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I am currently building an alethiometer from the phillip pullman book series: his dark materials

Specifically its a remake knowing what we know now having finished the two trilogies.

Instead of the three hands and the moving needle, its just one moving needle. Its made from wood and aluminium. The reason for aluminium is that in the 1920s (roughly the age that these books are set) is a wonder material, a bit like carbon fibre/titanium is now.

I have the working mechanism (controlled by 8mm steppers) I need to finish the case and dial, and paint it. I also need to shrink the controlling mechanism and design the voice->text->inference->output to 36 symbols logic.


If your budget is a bit more, and you want to hear a massive clunk every 30 seconds rather than a soft tick and you want to drive 2' (60cm) hands, then you might want this: https://waitingtrain.blogspot.com/2015/05/a-large-gents-turr...

The smaller ones look the same but are less beefy.

I used one to make this clock:

https://www.secretbatcave.co.uk/projects/electromechanical-c...

Which instead of using a well disciplined time source, uses a tuning fork and 74xx logic to drive it


The DIY tuning fork clock is very cool. I am hard pressed to understand why accutron doesn't still make and sell tuning-fork watches. I really admire the creative use of resonance frequencies (not dissimilar to quartz watches but cool that you can really see the tuning fork for you watch as opposed to a diminutive quartz crystal).

They recently re-released the Accutron with actual tuning fork movements, but at $6k ofc you’re better off buying vintage:

https://www.hodinkee.com/articles/introducing-accutron-314


There is (https://www.nist.gov/pml/time-and-frequency-division/time-se...) and in some conditions you can receive the time signal in the UK.

Our office manager bought some US tuned radio wall clocks, and every now and then they would jump 8 hours forward. I assume it was down to solar weather making propagation changes (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sporadic_E_propagation)


Could easily be solar weather related propagation changes, but probably not Sporadic E specifically - that's much higher frequencies.

its a fairly reliably stepper motor system. You're right it will degrade over time, you'd be surprised how many steps it can do before it degrades.

you are both confusing two issues.

Yes there is a lawful intercept system that operates inside telecoms networks, that is an issue.

The other issue is that there is no real security inside said telecoms networks. (side note, there is still fucking SS7 floating about)

Salt typhoon is not "just hijacking lawful intercept" its ability to fuck with the network in a way that is largely undetected. Sure the intercept stuff might help, but they don't actually need that. In the same way we learnt about state actors taking complete control of middle east telecoms systems, we can be fairly sure that other state actors have taken control of USA telecoms systems

Both the Executive and congress have done shit all about it, and will continue to ignore it until something happens


> you are both confusing two issues.

How am I confusing the two? My whole point was the same as yours - that the existence of lawful intercept is a separate issue and that the focus should be on securing telecoms.


This. The lawful intercept infrastructure is one facet of their network. The rest of their infra is also a deep concern: call records, SS7 signaling, the IP network, mobile infra and it's back end (sim swapping).

Depending on where the cameras are placed, they can be used to work out the pose (ie what position) the upper body is in.

Meta showed that it was possible to do that from cameras mounted on glasses.

However, the power required to do that is quite high (30-60mw to detect, more to do the pose extractions)

So I suspect its just hand recognition.


Are accelerometers not sufficient for pose determination? I would assume they'd work as well as cameras if not better.

for your head, more than enough, for the position of the arm you need something else.

I worked on some next next gen AR glasses, I saw and used both orion and the prototype version of the rayban meta display glasses

Orion suffered from the problem that plagued it throughout its production: shifting goals and poor product management. The display team promised and then didn't deliver, twice.

One of my friends showed me a demo in meta display glasses (the production one) that allowed you to take a youtube recipe video, feed it into the dipshit machine and it'd spit out a step by step guide for you to follow. That was really nice to use.

The demo I worked on was taking some research glasses and attaching SLAM, always on audio and basic VLM descriptions of what you are looking at and dumping it into a database. You'd be surprised at how useful that context was. at the end of the day you could say "In the meeting I had with x what were the actions" Sometimes it even worked. Because everything that you saw or did was geocoded (ie it knew which room you were in) and linked to a calendar, even though facial and voice recognition wasn't allowed, you could get something akin to a decent executive assistant.

Making it secure and private is a big fucking challenge. I put in face and screen blurring, but thats not really enough. There is OCR based on eye gaze, which is hard to censor. The problem is there is more than enough context stored to infer lots of things.

The problem is not just securing the storage, its finding a decent sharing mechanisms that allows you to perform normal actions without asking a million questions or over sharing.


The algorithm is pretty simple, it'll show you a selection of videos that are from the n most popular genres of videos, then depending on your dwell time, it'll A/B test categories that are related, or sub categories.

That bit isn't that difficult or new. the special sauce is the editorialising and content categorisation. being able to accurately categorise videos into genres, subjects and sub subjects (ie makeup video, 25 year olds, woman, straight, new york, eyeglitter) and then creating a graph of what persona likes what.

The second secret sauce is people going through and finding stuff and promoting it. TikTok (used to) editorialise/pay highly for content.


Its never really like this.

Tiktok spend a lot of money talking to EU regulators. They know shits coming down the track because these directives have to be put into law by eu members. that takes time.

> Doesn’t help the impression that they’re running a non-EU tech company shakedown campaign.

But thats not the point, companies shouldn't be doing stuff they know is harmful. Thats literally the point of regulation.


> seem to be decades behind on reducing the prevalence of smoking and drinking,

the EU isn't a federal government. the UK, when it was in the EU did a full smoking inside ban, and tightened it after leaving.

It however had a massive problem with binge drinking and sorta didn't do much to stop that, apart from make it more expensive.

the netherlands has a smoking ban, but it was brought in later (I think). they had a different drinking culture so didn't have the same issues as the UK for drink.

That kind of issue is usually left to member states.

Packaging however is more the EU's purview


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