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More than 20 years ago or so I made a small LED display that used a series of LM567 (frequency detection ICs) and LM3914 (bar chart drivers) to make a simple histogram for music.

It was fiddly, and probably too inaccurate for a modern audience but I can't claim it was diabolically hard. Tuning was a faff but we were more willing to sit and tweak resistor and capacitor values then.


I wish there was more info about how they're made but I suppose part of the demo scene has always been secretive and reverse engineer it if you want to know.

The first one said made with Godot and blender so is it using premade assets? (Which I thought was not allowed)

Edit: #22 Heart of Glass says 144kB of WebGL + audio. I assume this means the audio is separate.


This 64kb intro has speech synthesis to generate the voice of the song.

https://www.pouet.net/prod.php?which=9424

More info: https://www.flipcode.com/archives/08-04-2003.shtml


My pixel 7 battery was dreadful, and despite it being promised to come with 3 months of YouTube premium and Music I didn't successfully redeem either.

I admit once it didn't work I didn't reach out to support but the entire experience was shit sandwich after shit sandwich.


I had to disable 5G on my pixel 8 to get decent battery life

Agreed, I use Z.ai and the usage is fantastic the only temper that recommendation that it's often unreliable. Perhaps a few times per week it's unresponsive. Maybe more often it seems to become flakey.

It's very variable though recently I'm noticing it's more reliable but there was a patch where it was nearly unusable some days.

I guess I won't complain for the price and YMMV.


Agreed. They had a rough patch around the 4.7 to 5 upgrade. New architecture required hardware migration. The 5 to 5.1 upgrade was much smoother (same architecture new weights). As you say, little rough around edges, but still great value. Trick I learned is that it's max 2 parallel requests per user. You can put a billion tokens a month through it, but need to manage your parallelism.

The whole premise is bad. If the supervisor can do it in 2 months, then they can do it in 2 weeks with AI.

Didn't PhD projects used to be about advancing the state of art?

Maybe we'll get back to that.


Then they should remove the law this weekend. Apparently it is bureaucracy without purpose after all?

> Apparently it is bureaucracy without purpose after all?

No it's not without purpose at all. The purpose is to know who could be drafted in a timely manner should the need arise. There's currently 2 major wars - sorry "special military operations" - happening, one of which in Europe.

A certain government involved in one of these simultaneously calls for allies to assist while at the same time openly questioning half a century of military alliances. So maybe this helps to understand why regulations like this make sense - even for people who never lived through a time when there was mandatory military service and take their own security for granted.


It has a purpose: to be ready when/if needed.

Shockingly sexist policy.

And as per usual because its harmful to men no one cares.


The constitution made it impossible to make a less sexist law, because it says that women cannot be forced to military service. It is an old document, and it is based on old role models. Modernizing the constitution would require 2/3 majority, and the government was already struggling with making a law at all.

This is an explanation, not a justification.


> The constitution made it impossible to make a less sexist law

with the right level of public exposure citizens would surely have been able to put enough pressure on the government to make this happen. But instead zelensky kept repeating the talking points that we should not be concerned about the war because the risk had not changed since 2014. Near-zero effort was made to evacuate ukrainians living near the russian border or those who would be in the way of russian troops. The intelligence had been there for at least six months before the war began

> and the government was already struggling with making a law at all

what do you mean?


In a scenario where you are losing a significant part of the population to war, it's better that it be men.

Only if you ignore free will. Feels unlikely that women will suddenly abandon monogamy and forced procreation à la the draft is probably very unpopular especially given that women would be a majority. Not that they’re wrong to disagree, but there are more conditions here than the biology of procreation.

The modern answer would be immigration, and that’s gender-agnostic.


in a scenario where your country is on the verge of war, where will those women procreate? I imagine that those who can will leave the country ASAP

why?

Because a thousand women don't need a thousand men to make the next generation.

that argument is uninformed, check the birth rate in ukraine

also check who are these refugees abroad: mostly women and children. How many will return? No one knows. Also what’s the incentive for women to return knowing there are far less options to marry?

who will be working hard jobs where men are prevalent?

what about the current generation? Who will be rebuilding the country from ruins? I’ve never seen women working in construction in ukraine

also this is cynical, your position assumes it’s either men or women, not sharing the military service duty

go learn the history and then come here to comment on the matter


> that argument is uninformed, check the birth rate in ukraine

This has long been the argument for a male-only draft.

One woman can make 1-2 babies every 9 months on average. It is difficult and expensive to speed that up; you can implant quadruplets and induce labor at six months, but that introduces all sorts of other problems. Sperm is much easier to obtain.

