So I'm not a good programmer. At all. I know just enough to be dangerous, and am significantly slower than someone who would know what they're doing.

I've been using LLMs (no such thing as AI!) to help me write code for the past two weeks or so. I've been wanting to do these tasks for years but it would have taken me days or weeks to get to a solution to any one of them. I have revolutionized several rote tasks that I did on a regular basis and will save myself tons of time in the future. And I'm still working on more of them.

The real trick is that you have to verify everything that comes out of it. It's never right the first time, even if you do a good job of describing what you want. I've had to tweak the code directly in some cases where it just won't get it right. And I've seen it get stuck in loops where it just breaks worse and worse. Then it's necessary to grab the last working version of the code, start a new chat, and paste it in with the latest request.

You can't just say "write code to do x." You have to have some idea of what it's doing and be able to thoroughly test it and validate its results. Do that and it can be useful.

When did Puerto Rico leave the US?

The requests were coming from dozens of different IPs, all within certain ranges. That's why I blocked the whole ranges.

My own web server suddenly had the load spike to 100 from its normal 5 or so and was having database errors due to too many connections. It turned out to be an AI crawler that wasn't identifying itself as a crawler and was hitting multiple times per second. I had to block several IP ranges to stop it.

The annoying part is that I don't even mind sharing my site's content with the world, including such crawlers; it's non-profit and I'm fine with it. Just don't destroy it for everyone in the process!

Reporting that if policy X is implemented it could have impact Y, and someone who backs policy X was just elected, doesn't seem like bias to me. It sounds like reporting the facts, as people so often claim they actually want.

Is it simply the appearance of the name of a politician that makes it biased? If so, how do you ever report on politicians or the impacts of policies they support?

This post is not accurate.

No, DRM isn't even an adopted standard for AM and FM by the FCC in the US. The FCC adopted IBOC ("HD Radio") for digital AM and FM in the US. There is no wholesale transition in the works for this, either.

I don't know where you got this from. Your link mentions the US only once, and it's a specific reference to DRM for HF only, not AM or FM.

It doesn't actually do much from a spectrum perspective. GSM uses really narrow carriers that T-Mobile has wedged into the guard bands between the wider LTE and 5G-NR carriers. So shutting it down won't actually recover much spectrum, but rather, will eliminate maintenance on older equipment.

Oh, where I grew up, the lines were at 24.0 kbps 15 years ago. They've gotten worse since then.

Most of the dial-up options are not really workable now either because the phone lines have degraded to the point of near-uselessness, or the ISPs have just turned off the dial-up gear.

"Which is not an argument for whether it should be free."

Of course it's an argument. If you have a fixed budget, which every municipality does, does that fixed number of dollars go into more service, or into lower or free fares? Those dollars come from somewhere, and there's a limited supply of them. One can argue, philosophically, about whether or not fares should be free. But here in the real world, my tax dollar can only be spent once, and I'd rather have the practical argument about how to spend it. Even the linked article points out that surveys of actual low-income people who are the intended beneficiaries of free fares show they agree with more frequent and reliable service over free fares.

"No transportation does not."

I assume you mean "no transportation is guaranteed to get you where you want to go," which is a nonsense argument. (If I've misinterpreted, then I apologize, but the written sentence is hard to parse.) I'm guessing that your argument would be something like walking can't, eventually, be guaranteed to get me somewhere because I could be hit by lightning on the way. Or, with an intense irony, run over by a car.

The fact of the matter is that my car is far more reliable in getting me to places I want to be when I want to get to them. The train and the bus have both failed me before, repeatedly, and I use them basically to get to work or to special events, both places I don't really want to drive to for obvious reasons. Buses that don't show up and trains that get stuck in lengthy delays due to various issues of all kinds, both of these have happened more than once. I had to leave a concert right before the encore once to catch the last train of the evening, before midnight on a weekend, and I know that had I driven, I'd have been able to stay for the whole show and then meet the artist rather than risk being stranded. Trying to act like these things don't exist doesn't make them go away.

It doesn't matter what it costs if it's not frequent and reliable, a very common problem in the US. If it comes once per hour and doesn't always show up, nobody will take it regardless of cost because there's no guarantee it will get them where they want to go when they want to get there.

Honestly, money spent making the bus "free" would be better spent making it more frequent and reliable.

I mean, did anyone really expect them to come out and say "You know what? DoJ is right. We *are* a monopoly that needs to be broken up!"

Of course not. If they had, that would be news. This is not.

No, this isn't right, at least in the US.

In most cases, all carrier antennas are on the same rack. So if Verizon is on the top rack of the tower, then ALL of Verizon's gear is on that top rack, so the height is the same. There are certain towers, specifically the "stealth" ones made to look like ridiculously huge flag poles, where that's not the case, but the vast majority of cases do have the antennas at the same height. In many cases, the same antennas are being used for 3G and LTE, and sometimes also for 5G-NR.

Separately, the frequencies in use are very similar. Verizon uses 850 MHz CLR spectrum for CDMA/EVDO, and is using 700 MHz upper-C block spectrum for LTE (along with other higher bands). 700 and 850 are similar spectrum with similar reach.

Other carriers are similar. AT&T uses 850 MHz or 1900 MHz for UMTS, while using 700 MHz lower-B and C blocks for LTE (along with other higher bands). T-Mobile runs GSM on PCS (1900 MHz) and/or AWS (2100 MHz) along side LTE on 600 MHz spectrum and, in many places, 700 MHz lower-A block spectrum, which actually should have better range than PCS/AWS. In the area I'm most familiar with, US Cellular has CDMA and LTE on the same 850 MHz CLR spectrum on the same rack of equipment. Range should theoretically be the same, but it is not.

CDMA, which is 2G rather than 3G, did have excellent range. I could make a call on it, albeit somewhat broken up, at -104 dBm; LTE wouldn't even connect until that signal level came up another 15 dB. I can't speak to GSM or UMTS.

Better solution is to just remove the Firefox Snap and replace it with the Firefox .deb. Or, take it a step further like I did and tear out snapd completely and blacklist it.

"OpenSSH in Ubuntu 22.10 is configured by default to use systemd socket activation, meaning that sshd will not be started until an incoming connection request is received."

So I should expect that ssh will not work properly when I eventually get this functionality in 24.04? Is there nothing that systemd won't absorb and destroy?