Notices by Michael K Johnson (mcdanlj@social.makerforums.info)

Today I celebrated #WorldAmateurRadioDay by going to Raven Rock State Park, US-2751, and playing radio with my new-to-me KX3. Five contacts doesn't count as a successful activation by #POTA rules, but it counts as a success for me anyway. Making any CW contacts is a success for me at this point!

And I also lived the spirit of the day by making fewer QSOs than I might otherwise have done, due to spending quite some time chatting with an initially quite skeptical park ranger about what I was up to. He had served in the aftermath of Hurricane Helene and dealt with loss of communication infrastructure, so the concept of wanting to be able to help in an emergency resonated with him, and I shared how POTA is getting me outside instead of hanging around indoors; also aligned with his interests.

I watched his face change from a "I'm maybe going to have to ask you to leave" face to friendly and welcoming as we talked.

So that was the more important success for this park activation... 😁

@kees @securepaul @monsieuricon @jmorris I have one server where I've done something that breaks certbot, I don't know what, and have never investigated. I just manually renew when I get the email. Lazy me.

I guess I have some debugging in my future.

@corbet @LWN I'm wondering if a link that a human wouldn't click on but an AI wouldn't know any better than to follow could be used in nginx configuration to serve AI robots differently from humans, in a configuration that excluded search crawlers from that configuration. What such a link would look like would be different on different sites. That would require thought from every site, but also that would create diversity which would make it harder to guard against on the scraper side, so possibly could be more effective.

I might be an outlier here for my feelings on whether training genai such as LLMs from publicly-posted information is OK. It felt weird decades ago when I was asked for permission to put content I posted to usenet onto a CD (why would I care whether the bits were carried to the final reader on a phone line someone paid for or a CD someone paid for?) so it's not inconsistent in my view that I would personally feel that it's OK to use what I post publicly to train genai. (I respect that others feel differently here.)

That said, I'm beyond livid at being the target of a DDoS, and other AI engines might end up being collateral damage as I try to protect my site for use by real people.

Waiting for the @hackaday article on DIY iron lungs to come out...

@cstross @hittitezombie @revk @neil In 1991, I happily tended the VAX in the chilled server room, in part because I was able to use the blisteringly-fast 9600 bps console terminal instead of the 2400 bps terminals elsewhere that I had to use the rest of the time. Got a lot done, both ways!

(They conserved money in the form of wire and VAX ports, by 4:1 multiplexing four 2400 bps RS-232 VT-102s onto a single 9600 bps RS-422 with custom hardware, and demuxed with modified drivers on the VAX; thus the 2400 bps limitation when not at the console terminal.)

@jmorris Hold it up on the wall when you want to drill a hole, and use it as a visual aid to drill straight.

Oh, I'm sorry, you said wrong answers only... 🤪

@mhoye One of today's lucky ten thousand! 🎉

I learned this running cross country in high school, because at least at that time and place, HS men's courses were 3 kilometers or 5 miles, and HS women's courses were 2 kilometers or 3 miles, which was still sufficiently close to notice the start of that series. 😀

@xarvos @kaia Well, the first paragraph is from immediately before "[do]lorem ipsum" in Cicero's De finibus dolorum et malorum from which lorem ipsum was borrowed, and the second is a later sentence from which some of the garbage text of lorem ipsum was borrowed. So you could say it's not exactly lorem ipsum. 😀 But despite the brilliant loose translation here provided, I do suspect that in practice it was intended as placeholder text.

https://www.vearsa.com/lorem-ipsum-a-history-3/

Nothing says "this is a reputable company to do business with" like several paragraphs of lorem ipsum on the front page. /s

@jmorris I've done very little with copper, I just know it has a reputation for being grabby and gummy. Copper and brass generally have a tendency for tools to dig in. Some people regrind drill bits to reduce relief as a result. What you did clearly worked. 🎉

Flycutter geometry is essentially the same as single-point lathe tool geometry. There's an epic thread on Hobby-Machinist that has a lot of information on that geometry. I'm not suggesting you go read 1871 posts, but if at some point you decide you do want to learn more about single point tool geometry, you can ignore the chatter. Somewhere in that thread is buried a document someone did to summarize the thread at that point in time. No idea where though; I didn't bookmark it.

I can attest to the addiction. Awesome that you have a space at work for this!

@jmorris Starting out with copper — diving into the deep end, eh?

I was looking at my parametric einstein / spectre tiles and noticed that @cults3d appears to have defaulted to a no-ai license on everything, since I don't recall setting it and I see it there.

I think that makes sense as a default global setting.

I'm also now faced with a conundrum: I licensed that work CC0 inasmuch as copyright even could apply to it, which isn't clear to me. To me, CC0 implies not restricting AI training.

I think that calling LLMs generalized AIs is bogus, and as much hype as OpenAI has built on the pretense, when things went bad they were happy to say "well ackshually it's just random probabilities," I've also known for a long time that using statistics to find hidden patterns is pretty much what the entire field of statistics is for, and ML and LLMs are fundamentally interesting and sometimes unreasonably effective applications of statistics.