> who will be working hard jobs where men are prevalent?

Women, if too many men die in the war.

> I’ve never seen women working in construction in ukraine

This was also the case for the US in the 1940s. Women entered the workforce in large numbers for the first time. Plenty of predecent for this sort of shift.

> go learn the history and then come here to comment on the matter

As you can see from the above, this is perhaps advice you should follow first before yelling at others.


> This has long been the argument for a male-only draft. One woman can make 1-2 babies every 9 months on average. It is difficult and expensive to speed that up; you can implant quadruplets and induce labor at six months, but that introduces all sorts of other problems. Sperm is much easier to obtain.

this argument is detached from ukrainian realities. Can ≠ will. Also have you checked the birth rate? Do you expect it to grow in a post-war context?

> Women, if too many men die in the war

so who will then raise these 1-2 babies every 9 months on average? If women need to replace men in the workforce, first they need to go through education and training. Along with having children, it’s incredibly hard to accomplish

> Women entered the workforce in large numbers for the first time. Plenty of precedent for this sort of shift

in the same sentence you say ‘for the first time’ and then ‘Plenty of precedent’. You either have no idea what ‘plenty’ means or you contradict yourself

the states weren’t ruined like europe was. The large numbers you are talking about are only large compared to normal historical numbers and female population percentage

also you completely ignore the cultural context, ukraine is not the states. The story of your country, which seems the only one you know, isn‘t as relevant as, for example, the history of ussr. We didn’t have a boomer generation. There are way too many differences for me to continue, so surely you are uneducated on the ussr history

> yelling at others.

yelling? Not a single exclamation point but still yelling? You have a rich imagination for sure

edit: formatting


> Also have you checked the birth rate? Do you expect it to grow in a post-war context?

Yes, birth rates tend to go up when wars end.

> in the same sentence you say ‘for the first time’ and then ‘Plenty of precedent’. You either have no idea what ‘plenty’ means or you contradict yourself

This is baffling.

Women entering the workforce in the 1940s due to the war is the precedent. It happened throughout the developed world. We are now eighty years past that demonstration.

> The story of your country, which seems the only one you know, isn‘t as relevant as, for example, the history of ussr. We didn’t have a boomer generation.

There was indeed a birth rate spike in the 1940s in Russia.

https://www.statista.com/statistics/1038013/crude-birth-rate...

Unfortunately… Stalin.

Side note: I have dual citizenship, so I’m not sure which one of them is “the only one” I know.


I don't think we'll see anything close to reliable reporting any time soon.

The story of whether Iran had a nuclear program has been reported every which way but loose for the past 6 months.

By the time Trump started pushing that they were close to a nuke again, those that claimed he was wrong 6 months ago and the nuclear program was intact. Had started claiming it was in fact destroyed.

Gosh that sentence is hard enough to write, but the story is so contolvuted I don't think I can improve it.


"Iran will have a nuclear weapon real soon!" is a claim that has been pushed, particularly by Benjamin Netanyahu for thirty years.

https://www.news18.com/world/weeks-away-by-next-spring-video...


>The story of whether Iran had a nuclear program has been reported every which way but loose for the past 6 months.

6 months?

Try like 35+ years. Bibi has been pushing the "Iran is 2 weeks away from a nuke" narrative since the late 80s.


That Iran had a nuclear program was not in dispute. It was regulated under international supervision based on the terms of Obama's agreement with Iran, which Trump promptly tore up because he has the mental capacity of a fourth-grader.

That Iran was on the verge of building bombs was far from clear. Khameini had previously issued a fatwa against doing so, on the grounds that it would be haram, or un-Islamic. All signs suggest that the IRGC was operating in full compliance with that fatwa.

I'm sure the remnants of his administration regret that now.


But the JCPOA had some big issues with it. It was time bound- that is it only delayed Iran's program ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iran_nuclear_deal ) and Iran got sanctions relief in return that allowed it to fund its proxies and pursue other activities not constrained by the agreement (such as its ballistic missile program, drones etc.).

Iran also restricted IAEA access to military sites while the agreement was in effect.

https://isis-online.org/isis-reports/revealed-emptying-of-th...


That's a fascinating insight into what friends of Bibi can do with photoshopped text on long range photos.

Doesn't include any 256 channel multi spectral radiometric data from ground level crystal packs though ... I guess they didn't show much of interest in the gamma spectrum.


