Comment by Joel_Mckay 5 days ago
Get a ham radio technician license, and you may develop an intuitive perspective on most electrical engineering concepts.
i.e. the physics lab derivation of the core EE tool set is unnecessary if you understand what the models are describing.
AI is slop in and slop out... and dangerous to students... =3
John Shive's Wave Machines is where every student should start:
Were you also completely turned off by the community?
I ask because I got into it about 15+ years ago for the purposes of helping with emergency comms and learning more about electronics, but found the community extremely hostile toward new comers that did not have money to burn on expensive gear. I ended up just giving up on it after a few years after investing in a bunch of Arduino stuff and learned far more about EE than I ever did playing at radio. The concept of the Elmer seemed dead, leaving nobody who wanted to show the new guys the ropes.
From what I understand, maybe that has changed in recent years?
Weirdly, I did take something away from my experience with ham radio; I know an awful lot about the weather and atmosphere now, which has turned into a lasting interest.
Ham radio's decline is more than explainable as a cultural issue.
The culture of every internet forum I've ever visited for it is absolutely deplorable. It seems like each one has a handful of really grouchy old gatekeepers who lie in wait to absolutely dunk on newcomers.
We agree, but I suppose my next question would be why? What happened to turn these guys (or ham radio culture at large) into grouchy old gatekeepers? I'm generalizing, of course, but they were like that when I arrived. I can't imagine the hobby was always like that, especially seeing some of the old literature from the 50's and 60's in the US, which was very encouraging of mentoring and sharing info.
If it's still the same today as it was back when I tried it out, that's a shame, because ham radio is absolutely full of hardware hacking opportunities. Heck, you can make an antenna out of a retractable tape measure.
Maybe, but the problem I see with HAM is that no interesting discussion is allowed to happen in the first place. Between the legal rules, cultural rules, and the expectation to avoid niche topics that would bore out 90% of participants, there's hardly anything left to talk about.
> Were you also completely turned off by the community?
I was never turned on :). I got my license partly because other people at our local Hackerspace were getting it, and partly because I imagined it'll be useful to have the knowledge and ability to build and legally operate my own radio hardware.
I never got the whole HAM talking over radio thing. Between the legal and cultural restrictions on the topics, and the expectations of not taking up the airwaves too much, I can't see how you could discuss anything interesting or worthwhile this way. It's no surprise that there seems to be nothing going on other than boring and obnoxious rag chewing - interesting conversations aren't allowed to occur in the first place.
I mean, the intersection between "non-commercial", "non-religious", "non-controversial/non-political", and "interesting to any HAM" is... basically just saying hello, weather, trash talk, and self-referential showing off.
Did you mean you don't understand the equations/theory, or are having difficulty applying the concepts to design circuits?
In the first case, install LTSpice (free from Analog Devices), and head here to run down the basics:
https://www.youtube.com/@FesZElectronics/videos
And in the latter, go though common basic designs analyzing how they work:
https://archive.org/details/encyclopediaofelectroniccircuits...
https://archive.org/details/encyclopediaofel02graf
https://archive.org/details/isbn_9780070110779
https://archive.org/details/encyclopediaofel0006graf
Then try your own designs combining properties of several designs. Start with simple blinkers and buzzers at first... Try to avoid Arduino designs until you've done a few 555, transistor, and opamp circuits first. =3
Most of my issues seem to be about power - I have no feel for the relevant math, so even as I remember the basic equations and methods, I never feel certain I'm calculating it right. So in terms of hands-on experience, I pretty much jumped straight from burning through-hole resistors with 12V battery to ignite rocket motors made of PVC and caramel fuel, to Arduinos and RPIs and NodeMCUs -- basically, stuff that comes with an USB port it can draw power from...
Thanks for the links, I'll work through them and hopefully come out with some understanding at the end of this process :).
Note, part of the fun is the forensic analysis to figure out why stuff didn't work the first time... Maybe a LDO Voron 3d printer kit would be a fun project too =3
I mean I'm a dummy who just wanted to listen to ISS static and trucker jargon.
Indeed, we also end up learning about our sun in levels of detail no person should find enthralling... lol =3
At least in the UK you can't if you're a linux user, the software they use to spy on you while taking the test is windows only.
Well first off, the certificate comes with certain guarantees, and they can't give those guarantees if they can't prove you didn't cheat on the test. "spy on you" is absolutely correct, but a bad faith phrasing. That said, I did my AWS test at a test / exam center where there's isolated computers and cameras to validate that there was no cheating.
dangerous to students
It's fatally dangerous to students who ignore it or dismiss it out of hand. That much is already certain.
Wait and see. You're not paying attention now, but it's not too late to start.
Go to your favorite programming puzzle site and see how you do against the latest models, for instance. If you can beat o1-pro regularly, for instance, then you're right, you have nothing to worry about and can safely disregard it. Same proposition that was offered to John Henry.
Please reformulate your argument, and I will check back tomorrow:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aNSHZG9blQQ
LLMs are rules based search engines with higher dimension vector spaces encoding related topics. There is nothing intelligent about these algorithms, except the trick ones play on oneself interpreting well structured nonsense.
It is stunting kids development, as students often lack the ability to intuitively reason when they are being misled. "How many R's in 'Strawberry'?" is a classic example exposing the underlying pattern recognition failures. =3
> Get a ham radio technician license, and you may develop an intuitive perspective on most electrical engineering concepts.
May. I managed to get one without developing much intuition for most EE concepts, unfortunately.