So I think I really should not try to restrict training any form of statistical inference on CC0-licensed content, and I'm not convinced that I want to opt out for other works that I have licensed under what I intended to be open source terms.

The open source definition has famously excluded restrictions on field of use. Even as an LLM-as-generalized-AI utter sceptic, I feel like banning LLM training on work that I've released as open source would be inconsistent with my open source values.

@dalias @cults3d The argument being made is one of fair use, and I'm not opining on whether that argument will pass legal muster, and frankly I hear different opinions from different lawyers so I'm just not going to play a lawyer on the internet.

I'm bringing in field of use not as a license consideration but as a social construct, which was why I used language of "values" and "I want" here.

I'm posting about how I feel about this use and not making a statement about what is legally permissible. I recognize that you are making an assertion about legality. I am not trying to tell you that you are wrong. I am not convinced that there is wide consensus on this matter, though. I do have concerns about unintended side effects of saying this is not fair use. In any case it's not what I was trying to talk about at all. I was only talking through my personal feelings about my own work.

When people learn that I have a machine shop in my basement, they naturally ask why. I tend to freeze up a bit, then mumble about making tools with tools. The lathe is to make tools for the mill, the mill is to make tools for the 3d printer, the 3d printer is to make tools for the lathe, etc.

I tend to forget the practical things I do.

This morning, my wife brought me the springform pan. Two of the rivets had blown out, so the clasp no longer worked, and it was part of our plans for cooking our thanksgiving meal. "Can you fix this in an hour?" It's not like we could easily buy a new one on thanksgiving morning, and it sucks to throw things away that are otherwise good because something trivial and repairable has broken.

I drilled out the blown-out rivets, confirming that they were aluminum, worked out the sizes with a few test cuts, used the lathe to make some aluminum rivets that were like the rivets it came with, bucked them with my vise while setting the with my prick punch, flattened them down with a few more hammer touches, and we were back in business.

Because we were in a hurry, I didn't crown the rivet heads, so you can tell the difference between the two remaining original rivets and the new ones. If I'd had more time, I could have made them nearly indistinguishable.

#DIY #repair #machining #3DPrinting

Last night I was using a die to cut threads into a 3mm brass rod. I was doing this dry, and snapped off a section entirely inside the die. At first, I couldn't figure out how to remove it, but then I realized I could use a jeweler's saw. I sawed in from one hole, slowly turning to exit at another hole, then went back and sawed through the remaining hole to end up with three pieces, at which point the three pieces just dropped out and I had a working die again. (Now with some tap magic to avoid a repeat performance. 😬)

But also this die is a HF piece of junk and it's time for me to up my game. Time to go shopping for higher-quality metric and SAE die sets...☺

#machining

The robots have won.

One inadvertent double-click on step 10 and it was start over at 1.

I've had this Expedia account for many, many years.

I was shown this piece of junk "puzzle" because of a bug in their map view that was showing and then hiding properties.

I don't have time for this.

@fedora I've been reflecting today on a relatively short memo I wrote a bit over 20 years ago, describing why it was essential to Red Hat's long term success to build a community-driven Linux distribution, and what its essential characteristics would have to be, months before Warren so kindly agreed to let us use the #Fedora name he had used for his repository for extra packages for Red Hat Linux.

I've written many, many more words in my life, but probably none that have changed more lives.

I believe to this day that Red Hat Enterprise Linux without Fedora would have been a niche product.

@jmorris Glad you got it working!

Tap guides are a reasonable form of vertical reference; mill not required. That's why I mentioned what I do for tapping v-slot. They keep the taps straight enough that I've (touch wood) had 100% success power tapping with a drill and a spiral flute tap.

Also, not trying to talk you out of form taps. I want to go in the opposite direction and start using form taps where appropriate.☺

@jmorris Oh, #4-40 is only .155mm smaller diameter than M3, so maybe my good experience with M3 carries over...

I do almost always use a tap follower or some other effective guide. I think the spiral flute taps are not at all forgiving of misalignment. But I'm usually doing it on mill or lathe where I have a good normal reference.

I did also make 3D printed jigs for tapping openbuilds v-slot with M5, where I can't typically use either mill or lathe to get that normal reference.

@jmorris I guess maybe less likely to break from chip packing? They readily evacuate a long string chip out the top. The cheapest ones are still cheap of course. I use tap magic most of the time for tapping, too.

I'm trying to remember the smallest I've done. I own an M2 spiral flute tap and it's not broken, but I do so little that's smaller than M3. And the M2 spiral flute tap I own isn't the highest quality.

But yeah, spiral tip should be stronger than spiral flute, and eject the chip ahead of it as long as you aren't tapping a blind hole. (I do plenty of blind taps which is part of why spiral flute taps are my go-to one-and-done.)