We have two competing theories. One is that Israel is making everything up. The other is that Iran is pursuing nuclear weapons. At least the second one seems to have some evidence backing it up like secret underground facilities with centrifuges, enriched material, and yes, that warehouse in Tehran. The theory that Israel is making everything up doesn't seem that well supported.

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-middle-east-50382219 "The International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) has found uranium particles at a site in Iran that had not been declared by the Iranian authorities.

A confidential report, seen by the BBC, did not say exactly where the site was. But inspectors are believed to have taken samples from a location in Tehran's Turquzabad district.

That is the area where Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has alleged Iran had a "secret atomic warehouse". "

https://www.reuters.com/article/world/exclusive-iaea-found-u...

"VIENNA (Reuters) - Samples taken by the U.N. nuclear watchdog at what Israel's prime minister called a "secret atomic warehouse" in Tehran showed traces of uranium that Iran has yet to explain, two diplomats who follow the agency's inspections work closely say."

...

"Those traces were, however, of uranium, the diplomats said - the same element Iran is enriching and one of only two fissile elements with which one can make the core of a nuclear bomb. One diplomat said the uranium was not highly enriched, meaning it was not purified to a level anywhere close to that needed for weapons. "There are lots of possible explanations," that diplomat said. But since Iran has not yet given any to the IAEA it is hard to verify the particles' origin, and it is also not clear whether the traces are remnants of material or activities that predate the landmark 2015 deal or more recent, diplomats say."


Iran has been pursuing nuclear deterrence by enriching for decades, the entire time I've been in and out of the country. That's a given.

Bibi and his tales that Iran is just a week away from an actual working bomb has been going on almost as long. Bibi - the guy with a secret / not secret collection of bombs.

The question of whether or not Iran was playing along sufficiently with inspectors when there was an inspection deal in place is what we are talking about here.

IMHO they weren't getting away with much, at that time Israel was making up claims that they were and media blasting.

That is all times past, of course.

It's also clear that once Trump tore up the deal they went (sensibly in light of everything it seems) back to unchecked enrichment, and now that they've been attacked during negotiations there's zero trust and it would seem certain that there is a real risk that reinvigorated hard core fanatics will set a bomb off in either Israel and / or the US.

Smooth move clowns.


Isn’t this just weapons of mass destruction again circa Iraq 25 years ago? We had evidence back then also, it turned out to be fabricated. Are you sure Netanyahu didn't just need a big distraction to prevent from being impeached and sent to jail? And Trump didn't need a huge distraction from the whole Epstein thing? Because this war come out of nowhere and was way too convenient for them.

It's true that no stockpiles of WMDs were found in Iraq. But we also know Iraq has used chemical weapons: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iraqi_chemical_weapons_program

I lived in Israel during that war and everyone had gas masks and people were truly worried about chemical weapons being used. They weren't.

But in Iran there really are/were centrifuges and enriched Uranium. Remember: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stuxnet ?

Iran admits having this Uranium: https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2026/2/9/iran-suggests-it-cou...

So which part is fabricated?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_program_of_Iran

"By the early 2000s, two key clandestine facilities were nearing completion: a uranium enrichment center at Natanz (in central Iran), built to house thousands of centrifuges, and a heavy water production plant alongside a 40 MW heavy-water reactor (IR-40) near Arak. These facilities, which had been kept secret from the IAEA, were intended for ostensibly civilian purposes but had clear weapons potential. Enrichment at Natanz could yield high-enriched uranium for bombs, while the Arak reactor (once operational) could produce plutonium in its spent fuel, and the heavy water plant would supply the reactor's coolant.[41] In August 2002, an exiled Iranian opposition group, the National Council of Resistance of Iran (NCRI), exposed the existence of Natanz and Arak.[41] Satellite imagery soon confirmed construction at these sites. The revelation that Iran had built major nuclear facilities in secret, without required disclosure to the IAEA, ignited an international crisis and raised questions about the program's true aim.[41]"

People who are pro the Iranian regime claim that there was a religious order against building nuclear weapons. But at the same time there is no other explanation as to why Iran would enrich Uranium to 60% as that has virtually no other use. It also seems they were working on other components related to weaponiztion (though admittedly we have less confirmation/visibility into that). Ofcourse the precise timing of when they would chose to build those weapons and their intent is not that easy to guess but it's also not unreasonable to assume they would do so when they felt it would be to their advantage.


People who are pro the Iranian regime claim that there was a religious order against building nuclear weapons

No one here is "pro the Iranian regime." Do better.


