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Joined 11 months ago
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Cake day: January 10th, 2024

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  • An unnamed FBI official was quoted in the same report as saying that phone users “would benefit from considering using a cellphone that automatically receives timely operating system updates, responsibly managed encryption, and phishing-resistant” multifactor authentication for email accounts, social media, and collaboration tools.

    (Emphasis added)

    I assume by “responsibly managed encryption” they mean something that still has a backdoor, even though backdoors seem to be a significant part of the problem?




  • I don’t think those of us on the Internet have enough info to truly jump in one way or another. The only area I would really be concerned about the age gap myself would be if the age gap is being used as a power imbalance to induce the younger one into dangerous behavior, like a sexual relationship, drugs, or taking advantage of them financially. Do you think anything like that is happening, or do you have the vibe that something like that could happen?

    If it’s just that you can’t imagine hanging out with someone so young, you might want to consider that this guy is at a different point in life than you, even if he’s about the same age as you. If you’re around 40 but already have an 18-year-old kid in college. That would mean you became a father in your early 20s. It probably means you were married, perhaps fresh out of college. You’ve lived life as a parent for a couple decades now, in fact you could be just a few years away from becoming a grandparent. In contrast, if this guy’s been hustling to make money from a young age and an impoverished background, and is only just now starting college, he’s probably had to put a lot of those life experiences on hold. I’m guessing he doesn’t have kids himself since it’s pretty challenging to pay for college and med school of you also are paying to raise children. He might not even be married. I got married relatively later, in my mid-30s. As I got older I hung out with a wider age range, older and younger, but primarily single people. As my friends got married I saw them pretty rarely, not because I didn’t want to hang out with married people but mostly because married people tend to do things with other married people or just themselves. Now that I’m married I try to reach out to my single friends, but frankly it’s hard as a married parent to fit them in.

    All that’s to say, just because you can’t imagine hanging out with someone that much younger than you, it doesn’t mean no one else can for completely innocent reasons. This guy might even see it as an almost mentor-like relationship, seeing this awkward kid who doesn’t get out much and helping him grow socially and find interests he enjoys. There are some areas where an older friend can be helpful in ways a parent simply can’t be.




  • Broadcasting and the Internet work in fundamentally different ways. With Broadcasting a transmitter sends radio waves out into the world (and beyond). It does not care how many receivers there are; there could be millions or there could be none—literally broadcasting into the void. There is a bit of a disconnect between the transmitter and the receiver. The transmitter doesn’t need to know anything about the receiver; its transmission is ultimately independent of the receiver. The receiver can tune in or not, much like a boat raising its sails to catch a passing wind. One receiver generally will not impact another, just as many boats can sail on the same wind.

    This is a really efficient way to get a lot of identical data to many people at once. Especially when we switched to digital television this became easily apparent. ATSC 1.0, the standard the US switched to about 15 years ago, was able to carry about 19.3 mbps of data over a normal TV channel. Because the system was designed in the 1990s this is MPEG-2 video (the same as used on DVDs), but it still works pretty well for 1080i or 720p. In fact as encoders improved we could usually fit two HD streams in there at 6-8 mbps that looked pretty decent and still have room for one or two more SD streams.

    At the same time we were able to pretty significantly reduce the power of the transmitters. I think the last station I worked at was something like 125 kilowatts out of the transmitter in the analog days but with the switch to digital we were at 28 or 40 kilowatts (it’s been about a decade since I left television engineering). In the analog days a huge percentage of the power usage was to keep an adequate picture at the very fringes of our broadcast license, which effectively meant an increasingly crummy picture was pushed well beyond our license area (this was factored into how the system was designed). With digital, you either get enough of a signal to produce the picture or you don’t; there’s not really an in-between (other than a picture that keeps freezing up). This means a weaker signal far away from the transmitter that would produce a marginal signal in the analog days can produce a picture that looks just as good as it does much closer to the transmitter with a stronger signal.

    All of this means that with just 19.3 mbps of data coming from the transmitter, potentially millions of people can see the same video in real-time. Satellite is basically the same thing except instead of an antenna on top of a tower that’s 3,000 feet tall and can cover an area maybe 150-200 miles in diameter, the antenna is placed 22,000 miles high and can cover an entire continent. Cable works pretty similar except instead of transmitting through the air, the coaxial cable carries the entire spectrum protected from outside interference. It pushes all the signals out of its “transmitter” (called the head end) down a cable and then splits that cable and amplifies the signal (and then splits and amplifies again and again and again) as needed until it reaches all the customers. There can be some complications with digital cable, but that’s the basic concept.

    In contrast, the Internet very much designed for one-to-one communication. This works fine for everyday communication, but if you have something where a lot of people want to see the same thing, each of those people have to make their own connection to the server. Even if the video stream is only 5 mbps, if 100 different people want that same stream at the same time, you now need 500 mbps of bandwidth to handle all those connections. You also need a computer that can handle all those connections simultaneously. If you have thousands, hundreds of thousands, millions of people trying to stream the same video at once you can see how much of a problem this becomes. It’s one thing if the video is already recorded, like a movie, you can just distribute it to many servers in advance. But if it’s a live event that’s ultimately coming from one source you have to set up multiple servers to connect to the source and then forward that, perhaps to other servers that will forward to other servers that forward to other servers until you have enough servers and bandwidth for the end customers to connect to. If you have a million people trying to watch your 5 mbps video one might think you need 5 million mbps of bandwidth, but actually you need even more to connect all your servers back to the source, plus many servers. This is a hugely intensive usage of resources. Streaming companies will try to setup in advance for the number of viewers they expect, but if they guess too low they’ll have to scramble to increase capacity. I suspect this is more challenging for companies like Netflix that rarely do live video as opposed to companies that do it every day like YouTube or Twitch.

    This isn’t even getting into complexities like TCP vs UDP for the protocol. At the end of the day, the way the Internet is designed each client needs to be sent their own personal stream of data. It just can’t compete with the efficiency of everybody sharing the same stream of data that comes from broadcasting. In that sense, for big, shared experiences, it’s kind of a shame that broadcasting is dwindling away. How many people do you know who still can get a TV signal from an antenna or cable/satellite?







  • I can relate to a lot of this! I’m 41 and just got diagnosed this year. It explains a lot of my life! I started medication this spring with Concerta and it helped but then I built up a tolerance to it and it stopped working. After spending months trying different meds I’m getting help with Focalin XR, but I’m terrified I’ll build up a tolerance to it as well so I’m trying to get as much done on a certification as I can while it’s working. Have meds helped you?




  • My go-to hot tea is Twining’s Irish Breakfast, stronger flavor than your typical English Breakfast. I prefer it with half-and-half and sugar, but can go with full cream or milk depending on what’s available.

    As a southerner, I also like sweet iced tea (“sweet tea”) but was shocked to find what they serve at Chipotle is my favorite. It turns out the tea they use (S&D iced tea blend) comes from a provider in Concord, NC (just outside Charlotte) and they used to sell it for people to brew at home as well, but the company was bought out and don’t anymore. After some trial and error I discovered the secret was to put about half as much sugar in as I normally would. The tea blend itself is excellent, though, much better than you find in grocery stores.