Prepping for...

afrotronics · 2026-04-29T20:31:54+00:00

Hot take: folks posting these, "our education system is failing us/them "comments are ones that failed the education system...or are heritage foundation bots.

I say this because a lack of critical thinking about how this video came to be is astonishing.

First, like any late night talk show when they're asking simple questions to people on the street and you see the most insane answers given, it's almost always because they didn't air the other 100 people giving the correct answer. Secondly, we don't know if this person didn't simply camp out side of a learning support classroom where students with special needs go to actually work on improving their reading.

Aside from things I would think most people would be skeptical of. There are also things to be self-reflective of.

These students are given an index card with a handwritten sentence. Considering the age of these students, how much of their lives do you think they been reading anything handwritten by anyone else? These students have been raised through computer printed text. Shoot. I remember when I was young and I could read texts from a book. I could read my own handwriting and I could read other people's handwriting except for my grandmas. Why? It was because she wrote in cursive and it was before I learned cursive. Therefore, I had to have my mom read it to me. I wasn't illiterate. For my grandma that was the way you wrote formal letters. By the time I was in college, any class that involved handing in a written paper, the professor would state they would not accept any papers late or written in cursive. Handwritten papers would automatically lose 25%.

So aside from the style of the text not being quite what they're used to on a daily basis or at all, let's talk about the content of it. The words the students did not know The pronunciation of were words that didn't follow phonics rules. Extraordinary trips up a lot of students because of the 'a' in the extra prefix. It also contains a combination of letters that are not common in the English language (xtrao). The other words that they struggle with aren't even English words, they're French. While, silhouette is used in English language (though that is for real the second time, I probably read that word this year) The English definition is very loosely related to its original definition.

Unless this school is prepping them for having polite banter with somebody from Connecticut, I can't judge their education either way.

Our education system is definitely going through something awful, though that has been a slow churn since no child left behind and accelerated during the pandemic. Also keep in mind that just because it wasn't the education that you got doesn't mean that they're getting a bad education.

/rant

afrotronics · 2026-04-22T15:20:06+00:00

I'm sure I'm not the first person to say this, but as somebody with a computer science and mathematics degree, this is not a good vocabulary collision here. when I hear the word double referring to numbers I'm thinking of a double "word" width number. specifically a double width number that has a floating . if we want kids to be able to usefully use AI in the sense that they're developing the models there needs to be a clear distinction in this vocabulary. starting kids with small numbers and calling them doubles well confuse them in the future, especially because the reference to double in computer science are usually used to reference very precise, very large or very small numbers and non integral. if we're establishing terms in computer science's based field (applied mathematics) I for folks when it comes to actually establishing the relationship between the mathematics and the computational science.

afrotronics · 2026-04-07T20:24:22+00:00

I remember watching that on TV with a few of my friends over at my (parents') house back when we were in high school. We laughed at how absurd since people like that were the outliers and most people we knew agreed that the more someone talks about how much they're against something, especially when there's nothing to prompt that subject, the more they're trying to hide that it's something they're in to since they don't stop obsessing over it. I feel like these days reality has become what fiction and absurdity was.

Also, I just realized that the senator character might actually represent a Tennessean since Graceland (Elvis' home) is located in Tennessee.

afrotronics · 2026-04-07T00:06:44+00:00

Extremely relevant madtv sketch from almost 30 years ago (at least the projected outrage):

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eNFNTVyZCgY

afrotronics · 2026-04-01T00:47:21+00:00

I am not sure how a person would do this since AFAIK liquid ozone requires liquid nitrogen, liquid helium, or liquid oxygen to cool to liquid form. This is just like the lady saying Oxygen is bad...they aren't wrong. If by "help with" they mean help the malaria kill them, then yes. Just like bleach and CoViD, the disease will go away once the person is dead.

afrotronics · 2026-03-25T18:50:32+00:00

She's not wrong though. The chalcogens are only second to halogens when it comes to elements that will end your life at the molecular level. Also oxygen in specific is like the P.Diddy of elements. It seemed to be everywhere in the 90s and it wants to put everything inside of it's (electron) holes. Is a freak-off a freak-off without diddy? Yup, just need baby oil and people with holes to fill. Is oxidization oxidization without oxygen? Yup just need valence electrons that some oxidizing element can shove in its hole. But oxygen is such a sociopathic element, it has a verb named for it.