To that add what Joe Kent and Tulsi Gabbard said about Iranian nuclear bombs -- no indications that they have one or are building one.

But everyone agrees that they have enriched >400kg of Uranium to a level that has no other purpose than nuclear weapons and that the remaining steps of enrichment are measured in days/weeks.

So something doesn't add up in what your references are saying. What is your explanation of the discrepancy?

https://www.sipri.org/commentary/essay/2021/why-iran-produci...

https://armscontrolcenter.org/irans-stockpile-of-highly-enri...


Why in the world would Iran be expected to remain in compliance with the JCPOA after 2018, when Trump tore it up?

As I recall, they did remain in compliance for another year after that, given that it was originally supposed to be a multilateral agreement. But IMHO they should have put everything they had into refinement and weapons production as soon as Trump unilaterally ripped up the agreement. Instead they held back, and they are now seeing the result of that mistake.

None of this would be happening if Iran had actually done what Israel assured us they were doing.


You're asking why wouldn't they pursue nuclear weapons and ballistic missiles to deliver them? Why should they? Don't you think as a country they should have some other priorities? Like ensuring Tehran has water? So because Trump tore up the agreement (and the US was sanctioning them anyways for their ballistic missile program and other reasons) that's somehow justification? Trump tore up the agreement because it would enable them to get there anyways and Iran refused to sign an agreement that would prevent them from getting there.

The JCPOA would have expired in 2025 anyways assuming that they even meant to observe it in the first place.

Your last statement isn't as solid as you think it is. Iran hasn't gotten to a point where they have nuclear weapons mounted on ballistic missiles not because they didn't want to but because they were unable to get to that or were concerned that getting closer would invite the same attack we're seeing today.


You're asking why wouldn't they pursue nuclear weapons and ballistic missiles to deliver them? Why should they?

Turned on a TV lately?


Which came first. The chicken or the egg?

Maybe Israel and the US wouldn't be attacking a country where stepping on US and Israeli flags, chants of death to America and death to Israel, calling Israel little Satan and the US big Satan. Building an arsenal of ballistic missiles and trying to get to a nuclear bomb? (and I mean the list goes on and on).

They need nuclear bombs and ballistic missiles so they can murder with impunity without risk of retribution. A regime that conducts public executions in stadiums, or mows down 10's of thousand of their own citizens who dare to protest, or give people plastic keys to heaven to walk into minefields: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plastic_key_to_paradise or beat up woman on the streets to death for not wearing a hijab: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Death_of_Mahsa_Amini (and this list also goes on and on) can't be allowed to act with impunity.


Maybe had the US not upended their parliamentary democracy with a coup to grab their oil, they would have continued to maintain their earlier friendly relations with Israel.

Burning US flags and calling for death to blacks has been a KKK thing. We did not bomb them collectively, or break their infra, when they got their guns because their expressions were considered free speech. Individual transgressions of law were pursued (once in a while).


Oh shucks! military intelligence and 19 different intelligence gathering agencies are such nincompoops that they completely missed what an expert HN commenter of sparkling genius pointed out.

I don't have the expertise to know what use its for, but I suspect the agencies assesment was informed bybthe knowledge of 60% enriched uranium.

It's used for subs btw and maybe they felt they needed a nuclear one to secure Hormuz.


I get it. So according to you Iran is building nuclear subs. JFYI it takes 4-5Kg of material for a nuclear sub reactor. So according to you they're building 100 nuclear submarines.

Got it genius. But hey, by the trust you put in Joe Kent and Tulsi Gabbard we already knew you were a genius. Didn't need the additional observation about Iran building 100 nuclear submarines to secure Hormuz.


I have no F'ing clue what Iran wants to do. But I know that the intelligence agencies are well equipped and experienced to guess that, especially more than 'that guy on the internet '.

> which Trump promptly tore up because he has the mental capacity of a fourth-grader.

That would be an insult to fourth graders IMO, my son happens to be one.


Yeah, valid point, I was out of line there. Apologies.

I do a mild bit of environmental geophysical radiometrics, that took me to Iran decades ago - it's not a new thing, they've been edging having nuclear deterrance for a good while.

Trump ripped up the monitoring agreement - that was unquestionably stupid.

He attacked Iran during talks to get that back on track .. that was unbelievably stupid (see: current world state).

Had he agreed to have in country monitoring again and had the USofA simply waited it was probable the old hard line core would have withered in time.

That's certainly not on the table now, the fanatics are dug in and feel fully justified. On both sides.

Incapable of The Deal.


