2.4 GHz is unreliable for me these days due to interference from bluetooth headphones and hearing aids that other people are using. The issues tend to only show up during extended periods of video streaming, and having looked at a bunch of traffic captures over the holidays, it seems to be limited to certain streaming services sending very large bursts of traffic at extremely high rates (likely from servers with 100+ Gbps interfaces using TSO to reduce CPU usage). That makes me think that the regularly paced bluetooth interference from real time audio streams limits the maximum viable burst size of a 2.4 GHz wifi radio.
Yes, this happened a bunch more over the Christmas holiday when we had an extra 3 or 4 younger family members all listening to music and videos over their bluetooth ear buds and headphones, which made it much easier to track down as it was quite a rare intermittent failure with only a single bluetooth device being active.
Security for maps is basically impossible. Maps tend to have to be widely shared within government and engineering, and if you know what you're looking for, it's remarkably straightforward to find ways to access layers you would normally have to pay for. It's a consequence of the need to share data widely for a variety of purposes -- everything from zoning debates within a local county to maps for broadband funding across an entire country create a public need to share mapping information. Keys don't get revoked once projects end as that would result in all the previously published links becoming stale, which makes life harder for everyone doing research and planning new projects.
Moreover, university students in programs like architecture are given access to many map layers as part of the school's agreements with the organizations publishing the data. Without that access, students wouldn't be able to pick up the skills needed to do the work they will eventually be hired for. And if students can get data, then it's pretty much public.
Privacy is becoming (or already is) nearly impossible in the 21st century.
I basically asked my math and physics teachers in high school what the Fourier transform was, but none of them knew how to answer my questions (which were about digital signal processing -- modems were important things to us back in the early '90s). If I had to do it over again, I would have audited the local university's electrical engineering and math courses in evenings. The first time MIT ran 6002x online back in 2012, the course finally answered a lot of those questions when touching upon filters and bandwidth.
Yeah I wish I had known about or had access to that stuff when I was a kid. To really learn and internalize ideas like negative frequency early would have been quite fun.
What measures are being taken to ensure that this model isn't used to lower the cost of fraudsters committing grandparent scams by mimicking the voices of grandchildren?
None, obviously, and it's barking up the wrong tree. The genie is already out of the bottle as there are zillions of similar free services and software that do the same thing, and there's no quick-fix panacea technological solutions to social and legal problems. Legislation in every locality need to create extremely harsh penalties for impersonating other people, and elders need to be educated to ask questions of their family members that only the real people would know the answers to.
Ah yes, the "things are bad; we shouldn't try to fix them" argument. That isn't a philosophy which I subscribe to. People should very much consider the ethical implications of releasing software they created to the general public.
The old manual tools were extremely slow. Modern fibre splicers mean that a dozen fibres can be spliced in maybe a bit more half an hour, although cable prep cam take a significant amount of time depending on the cable type, number of cables and splice closure. Even more if you're using a ribbon splicer that fuses 12 fibres per burn.
Cable still has one thing going for it: it tends to be cheaper for sports. Watching hockey games online requires subscriptions to 3 different streaming services just to follow a single local team, which is ridiculous.
I would be fine if data centers paid the full cost of their existence, but that isn't what happens in our world.
Instead the cost of pollution is externalised and placed on the backs of humanity's children. That includes the pollution created by those datacentres running off fossil fuel generators because it was cheaper to use gas in the short term than to invest in solar capacity and storage that pays back over the long term. The pollution from building semiconductors in servers and GPUs that will likely have less than a 10 year lifespan in an AI data center as newer generations have lower operating cost. The cost of water being used for evaporative cooling being pulled from aquifers at a rate that is unsustainable because it's cheaper than deploying more expensive heat pumps in a desert climate.... and the pollution of the information on the internet from AI slop.
The short term gains from AI have a real world cost that most of us in the tech industry are isolated from. It is far from clear how to make this sustainable. The sums of money being thrown at AI will change the world forever.
Given that data centers use less energy than the alternative human labor they replace, they actually improve pollution. Replacing those GPUs with more efficient models also improves pollution because those replacements use less electricity for the same workload than the units they replaced.
This is such a wild take. You're 100% correct that AI-generated art consumes less resources that humans making art and having to, you know, eat food and stuff.
Obviously, the optimal solution is to eliminate all humans and have data centers do everything.
I just had an incident like that a month and a half ago. Customer reported repeated internet outages in the morning. Lots of back and forth by phone and email, and the only conclusion I could come up with is that the ONU or router was flaky and needed to be replaced.
Nope. Ended up going on site one day. It turns out that the power bar everything was plugged into was sitting on the floor at the back of the desk in the customer's office. When they sat down first thing in the morning, they would often jostle one of the power supplies just enough to cause a restart. Moved the power bar over 2 feet to the left where feet couldn't reach it, and the problem was solved.
LibreOffice is good enough for many use cases. A competing product doesn't have to be a 100% match feature for feature to be Good Enough for most users.
Yes, this happened a bunch more over the Christmas holiday when we had an extra 3 or 4 younger family members all listening to music and videos over their bluetooth ear buds and headphones, which made it much easier to track down as it was quite a rare intermittent failure with only a single bluetooth device being active.
reply