We gave our oldest a basic feature flip-phone when he started Middle School, mainly so he could text and coordinate pickups. In 7th grade, we gave him a smartphone because he was going on a class trip to DC and the kids were encouraged to take pictures and share. At home, we made it a rule that the phone had to be plugged into charger in our bedroom to avoid bedtime disruption.

That same year I created social media accounts for him on every service, mainly to reserve his username. But they were all blocked using parental controls, based on advice from school. We also had software/hardware from Circle (now Aura: https://meetcircle.com/) that blocked access on wifi and cell and capped usage.

In high school, when he turned 16, as part of his birthday gift, we gave him an envelope with his own non-school email account, and all the links and passwords for social media accounts. We also took away all the filter blocks. Figured he was mature enough without feeling left out.

It really worked out well. Later, he asked to put usage limits back on so he would be forced to put it down and go to sleep.

Amazed it’s the first one. That entire region (including much of Hungary) were Roman territory.

“Je suis Charlie.”

😔

Have you looked at the free courses from AWS?

https://explore.skillbuilder.aws/learn/courses/16434/exam-prep-standard-course-aws-certified-cloud-practitioner-clf-c02-english

More links on the site: https://aws.amazon.com/certification/certified-cloud-practitioner/

Best practice, if going further, is to set up a console account and practice experimenting within free tier.

Wonder:

• How do they handle someone who may not be performing as well as others?
• What’s the process for conflict resolution? Both professional and inter-personal.
• Not sure if they’ve been through a big global recession yet. That’s usually when companies and their policies get tested.

Not to take away from their unique model. Just curious how the idealism handles the messy parts of human nature.

I’ve always appreciated the feature of AI coding tools, where they confidently tell you they’ve done something completely wrong. Then if you call them on it, they super-confidently say: “Of course, here’s what needs to be done…”

Then proceed to do something even worse.

There’s a very simple solution to autonomous driving vehicles plowing into walls, cars, or people:

Congress will pass a law that makes NOBODY liable – as long as a human wasn’t involved in the decision making process during the incident.

This will be backed by car makers, software providers, and insurance companies, who will lobby hard for it. After all, no SINGLE person or company made the decision to swerve into oncoming traffic. Surely they can’t be held liable. 🤷🏻‍♂️

Once that happens, Level 4 driving will come standard and likely be the default mode on most cars. Best of luck everyone else!

Nothingburger. For the vast majority of users the audio was already getting sent to the cloud for realtime processing. Nothing here changes that.

For a few devices, some amount of processing was getting done on-device. Now, with the fancy LLMs, it has to revert to sending it all to the cloud.

Just turn on the feature to delete the recording after each processing. Best you can get if you want to keep using these devices and not run an NVidia processing cluster in your kitchen.

Excellent insights. You’ve given me a lot more new things I’ve never heard of to look up and investigate (ARES, ARK, POD).

There’s a registered Meshtastic node near me that places it on the side of a mountain in an open space. Going to get in touch with them. It has line of sight to half the city from that high up.

I’m going to use all this info to find out what the local municipality has already set up for DR at the next CERT class. Also what gaps need to be filled. Lots more to learn.

Much appreciate all the info. Anyone reading this, please keep it coming.

Thanks for the tip, will also look into ARES.

I’ve only taken one of the CERT classes. Will have another next week and am signed up for three more. My understanding is that CERT is targeted at civilians who form a neighborhood first response team in case official services are inaccessible or stretched thin.

The material leans heavily toward self-help (medical triage, food/water/medicine caches, etc) until help arrives. My thinking was the official channels already have access to UHF/VHF for their own comms. But CERT trainers kept repeating that if a big disaster hits, neighborhood groups should plan to make do for 10 days (and maybe up to 30) before outside help can come in.

Assuming 10 days without power, gas, or water and maybe closed roads, seemed like Meshtastic might be a good way to coordinate inside these neighborhood groups and across them.

The LilyGo T-Deck (https://lilygo.cc/products/t-deck?variant=44907372413109) with a 3D printed or IP-66/67 enclosure seems like an inexpensive civilian-friendly device to offer CERT groups without requiring a radio license. But the repeater network needs to be there and configured for redundancy. TBH, I don’t know if it’s a good solution, but I’m going to ask the instructors this week if there are any alternatives already in place. Meanwhile, I’m trying to learn as much as I can (hence the post).

We’re in earthquake terrain (a fault line runs through the middle of town). My concern would be what happens in case of a Loma Prieta scale quake. Going to do some research on fault tolerance, redundancy, and avoiding single points of failure.

Have a buddy who works at a FAANG and has been doing a lot of work on DR. He showed me a picture of his stash of prototypes. Turned out all were built on top of Meshtastic. Going to hit him up for tips next week.

That’s actually a great clip to show the CERT training folks here. Will share it with them this coming week at the class. Thanks!

Awesome tips, thank you!

The highest peak around here has a communication tower on it. Pretty sure some of it is for municipal services. Will do research on what it will take to stick a router up there, if there isn’t one already.

Not a formal audit, but a more recent review of the protocol: https://soatok.blog/2025/02/18/reviewing-the-cryptography-used-by-signal/

My kid was told to fill one out, even though we knew we didn’t qualify. After a LOT of paperwork, it came back with an offer of a $2K loan.