True but without radar they have a relatively difficult task of being out there setup and waiting for a fast moving jet to pass within range.

Compare that to Ukraine defending it's skies with NATO (well mostly French IIRC) AWACS feeding early data which is what made MANPADS in Ukraine so effective against Russian attacks.


Yeah my guess was they were coming in along predictable routes at this point and that's what got them? I saw that the search and rescue mission was in an area close to water. I believe many Stinger hits in Ukraine can be attributed to predictability.

And maybe they do have some kind of radars?


There have been no legitimate reports of NATO providing real time AWACs feeds to Ukraine.

I don't think manpads themselves are connected to the AWACS infrastructure.

It's more that high altitude planes get picked up by the AWACS while low flight is at risk of being shot at by a MANPAD.

Shortwave radio is more challenging than you might imagine.

Near to the transmitter it's received by ground wave, further it's scattered off the ionosphere. In-between it's undetectable due to the skip zone. This might also explain why Amelia Earhart went missing [1]

Coverage is obtained from multipath and reflections. Leading to variable strength and timing. Not as bad as DXing on HF with low power but much harder than you might imagine.

Fine for someone to transcribe some numbers but useless for people trying to identify sources.

So locally you get an apparent direction to the source which is clearly not the source.

Add to that the complex local terrain and a well placed number stations can be very difficult to locate with precision.

Edit: unrelated but interesting there are some mysteries in HF transmission including long delayed echoes where a signal takes far longer than reasonable to travel out and back over several seconds [0] which given its travelling light milliseconds is a conundrum.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long_delayed_echo

[1] https://youtu.be/zTDFhWWPZ4Q?si=Ib8jfbdNP-sLHM0B


I would guess that the combined EU/NATO counterintelligence forces could find the station if they wanted to, especially for the rough location in the article.

EDIT: apparently the source is on a U.S. military base in Germany (other posts on this topic). Looks like its "ours" then.


Explains why it’s still sending

My father regailed tales of his college years where it was a game to have a HAM radio operator start broadcasting and to have teams try to find where they were hiding, first.

More challenging? Not really. It does require multiple boots on the ground to do it.


Yes, more challenging. Ham radio fox hunting is usually VHF/UHF. Waaay easier to direction-find, since the signal isn't bouncing off the ionosphere, and also the much shorter wavelength means that you can get highly directional antennas that are small enough to be held, and don't need to be 50 feet in the air to work well.

Presumably doing it locally within a known few mile radius is different from nation-scale broadcast areas bounced from god-knows-where?

If you can receive a shortwave signal, you can triangulate the source.

Besides the problem caused by reflections and by the fact that unless you are very close to the transmitter you do not receive a direct wave but one reflected from the ionosphere, there is an additional difficulty.

Antennas with high directivity, which are needed for accurate triangulation, must be very big in the shortwave range (wavelength from 100 meter to 10 meter). Moreover, if they are too big it would be difficult to move them, to be able to measure an angle.

So traditional triangulation is inaccurate in this frequency range.

With modern technologies, using highly accurate synchronized clocks, one could distribute shortwave antennas over a large area, to create a synthetic aperture array, enabling a precise triangulation. However this would be expensive. An amateur would certainly not have such a thing. I doubt that even a state would bother to build such a thing, because it would not be worthwhile.

While precise triangulation of a shortwave transmitter from far away is very difficult, such a transmitter would not be hard to find during a local search wherever it is placed, because there not only the direction, but also the intensity gradient of the signal would allow finding it.


Reflections will pose a problem though.

Two receivers of the same signal may not be from the same proximate source. One could from the original antenna the other from a reflection. Both could be reflected but by different reflectors. Even if the proximate source was the same for both the receivers, triangulation might yield the location of a virtual image of the original source.

BTW I am just going by geometry and may be way off because radiowaves behave quite differently compared to visible light.

One might need effectively the inverse of beamforming to nail it.


Exactly I have friends who have had voice contacts reflecting off aurora at VHF

KP4MD detected wingtip vortices from reflected VHF signals.

https://www.cfmilazzo.com/aircraft-wingtip-vortices


That made my day. Thanks for the laughs.

See content of post you initially replied in the context of:

> Shortwave radio is more challenging than you might imagine.


Multiple boots on Iranian ground is tricky for Americans right now.

This seems to be a common treasure hunt game conducted by HAM clubs.

That was it. Treasure hunt.

Also known as fox hunting.

Thanks that was quite illuminating. I knew about ionospheric reflections to be a problem but not the others.

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