarily sell you a false bill of goods. US politics are such that there is no actual fully-left political party, so that by default makes you a democrat.

    There’s also a bunch of added uniquely christian baggage. So there are left-wing christians who also have their own set of weird baggage.

    Third, mostly irrespective of politics, there’s a lot of cultural programming for males that they can’t actually worthwhile work though their emotions in a productive fashion. Movies, TV shows, books, literally everything in the media creates this idea of maleness and the writers are just trying to write a catchy story and seldom have time to think about what kind of male they are creating. This is, overall, a relatively recent concept.

    Fourth, “things men need emotionally that women cannot provide” is actually pretty silly. Outside of practical advice about what to do with specific pieces of anatomy where maybe it would be nice to have some reference, the things people do is a pretty wide field. “Oh, someone to watch football with” ignores female football fans, et al. This ties in a lot with right wing men because they can’t necessarily have an emotional connection with someone not-male because that’s equivalent to messing around with someone’s property. And it also ties in with the social programming that created a stereotype for how men are supposed to relate to each other that’s just a writer trying to put a good story together without thinking of the social implications.

    Radicalization doesn’t work on people who are emotionally connected and comfortable. Part of why we are where we are is that there’s a whole class of people whose happiness has been precluded by the structure of their lives and the best people who can take advantage of this are fraudsters selling a false bill of goods. And I don’t even really feel sympathy for those people anymore because they are hurting people who I do very much care about and after a point it doesn’t matter if they are just too dumb to see it.

    But, I guess, to return to your initial point, the idea that if you find a person and get married to them that you have “solved” connection, that’s the road to unhappiness. Partially because marriage generally requires a commitment and effort to stay together as things happen and people change… but also because relying on one single person without other social connectivity is not a stable equilibrium.