Posted by kareiva 23 hours ago
Also I only realized after finishing the article what a breath of fresh air it was to read something that came straight from another human's brain without LLM intermediation. Thank you to the author for that too.
That's because the author folded over and played nice. Imagine if he exercised his first amendment rights.
I found it a little difficult to follow
I have a bunch of memorable experiences from it, including:
1. Under inflating the first balloon because our helium provider was closed, and instead buying lower pressure "party" balloon containers (and not realizing until too late that lower pressure meant more helium left in the containers)
2. Chasing down the balloon at night and trying to explain why you wanted to walk onto some guys field to check for a weather balloon
3. Later calling a gas station to ask if "some guy just arrived with a weather balloon in their truck" when trying to track down the balloon
If anyone has kids and wants a fun project, I highly recommend it. There are a few companies online that sell kits, and it's neat to watch the different layers of the atmosphere (temperature and wind), and try to "chase" after the balloon and find it afterwards.
About the lowest thing that could reasonably be called space is the Karmin line, and that's at 100km, or 330,000ft.
Some of the memorable experiences from it:
1) Purchasing equipment to do a Hydrogen launch because this was during a Helium shortage and the cost difference was significant. Arrived at store to pick up our Hydrogen tank where the guy working took a look at us knuckleheads and had serious reservations about selling us inexperienced dorks Hydrogen. Took pity on us and swapped out all of our fittings (hydrogen fittings are specific to prevent accidental use of hydrogen) and sold us the tank of Helium for a much cheaper price than what we were originally told.
2) Printing up stickers to attach to the payload box with "If Found" contact instructions only to realize one second after letting go of the payload that you forgot to attach said stickers.
3) The terror of realizing that when the balloon took off that it immediately headed west when the flight predictions you had been running for the previous days before all showed the balloon landed east.
4) Having to contact ATC to report the launch of the balloon, only to be told they needed further updates at every 10,000' feet.
5) The terror setting in deeper when the consumer GPS unit stopped responding after 30,000' altitude and then having ATC scold how unprofessional we were for using cheap devices. At least they told us they were still tracking it.
6) The shenanigans a group of knuckleheads got up to waiting the ~3 hours for the balloon to land.
7) The relief when the consumer GPS unit started pinging updates again on the way down and the laugh (with us not at us) from ATC that we could start reporting back again.
8) Using mobile Google Maps to attempt to find the GPS location. Wandering around fields in the middle of the night to find a strange circular pattern of out of place plants to realize it was from a deer feeder's throw. Then searching for the nearby camera trap to wave to leave some hunter with serious WTF.
9) Nearly giving up on the search until deciding to use the hotspot to look up the GPS coordinates not on a mobile device to see that the balloon was less than 300' from where we parked making the hours spent wandering really dumb.
Ah yes, the CoCom export control limits so you can't use it to build an ICBM. Legally they're supposed to stop working above 60,000 ft and 1,200 mph, but some manufacturers interpret that as an "or". The rumor was that some really cheap chips out of China failed to implement either, so if you'd bought a crappier gps module, you might have been fine!
That's an awesome story tho!
Any country with the knowhow to make an ICBM can source or build a gps receive without said restriction. Just saying.
That's like putting a sign "no burglary permitted" and leaving the door wide open.
Well indirectly about how they work and to counter them.
[0] https://www.highaltitudescience.com/products/eagle-pro-near-...
I should really do a write-up sometime.
Among other things. And this was the most sane part of Meteolabor's email
Instead the implied mode of operation is that they shut down after 10 hours, but sometimes they dont and after 12 hours the battery is empty. Or maybe it's another trigger (location?) that is not always active or does not always trigger
I wonder how often this happens outside of software? Do fence manufacturers get emails asking to identify the culprit when someone crashes through a fence?
A person like that sending inquiries to website/API operators demanding data, ignore it. Always. Continue to ignore it until a process server actually shows up on your doorstep and serves you, in which case you know they're at least moderately serious, and then you need to engage your own counsel to deal with it.
If meeting the court's (or court parties') demands costs you something you are generally entitled to charge them for it, within reason and with justification.
As a hobbyist therefore putting a service offering page together with your preferred rate probably helps establish the nature and parameters of any such service.
Bill rates / piece rates, especially, and setting up bounds of what is reasonable to expect, in proportion to your gig and your intended effort level.
Quantity and price tiers, turnaround times, what will be included in the deliverable, how it will be delivered, SLAs, etc.
Whatever defines your service, esp as it relates to the types of requests you end up getting.
This is not a hobby, it’s a job.
This is why all my hobbies are dark web projects, these days.
Merely listing prices (without an associated automated payment form which could imply a contract was en force upon successful payment) doesn't actually force you to do business with anyone. It would however 1) deter requests for unpaid work by giving them an idea of what it would cost to get what they're looking for and 2) give you an idea of the demand for said services and could give you a warm lead which you can then choose to pursue formally by getting the necessary business structure, legal/business advice, etc.
In some cases it could. If you want to say "we categorically don't do X for ethical reasons", that can sometimes be more easily defensible in a way that "we have a standard price for doing this, but we don't want to do it for you in particular" may be harder to defend. (Even though I think both should always be possible.)
Insurance. This is about insurance.
See, in my country, you could not use a car's dashcam recording as evidence in a small claims court. But I could 100% use it with insurance. They don't abide by the same rules of what counts as evidence.
You have to be kind of lost to contact Daniel about it, but I think it's ok behaviour for junior sysadmins that are just starting out, everyone was starting out sometime, and curl is like a lightning catcher for the world's daily lucky thousand.
The dumb careless things that teens do on the web.
(per section 1.6 of USPS DMM 133 at https://pe.usps.com/text/dmm300/133.htm)
> we decided to start proxying radiosonde ingestion data through SondeHub
Redirecting to the habhub UI doesn't seem like it would also let them intercept people uploading their data to habhub.
Some interesting links:
https://www.hisutton.com/US-Navy-CIA-Submarine-Launched-Spy-...
https://www.hisutton.com/Chinese-Navy-High-Altitude-Spy-Ball...
The numerical predictions of weather models often have many vertical components as well, so solving it for ground level also requires extending the forecast to the air, depending on the model.
There are of course several different global weather models that predict the behavior of the atmosphere, and it is a lot more complicated than just interpolating past data. But they all do rely on radiosonde data for daily calibration of actual atmospheric conditions.