tomo,

Looking from here, both items are "unavailable", but I can believe the unbelievable prices you listed. I did like one of the 5-star reviews for the USB cable saying it brought the sound quality up to vinyl standard. That could be the pretentious "warmth" for the audiophile, but to me it evokes scratchy and rumbly.

As for that tweet, doesn't wind and solar mean electriciity is free; so what's the problem?

A comment I posted at Jo Nova's yesterday led down a rabbit hole. Browsed around the links from wazz and Mary Vecchio (e.g. Marilyn's story). I suppose this is how dystopias happen in real life. You live as usual, thinking all is as it has always been, blissfully unaware of the bleak tide engulfing less fortunate people. And then you find it lapping at your own feet.

That tale of Dad's was from the first half of the 1980s and it seems the decline continued a long way.

tomo,

What little I know about NMEA is through a friend who's spent up big on his boat and has lately been installing a new radar, autopilot, depth sensor and who knows what else. It's easy to see the tension between openly interchangeable components and the "close integration" you get with the walled garden as you put it. I've seen it a few times in the software world: everybody likes standards right up until they're dominant in the marketplace.

Your IP address problems sound like they might be sortable by interposing a suitably configured router doing IP masquerade, which, as you say, is a PITA, but at least it shouldn't cost much.

In my dabblings with electronics, connectors have surprised me often enough that they no longer surprise me. Expensive components, really expensive crimpers, special cabling requirements. Absurd for something like CAN bus, which would work ok down a power cord.

Listened to that podcast again at the weekend. One point I hadn't twigged earlier was that the hassles car owners go through these days when one of the ECUs dies — now you've paid for your new computer, it's car specific; we need to get a dealer to program its ID so the rest of the car will recognise it — are not about security/anti-theft at all. They just serve the dealer lock-in.

Also *very much* approved of what he said about software abstraction. What the computer scientists get up to is all very nice, but there's a big difference in what is conceptually elegant to a human mind and what works well at the bits and bytes level. So good to hear someone else who doesn't want to just throw hardware at a problem.

John Campbell on the WHO's "health certification" plans. I'm reasonably hopeful than any plans for world domination will fail. Things clump, then fall apart again. There's a limit to "fusion" and "fission" takes over.

Interview with Joanne Nova. Video is positioned as she's introduced, though the stuff before it is good too, covering why housing is so unaffordable in Australia and another item warning that new laws targeting annoying Extinction Rebellion protests may be levelled at less deserving targets. Pretty clear that's the plan considering both sides of politics like the new laws.

Meant to include this article on lockdown lessons (seen in a comment at Jo Nova's). Nothing much new there, though I hadn't considered the 'shallowness of the faith communities". It fails to push my favourite point (probably belongs as an adjunct to their point about "sadism of the ruling class"), that all these measures were taken against the well. It was always mad: rather than keep the sick away from the well, which can be difficult, it was keep the well away from everybody, which is impossible. It could never have worked.

tomo,

Some of the boat gadgets seem quite interesting, but the prices indicate a pretty hefty "boat-owner's premium". Like you say,, it would be good to hear more from that guest.

As it happens, I bought a Pi Pico last year, mostly out of interest in its I/O coprocessor. Not a big expense of course, but rather pointless on the basis of already having plenty of "just out of interest" tasks on the go. Haven't got any further with it than reading enough of the documentation to convince myself that I could spend the next 5 years getting properly up to speed with everything it can do. Just ridiculous how much capability you can get for a few dollars!

Perhaps the motor industry has always been a bit slip-shod, but I'm very unimpressed with various "driving aids" that cars are coming with. My experience with a Subaru and tales I've heard about a BMW suggest that adaptive cruise control can easily target wrong vehicles and then unexpectedly apply the brakes *hard*. Not a good thing if there's someone behind. But people do love their adaptive cruise control... Russian roulette and ergodicity again.

Poor quality code is at least an addressable problem, but a lot of the hard problems for full autonomy are getting the neural net wand waved over them, where the code is relatively simple and reliable, but so much hnges on how it has been trained. And even once it has correctly identified that that's a child in a dinosaur outfit following his mother pushing a pram, the programme has to assign values to each actor, so that if, say, the brakes have failed and it needs to take evasive action to avoid the traffic stopped ahead, it can evaluate a path of lowest "cost". Elements of a chess-playing computer, but not the sort of stakes I'd like my software to be playing for.

tomo,

I've always liked the notion of planning by entrail; it's not pretentious on the galactic scale, like astrology, nor a simple random thing like rolling dice. Seems ideal for tricky domains like climate science and epidemiology. Couldn't be much worse than their silly models.

As for Pangloss, we do have our share of *classical* Panglosses who see everything going swimmingly, but we also have the cynical variant, who tells us that all is for the best in the best of all possible worlds, while not believing a word of it himself. There are also negative variants on the Pangloss theme.

Mind you, the "all possible worlds" clause makes any such statement trivially true, there being just one possible world for us to occupy.

Thanks for the pointer to Chevaline. Hadn't heard about it and it was an entertaining tale. I agree that secret projects are great places for hiding waste, but there's a bit of dissonance in the case of a "deterrent" project. Surely a key point of having a deterrent is that the enemy knows about it, and any secrecy suggests that your deterrent is not very good. It's a bit like the cryptography derision for "security through obscurity" though, back to your point, job security through obscurity can work quite well.

Depending on how geeky you are about cars, a recent Amp Hour podcast was an interview with a CAN bus boffin. I was interested because I've done a little bit of CAN programming. The interview stemmed from an investigation by someone whose car was stolen. The thieves got on the CAN bus via the headlight, then spoofed the "remote key accepted" message which unlocked the doors and set the engine up for starting. Etc.

Not too disturbing to me. On top of old-school keys and locks, my car has another pretty good theft deterrent: that few would want to steal it anyway.

I knew that CAN was mainly a hardware standard and that Toyota's messages were structured very differently from BMW's, etc., but I was interested to hear that this *doesn't* apply to trucks. Because coachbuilders may choose engine, transmission, final drive, brakes, etc, from a "menu", it's in all those manufacturers' interests to agree on standard formats. I gather the same goes for boats (NMEA is just a flavour of CAN). Anyhow, all interesting in a geeky way.

One other point touched on was self-driving cars. This has been a point of contention between the podcast hosts: Chris thinks sooner, Dave says not for 20 years or more (I'm heavily in the "or more" camp). The guest went with the "20 or more", and mentioned a tweet he had seen where a sceptic posted a photo of a child at Halloween in a dinosaur outfit and asking "Has your autonomous vehicle been trained for this?"