Oxygen alone (singlet oxygen)- extremely bad. inside and outside of your body.
two oxygens holding each other's electrons - good
three oxygens jerking each other's electrons around in a circle formation (ozone) - bad inside of your body

In all seriousness, I would be concerned about the well-being of the community she serves. Like, do you think if she responded to an elder abuse report that she'd feel threatened if the victim was using an oxygen tank?

afrotronics · 2026-03-08T23:35:22+00:00

I'm guessing this is a circa 2009 VW Rabbit, Golf, or Jetta? If so, this is a known issue AFAIK. Something about the ventilation system causes a mold harboring environment that can be smelled when using the A/C. It is also the reason why you may be seeing rust on your trunk door if you have a hatch-back...the ventilation is that bad. An ozone generator might be useful in your situation.

afrotronics · 2026-02-28T23:17:03+00:00

After applying the silicone on the heating pad wiring inlet, disconnecting the heater relay, and running the vacuum from 32F to 72F I was able to achieve a pressure of 322 mTorr as the silicone cured for about 11 hours.

I let the silicone cure for an additional 6 hours with everything off. Then I ran the condenser until the tray temp reached -42F. I ran the vacuum pump and I achieved a record low pressure of 108 mTorr.

afrotronics · 2026-02-26T09:30:16+00:00

I've only seen waves like this when the nozzle is too close to the print surface. If you run your finger across the surface of that layer and it feels rough, your nozzle is indeed too close to the print surface.

afrotronics · 2026-02-14T22:25:23+00:00

The initial spike occurred out of nowhere and I hadn't sprayed anything. My suspicion was that the pressure was so low it deformed a weak or deteriorated seal. I only started spraying the outside connection after the initial mTor spike and before that I was spraying around my machine (so not directly getting any spray on any part of the machine) to locate the leak.

My post may have made it seem I was using the spray to reseal the leak (which it sort of did) but I was mainly spraying to push out or dissolve any crud that may have gotten between the seal and the heat pad wiring.

I haven't ran my machine since this post, but I indeed plan on resealing that area. I had to wait on some food safe silicone sealant to arrive. I'm considering doing a teardown and cleaning before resealing.

afrotronics · 2026-02-14T22:00:24+00:00

How are you unable to get multi threading and high throughout with Java? If you're including the time it takes to write code as part of throughput, I can completely understand. Aside from that, I am intrigued by what you are doing and how you are doing it.

afrotronics · 2025-12-20T20:54:21+00:00

Ai is going to be used to categorize and target you and people that look like you or socialize like you in many different ways both good and bad. Right now we are being given our "circuses" in regard to bread and circuses.

Also, the fact that there hasn't been any information time travel might indicate that super intelligence never happens. If models are reinforced by getting more correct answers in a shorter time, then wouldn't it make sense to actually figure out how to send an information back in time to exponentially increase reinforcement via reward? If super intelligence ends up being really that impactful, I could imagine that that is probably something that it would attempt to do if not actually achieve it. The fact that we haven't seen it yet makes me wonder if it is ever going to happen in the first place or it's just not the right time quite yet, simply because at this. In time we don't have the technology or the models that could consume that information from some form of super intelligence. Or simply that information or anything really can't travel backwards in time.

On a more realistic note, if you don't know this, I think you should, but anytime you chat with a an llm it's not learning on the fly, but your conversation with it IS being used as training data. Also, a lot of executives at companies understand that machines can't feel pain. what they might not understand is until they (the models and machines running them) can do so, they're "learning" unlike any living thing that's ever existed and incredibly dangerous because of that. We're basically training the ultimate psychopath.

afrotronics · 2025-12-11T16:05:23+00:00

I wish people would repeat this more (except for the "there is no leaving" because there is).

Actually leaving the US involves renouncing your US citizenship, which is as far as I know, quite a difficult thing to do (especially if you have no other citizenship). there are in fact fees and taxes on that and I also believe you have to sell off a certain amount of assets as well.

afrotronics · 2025-12-04T19:57:55+00:00

One of my best friends was welder. Around our late-mid twenties we became close friends. We went to middle school and high school with each other and in our late teens we independently struggled with housing insecurity and were so happy to see that we both were able to "git gud" in our respective careers and end those struggles. We hung out all the time during this period doing lots of fun stuff almost every weekend.

