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Cake day: March 23rd, 2025

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  • It’s a broadband bang that can be heard across the whole spectrum. It becomes audible when listening to radio broadcasts.

    Regular radio transmissions are comparatively narrow band, allowing lots of simultaneous transmissions in the same airspace, each on its own frequency. The spark gap transistor is very wide band, so it basically sounds as if you are sending a bang sound across all radio frequencies at the same time.

    It wouldn’t destroy radio equipment, but the radio transmissions. It’s basically as if you’d use a radio jammer as a morse code transmitter.


  • Pretty much the first type of commercially viable radio transmitter was the spark-gap transmitter (“Knallfunkensender” in German). It worked by charging up some capacitors to up to 100kV and then letting them spark. This spark sent a massive banging noise on the whole radio spectrum, which could then be turned into an audible noise using a very simple receiver. That was then used to send morse codes (or similar encodings).

    They went into service around 1900, and by 1920 it was illegal to use these because they would disrupt any and all other radio transmissions in the area with a massive loud bang.


  • This.

    There are often actual limits to what can be done, and there are practical limits. Especially in the early days of a technology it’s really hard to understand which limits are actual limits, practical limits or only short-term limits.

    For example, in the 1800s, people thought that going faster than 30km/h would pose permanent health risks and wouldn’t be practical at all. We now know that 30km/h isn’t fast at all, but we do know that 1300km/h is pretty much the hard speed limit for land travel and that 200-300km/h is the practical limit for land travel (above that it becomes so power-inefficient and so dangerous that there’s hardly a point).

    So when looking at the technology in an early state, it’s really hard to know what kind of limit you have hit.











  • Terrible idea for a few reasons.

    • The example in the OP does not need anything but the country. GPS coordinates are less efficient than ISO codes
    • GPS coordinates don’t map 1:1 to countries or even street addresses. There are infinite different coordinates for each address, and it’s very non-trivial to match one to another. Comparing whether two records with country codes are in the same country is trivial. Doing the same with two GPS coordinates is very difficult.
    • GPS coordinates might be more exact than accurate. This is a surprisingly common issue: you start out only needing a country, so you put some arvitrary GPS position (e.g. the center of the country) into the GPS coordinates. Later a new requirement arises that means you now need street addresses. Now all old entries point so some random house in the middle of the country, and there’s no easy way to differentiate these false locations from real ones.

    I guess you meant that as a joke, but people are really doing this and it leads to actual problems.

    I saw a news report a while ago about something like that being done in a database for people with outstanding debt. If the address of the debtor wasn’t known, they just put “US” in the form, and the program automatically entered the centre of the US as the coordinates.

    Sucks for the family that lives there because they constantly get threatening mail and even house visits from angry lenders who want their money back. People even vandalized their house and car because they believed that their debtors lived in that house.


  • Zionism is the one thing where anti-semites and Jews (at least zionist Jews) agree.

    Zionist Jews want it because it gives them their own country where they are not persecuted.

    Anti-semites want it, because it means that the Jews are not in their country.

    That’s why even the literal Nazis supported zionism. Every Jew in Israel was one less Jew in Germany.

    You get the same thing still today with the most right-wing politicians supporting Zionism/Israel. On the one hand because it’s a way to keep Jews far away and on the other hand because it can be used as a “I’m supporting Israel, so surely I can’t be a Nazi. Anyway, let’s go shoot some Muslims.”-kind of excuse.


  • Tbh, immigration isn’t the worst “solution”.

    We do have an overpopulation problem. Well, an overconsumption times overpopulation problem, really.

    We could fix that by either consuming less (which we apparently, as a species, really don’t want) or by having fewer people (which we apparently really want).

    So, in the end, reducing population isn’t a real problem. Even if the population shrinks by 50% each generation (~25 years, for the sake of the argument), there will still be 250mio people left even after 5 generations. The trend should probably be reversed sometime then, but until then it’s really not an issue on the species survival aspect and it would actually be really good for the planet and our long-term survival.

    But until then we have mainly one problem: our economic system is based on infinite growth, which can’t work. So again there are two main solutions: either we bring in people from other countries, who benefit from a higher standard of living here while supporting our economic system, or we get rid of the real parasites and freeloaders in our societies: the ultra rich. And again, for some reason we really don’t want to get rid of the rich.