Four pounds of hardware ingested by a jet engine is going to do a shitload of damage.
I agree, but apparently that's the rule.
Readit Newsdaemonologist commented on High-Altitude Adventure with a DIY Pico Balloon spectrum.ieee.org/explore... · Posted by u/jnord
daemonologist commented on High-Altitude Adventure with a DIY Pico Balloon spectrum.ieee.org/explore... · Posted by u/jnord
Okay, though, for very small hobbyist payloads, though, wouldn't hydrogen balloons be feasible?
Some quick math tells me that you can lift approximately a kilogram of mass per cubic meter (at sea level, anyway). If your balloon's full weight is a half of a kilogram, you'd only need about a large beach ball filled with hydrogen to lift it. That seems like something that would be attainable for an outdoor DIY electrolysis setup.
Oh for sure - in fact I believe weather balloons usually use hydrogen (not for demos, but for large scale/daily actual weather purposes). It's just amusing that the regulations effectively encourage use of the more... energetic lifting gas.
daemonologist commented on Voxtral Transcribe 2 mistral.ai/news/voxtral-t... · Posted by u/meetpateltech
This demo is really impressive: https://huggingface.co/spaces/mistralai/Voxtral-Mini-Realtim...
Don't be confused if it says "no microphone", the moment you click the record button it will request browser permission and then start working.
I spoke fast and dropped in some jargon and it got it all right - I said this and it transcribed it exactly right, WebAssembly spelling included:
> Can you tell me about RSS and Atom and the role of CSP headers in browser security, especially if you're using WebAssembly?
404 on https://mistralai-voxtral-mini-realtime.hf.space/gradio_api/... for me (which shows up in the UI as a little red error in the top right).
daemonologist commented on High-Altitude Adventure with a DIY Pico Balloon spectrum.ieee.org/explore... · Posted by u/jnord
I wish the regulations around HAB were not so lighter-than-air gas centric. Hot air balloons are much more accessible, especially solar heated hot air balllons. But they have much less lift per volume and so the FAA FAR 101 rules basically say they all have to be treated as the type where you inform the FAA beforehand and then every hour about their position among other things.
https://www.ecfr.gov/current/title-14/chapter-I/subchapter-F...
>any balloon that is moored to the surface of the earth or an object thereon and that has a diameter of more than 6 feet or a gas capacity of more than 115 cubic feet.
And the regulations on tethered balloons end up being even stricter than letting them go.
FAA wants you to use hydrogen. >roll safe<
daemonologist commented on High-Altitude Adventure with a DIY Pico Balloon spectrum.ieee.org/explore... · Posted by u/jnord
If you keep the payload under 4 pounds I believe it's theoretically unregulated in the US except section 101.7 - don't create a hazard. I would still try to be approximately in compliance with part 101 though. Not a laywer.
daemonologist commented on Grid: Free, local-first, browser-based 3D printing/CNC/laser slicer grid.space/stem/... · Posted by u/cyrusradfar
Any circuit designers? looking to hobby, but what I saw was all proprietary
You mean like PCBs? KiCad is pretty popular.
daemonologist commented on TeraWave Satellite Communications Network blueorigin.com/news/blue-... · Posted by u/T-A
I think customer speeds is 144 and the 6Tb is their ground links to their stations. That is my take on it at least as its not super clear. I'm curious as to how it works as well.
My read was that they're going to have 144 Gbps RF for both regular users and their ground station gateways, and 6 Tbps optical for satellite-satellite back haul, but then you can also buy direct ground-MEO access to a back haul link. (Presumably MEO-only because it's hard to maintain the link to a fast-moving LEO satellite?)
They don't seem to mention using optical for their own ground stations - maybe too unreliable?
How do Darn Toughs compare? I've managed to wear through 8 pairs of costco wool socks without loosing any, so the idea of a lifetime warranty sounds promising.
They last longer than the others (though I have still put holes in many pairs) and as mentioned have the warranty. I prefer the fit of Smartwool but still wear almost exclusively Darn Tough for the durability.
daemonologist commented on US electricity demand surged in 2025 – solar handled 61% of it electrek.co/2026/01/16/us... · Posted by u/doener
Contrary opinion: too much farmland is being turned over to solar. Our regulatory systems are not working. Land that once produced food now produces electricity. Turning a food farm into solar is too easy (ie cheap). The land is flat and there are nearby roads and electricity networks. And who is going to tell a farmer how to best use thier land? But the world needs more than datacenters. The world needs food.
Solar should be installed on unproductive land. Buildings should be covered in panels. Carparks should have solar roofs. If i were king of zoning, every new construction would be required to cover say 50% of thier footprint in panels. That is the direction to go. We should not continue to convert farmland.
A total parody, but on point. "Can I Beat Farming Sim WITHOUT FARMING?" - The Spiffing Brit
I'll bite: the US dedicates about 5 billion bushels of corn a year to ethanol production [0], which is basically solar with extra steps. At a generous yield of 190 bushels/acre [1], this is 26 million acres dedicated to ethanol production (WRI puts it at 30m [2]).
Depending on who you ask, it would take somewhere between 2.5 [3] and 13.5 million acres [4] of solar to supply total US electricity demand, including storage and maintenance etc. We could double it to be safe and account for the reduction in ethanol production, and it would still all fit within the land currently used for corn ethanol. (btw this works out to a >10x increase in efficiency over ethanol.)
Of course I do agree that there's lots of less productive land (desert in the west, grazing land in the plains, and parking lots/rooftops everywhere) that should be used when available. But even in the midwest and east the land use is not a problem.
[0] - https://www.ers.usda.gov/publications/pub-details?pubid=1057...
[1] - https://www.ncga.com/stay-informed/media/the-corn-economy/ar...
[2] - https://www.wri.org/insights/increased-biofuel-production-im...
[3] - https://blogs.ucl.ac.uk/energy/2015/05/21/fact-checking-elon...
[4] (PDF) - https://docs.nrel.gov/docs/fy08osti/42463.pdf
daemonologist commented on Pocket TTS: A high quality TTS that gives your CPU a voice kyutai.org/blog/2026-01-1... · Posted by u/pain_perdu
Is there something similar for STT? I’m using whisper distill models and they work ok. Sometimes it gets what I say completely wrong.
Parakeet is not really more accurate than Whisper, but it's much faster - faster than realtime even on CPU: https://huggingface.co/nvidia/parakeet-tdt-0.6b-v3 . You have to use Nemo though, or mess around with third-party conversions. (Also has a big brother Canary: https://huggingface.co/nvidia/canary-1b-v2. There's also the confusingly named/positioned Nemotron speech: https://huggingface.co/nvidia/nemotron-speech-streaming-en-0...)