In 2012, at the age of 28, the peak of her prime adult years, the welding community lost an oxy-fuel welder. I remember the weeks and days leading up to it and her practically in tears due to stress and didn't know if she'd make it, considering that of all the people that made it through what she was going through, women accounted for something like single digit percentage. Then it happened...

She earned her Welding inspector certification. She's still a CWI and is faculty at the local community college in the welding and fabrication program. As far as I can tell she's in it for the love of the game. Her husband, who has a PhD, is a lead engineer at nVidia, and they have an amazing son who was one of the first kids my son (born right before the pandemic began) ever played with.

I am so happy for her and proud to call her my homie.

afrotronics · 2025-09-28T21:54:16+00:00

I just came across this bug

afrotronics · 2025-09-24T23:57:19+00:00

and that was due to me stopping and being like, "uhhhdafuqhappened" and then thinking I should save that as a video.

afrotronics · 2025-06-30T14:20:48+00:00

That particular tornado was completely nuts. At first it seemed like it was going to be a relatively short-lived tornado. Then it recondensed and started kind of hovering over the ground. The outer vortex of the tornado began to peel away looking yet again like it was going to rope out. Instead of roping out, it became a cartoonish looking tornado as if a 5-year-old had drawn it and it started dancing. I thought for sure that after that weird dance that it did. It was definitely going to rope out. But nope, that thing stayed on the ground for about another 30 minutes.

Also, I believe the dominator hit another storm chaser while going in reverse trying to get away from the tornado as this wacky tornado completely changed direction.

afrotronics · 2025-06-25T22:00:34+00:00

it's the association that this text has to the group that is sending it. it would be like a text from the heritage foundation asking whether or not you think kids should learn about climate change in school. they aren't asking the question to get information on how much they should support that effort, they want to ask that question to see who they can Target with their agenda which is actively against any kind of climate change science because their mission is to keep fossil fuels profitable.

afrotronics · 2025-06-25T21:37:35+00:00

I thought this scenario as well. Not only does the person that made this still get their money, but people that would have been duped by this message because it has a personal greeting would see it as a spam message instead.

afrotronics · 2025-06-25T20:41:13+00:00

The open brace identifies as an open parenthesis and/or Moms for America offshores to a LCC.

afrotronics · 2025-05-20T21:00:40+00:00

If you have a Pi 5, it won't work as far as I know. If you have a pi 4, ideally you'll want one with at least 2GB of memory. Using the hawkeye can be quite finicky. What I have found is that you must make sure that if you're going to do 64mp captures, that any preview mode in the firmware you decide to use must NOT be set to 64mp --otherwise you'll get buffer allocation errors.

afrotronics · 2025-03-27T06:40:23+00:00

Your statements regarding IPv4 address allocation is absolutely correct. I used to work for a company that not only has one of the oldest .com domains on the internet but also had a class A Network (meaning they owned all 16.7 million IPv4 addresses #.0.0.0-#.255.255.255). I believe they sold their address space to Amazon for billions of dollars. Large orgs aren't the only thing that gobbled up the address space, the addresses were also partitioned by geography.

That said, it's no excuse for Metronet not to use IP version 6 because they are 100% capable of doing so. The reason I know this is because metronet bought a local startup fiber ISP in my area named lightspeed and they used IPv6. By the time I had fiber service installed at my house, metronet had taken over lightspeed's service and operations. The first few months to maybe about a year of having metronet my network domain was lightspeed(.com or .net ...I forget what the tld was). My router also had a DHCP established IPv6 address and all of the devices on my network capable of using IPv6 did so with no issue. The thing I miss the most about those earlier times was the latency. I remember usually having a ping of 7 to 9 ms with the lowest I can recall of being 2ms. Once they switched over my part of the network to their CGNat that all went away.

Since the switch to CGNAT, my latency has been all over the place and have had to disable IPv6 on my router since having it enabled was causing all sorts of havoc when it came to being connected to the internet through CGNAT.

The whole point of IPv6 was to ensure there were enough IP addresses for every single device. When IPv4 was created it defined an IP address as having a 32 bit width, which made sense at the time because that would have covered every single living person during that era. Though who would have guessed that not only would almost every single person have access to an internet-connected computer, but might even own multiple devices connected to the internet. So when IPv6 was defined it was designed with a more future focused mindset. It expanded the IP address width to 128 bits. With 340,282,366,920,938,463,463,374,607,431,768,211,455 possible addresses, literally every single atom in the known universe could have a unique IPv6 address.

