> "I found them!" you might say to yourself. But who are you telling?
I don't, personally, have this internal monologue. My interior world is a roiling foam of images, feelings and intuitions, memories and imagined possibilities that slosh around solid concepts and facts like boulders in the surf. I have no trouble thinking of words when I need to but I must first conjure up an audience or sit down to journal.
Before these kinds of interpretive posts, I thought the idea of talking to one's self was just a metaphor.
I would expect LLMs to develop some similar non-verbal structure deep within their black boxes, but I know from my own experience that there's more to cogitation than language.
As Morse speeds up, you stop relying on individual dots and dashes and begin recognizing common combinations of letters. Faster still and you are mainly hearing word stems and suffixes.
The faster the information comes at you, the less important any particular bit is, because you have more context with which to autocorrect.
Amateur radio is a series of narrow regulatory carve-outs of the radio spectrum for the public good, somewhat like a national park. It has existed since the discovery of radio itself. RF is now a mature formal engineering discipline, but the underlying knowledge and practice has also been passed down through amateur channels for generations in an almost guild-like fashion. It is now one of the very few sanctioned ways in which a person interested in radio may put their own electrical components together and see how it works on a workbench.
In the US there are two major distinctions between licenses. The basic Technician class license mainly lets you access VHF and up - these radio waves propagate based on line of sight. The general focus in this area of the spectrum comes from the sheer utility of radio.
Then, the General and Extra class licenses let you operate more fully on shortwave. These are lower frequencies that interact with the ionosphere, giving them the curious property of reaching around the planet. (Extra opens up a little more spectrum, and is recognized by some international treaties allowing you to operate while abroad).
The basic starter equipment for a technician is a handheld or mobile radio. The line-of-sight limitation on VHF is overcome by the use of repeaters. A no-stakes way to sample the activity in your vicinity is to get an RTL-SDR dongle and tune in to the 2 meter and 70 cm amateur bands.
The classic starter kit for a general is an HF radio and homemade dipole. The radio will realistically cost a couple hundred dollars, but the antenna can be just scrap wire and modest coax cable. The size of the antenna is determined by the wavelength at which it operates. The two most common beginner bands are 20M and 40M. A dipole for those wavelengths is about 33' and 66' of wire respectively, but the wire does not have to run in a straight line. You can use a WebSDR to peek in on the activity for free.
My personal interest in all of this is SOTA -- Summits On The Air. It is a radio sport that involves taking portable shortwave transmitters up to mountain peaks. It is equal parts exploration, since many of the peaks in my region lack even trail access; and invention, as the physical realities of mountain climbing necessitate radios and antennas made for the purpose. The actual radio exchange from the peak is simple - who is calling, how well they can hear you, and where they are located, and maybe a pleasantry or two. There is a great deal of camaraderie from the other operators, and you never know whether your next contact will come from San Francisco or coastal France.
Technical point, you generally would not be able to recover an AM broadcast signal from a cellular baseband. You might be able to get it from a direct sampling receiver (some RTL-SDRs can do this), but it implies additional band filters and of course an antenna.
I empathize especially with the author's account of "covid nose." For me, Coca Cola now tastes like patchouli. When I say that out loud, it's easier for others to believe I'm simply a hypochondriac, or that I've forgotten what Coke tastes like, or possibly it's made differently where I'm from. As far as I can tell, it's nerve damage. How could I forget the taste of summer vacation?
Back when smell loss was a common side effect of Covid, the NYT ran a series of articles on retraining one's sense of smell, by e.g. smelling all the jars on the spice rack. I found those articles patronizing. I can instantly recall what both Ceylon and Korintje cinnamon are "supposed" to smell like, but those memories are now mismatched with my olfactory system. All I can do is decide whether to accept the new sense, or just avoid the taste altogether.
We don't discuss smell like we discuss our other senses. Perhaps it's due to the difficulty of producing smell on demand, unlike within the visual or auditory domains. Despite being one of our most basic senses, smell seems to lie behind an inherent veil of subjectivity. My experience with continuous olfactory "hallucination" made me second guess that.
> All I can do is decide whether to accept the new sense, or just avoid the taste altogether.
I've accepted that my sense of smell will never fully recover (been about 1.5 years now). It's not as bad as when I first got it, where things smelled really weird and chemically/burnt, some things are closer to what they used to be, but overall my sense of smell is greatly muted from what it used to be. Kinda sad since I used to think I had a pretty "refined" palate :)
I believe you're thinking of the ISM bands - problematic chunks of the spectrum that are given over to industrial, scientific and medical technologies that emit RF by design. The FCC allows a bit of part 15 free-market anarchy on these bands so long as manufacturers limit power and print a familiar disclaimer on the device. By contrast, the amateur radio service does require a license.
This is actually a chart that shows who is legally protected from interference. A license holder of a service listed in a colored bar has the right to complain if there is another emission on their spectrum. (There are also "primary" and "secondary" users for some ranges, the latter expected to yield to the former). According to that chart, a radiolocation service is the primary user. Amateurs can then work around them (1.5KW earth-moon-earth wifi anyone?) and finally wifi is allowed to exist with all the other random gadgets.
Yes, WiFi is given nearly the lowest priority for a small slice of the spectrum that is full of garbage from other users. No wonder it's so good at beamforming, spread spectrum use, channel hopping, and so on.
I don't, personally, have this internal monologue. My interior world is a roiling foam of images, feelings and intuitions, memories and imagined possibilities that slosh around solid concepts and facts like boulders in the surf. I have no trouble thinking of words when I need to but I must first conjure up an audience or sit down to journal.
Before these kinds of interpretive posts, I thought the idea of talking to one's self was just a metaphor.
I would expect LLMs to develop some similar non-verbal structure deep within their black boxes, but I know from my own experience that there's more to cogitation than language.
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