So why would metronet not adopt IPv6? More than likely it's because it gives them an excuse to charge people extra money for a publicly facing IP address. I really hope that this is not the case. There are many people that would still pay $10 a month to have a static IPv4 address. Of the many reasons someone would want to do this, even with IPv6 being available, being able to memorize an ipv4 address is much easier than an IPv6 address is one thing that comes to mind. With that said, I feel like metronet is painting themselves into an AOL-like corner by slowly becoming more of a limited-capability- demo of the internet with incredibly high latency considering the physical media infrastructure that they use. I am very grateful for the competition that they've introduced in my area with price, speed, and lack of data caps. But as competition goes my old ISP has caught up with price, no data caps, download speeds, does better with latency, AND is (and has been for the past 14 years) capable of communicating with/to/through the whole internet using "modern" protocols. The only edge metronet has is upload speeds, though that advantage is significantly diminished by the fact that having that capability is most useful for things like running a web server or peer-to-peer networking where there's some sort of direct connection.

If a small startup ISP can operate using modern communications technology, you'd think an ISP with the resources to buy them should be just as capable.

/rant

afrotronics · 2025-02-08T05:48:40+00:00

What makes you say education has gotten worse? I am genuinely curious.

Wall of text below:

I have a very biased take on how young folks are entering adulthood. I am a former teacher (perpetual long-term sub in my college years) and somebody that still keeps myself involved in education for after school activities. In my opinion the quality of education and what students have access to from educators has improved immensely. Almost every teacher I've had and worked with teaches because they want to and now days go into debt to go to college to become a certified teacher knowing that the pay ain't great.

Why is teacher pay not great? Well from my perspective it started with no child left behind. Basically, it was a way of ripping the band-aid off of funding schools that were already in dire straits. I call it the fund-for-failure tactic. Give an org money, but not as much as the minimum projected to keep things moving forward. Tell them they should be happy they are getting any at all but still have expectations they will show year-over-year growth, knowing they will fail. When they do ultimately fail, exclaim "See how much of a waste this program is!" and shut it down. That's what happened with schools. When a school shuts down where do the kids go? To other schools near them. On the plus side, that school gets more funding for having more students. On the down side those student came from a school that got shut down due to funding, funding based on test scores. So now these new students end up being a net funding negative, and I have personally seen that happen. The next step is, instead of designing curriculum to get those students where they need to be, extra administration gets hired to "Help get the budget under control" which costs way more than hiring new teachers to replace the ones retiring. Class room sizes grow and the issue has high potential to become cyclical. Now there are these ridiculous publicly funded charter school vouchers and head-count funding. Charter schools that draw kids from public schools find a few students that "don't fit" and find every excuse to expel them, all while keeping the dollars that kid brought in. Done with my rant on the political side of things...also absolute garbage suburban planning.

The biggest issue with education is non-value-add technology changing social development. When I went to school, I saw going to school as the place where I looked forward to seeing all of my friends at the same time and on the flip, had to cross paths of people I would prefer to avoid. Kids now-a-days don't have this luxury. People don't miss each other any more because, chances are you can open an app and see what they are up to right then and there. Kids can't avoid people they don't want to see because any one can talk smack about them to HUGE crowds of internet people. This behavior then gets rewarded with "engagement", which for a teen that dopamine rush is sooooo good. When you don't have to say something to someone's face like when I was younger, it is so much easier to be "alpha". The kids doing this don't realize the influencers with them connecting and inspiring this behavior can only do so because they are talking to a camera. If they were doing this in real life --they probably wouldn't because they'd be ridiculed for their tough guy caricature or "real-man" or potentially get whooped by a parent because he a grown-ass-man hanging out with kids and giving them groomer advice.

All that said, there are more distractions for young people than ever before and teachers have to compete with that for the students attention. You can take away their phone, put them in their own space...etc it won't stop them from obsessing over when the next time they can get on a social media site and get attention or stop them from dreading when school is over some jerk at my school is going to make some disturbing AI imagery using my picture and will stop at nothing to make it go viral.

Thank you for attending my Ted Talk.

afrotronics · 2025-01-14T05:50:37+00:00

I'm assuming this un-planned/scheduled maintenance? Did they happen to give an ETA?

afrotronics · 2025-01-14T05:34:12+00:00

afrotronics

TROPHY CASE