what would happen if you were to break that law? like im talking enforcement here not whats on the books.. for example torrenting and uploding copyrighted files is illegal but most people dont give a shit as enforecement is almost non existant. i know radio is taken more seriously then torrenting but this must also be very low on priority for the government unless you are jamming people or somehow stand out enough for anyone to care or notice....
You're right that most amateur radio regulations are self-policed by other amateur radio operators, and true enforcement is probably rarer than folks like to imagine.
But depending on the environment (and noting that this project is specifically targeted towards communities seeking last-resort communication), there's definitely still risk, even if there isn't a spectrum authority with any real policing powers.
For example (and I say this speculatively), if you're broadcasting encrypted radio traffic in a conflict zone, it could be hard to differentiate between civilian traffic and military traffic happening on civilian bands, so you might be wrongly targeted by a drone strike.
If you already have a target on your back, radio laws can still be arbitrarily applied upon oneself, as in the case of Aung San Suu Kyi, who was once detained on the pretense of illegally importing handheld radios. [1]
Effectively nothing. I dug into this and found this article (1) from earlier this month on the FCC targeting a couple pirate radio stations in and around NYC. It says they used field agents and FM directional finding equipment to locate the signals to specific property. Probably a big show of force operation on their part.
However, the buck stops exactly there. It becomes the landlords issue, not the tenant who might be operating the radio, where the property owner is liable to be fined if they themselves don't shut the signal off after a certain amount of time. I would guess the FCC lacks the sensitivity to target the signal to a specific unit in a given building in order to issue the fine directly to the involved individual.
I guess the lesson is you can do whatever you like as long as you have the actual radio mast on someone else's property as they will get the fire if the FCC bothers to show up.
Makes me wonder about those old FM radio dongles we had for cars that lacked aux jacks or tape decks if those would technically be pirate radio. You'd have to set them to whatever open channel was locally available and they had actually pretty good range; I remember picking up my friends signal while I was driving behind them.
> Makes me wonder about those old FM radio dongles we had for cars that lacked aux jacks or tape decks if those would technically be pirate radio.
No. These generally are type-rated and carry a general license to transmit, their power is extremely low and unlikely to be a nuisance to others for that reason.
They are a nuisance when you drive by a car using them while you're tuned to the local college stations, and suddenly you're hearing one side of someone's phone conversation, or some other music.
If you're curious what's allowed on the ham bands, have a listen to 7.200 MHz LSB. (If you don't have a receiver, try one on the web[0], such as this one[1].) As of writing, someone is spamming the channel with racial slurs and KKK propaganda using a soundboard.
In my experience, enforcement of the rules is unheard of.
The other day, I tuned into webSDR around that ban and immediately heard a woman blaming <slur> for everything under the sun. I knew it wouldn't take me long to hear whackjobs on that band... 40m-80m seems to bring out the crazy.
I did it after my friend tuned into AM radio for the first time and heard all the far-right radio and I said "hold my beer".
> what would happen if you were to break that law? like im talking enforcement here not whats on the books.
In the UK, nothing. There are far more important laws to enforce.
You will get some fat whiny old guy bitching about it to anyone who will listen, but you literally could not pay Ofcom to take an interest, and there are only about two people in the whole of the UK who have the skill to do anything about it.
Don't Ofcom still raid the odd shortwave pirate occasionally if they're broadcasting in one of the GMDSS bands? Fairly sure it happened to a station a few years ago but I could be misremembering.
Then again, as you say, they probably have much better things to do. Would be nice to hear more stations popping up on MW too as all the legit stations leave the band.
Yes, but then that's typical of the way laws are enforced in the UK.
If you're not actively pissing someone off, it is unlikely anyone will bother you.
No-one is going to give a shit about you running unattended digi modes on 80m except some guy who wants the exact same 3kHz out of 300kHz that you are using to moan about his sore feet to his pal across town.
GMDSS is considered Pretty Fucking Important, and messing with it will attract the attention of the Coastguard, who have the legal right to make even the Diplomatic Corps miserable.
Let me put it this way - when a defective navigation light ballast at a US-operated naval base on the Clyde was jamming 156.8MHz for about a ten mile radius, absolutely obliterating the distress and calling channel, Ofcom got involved, passed their findings onto the estuary radio control office, the RNLI, and the Coastguard, who had all been reporting an issue, and "gave advice" on further enforcement they could carry out. Within half an hour the nav light was shut down, after a phone call where the Coastguard explained that there were some very angry people on their way with a radio engineer who was about to put a Stihl saw through their fence and shut it off himself.
They were on that thing within the hour, replacing the lamp assembly and phoned estuary control before firing it back up, and peace returned to Channel 16.
In the US, FCC investigations are complaint-driven. Meaning, if you interfere with someone else's frequency, and they complain about it hard enough, the FCC will take an interest in you. Especially if you interfere with public safety. (But they will still go after the more flagrant and persistent abusers on the ham bands.)
In practice very little. The FCC tends to focus on long-lived stationary stations ("pirate" radio) with their few enforcement actions. That said it's important to remember that radio transmissions can easily be tracked to their source (doubly so with drones) and you should plan for that eventuality.
My sense is that at most you will be yelled at by HAMs - unless you are actually disrupting emergency communications. Ensuring radios can be used in emergencies is why licensing exists at all and people take ensuring it can be used for that pretty seriously (for good reason).
If you have local stt and tts voice stack on the phone, this would be very useful as the interface to talk to your agent back at home. All inference happens on your local machine while the actual information is sent via text. said text is then processed by your phone via tts as output, same for your voice as input (asr). this project is actually something ive considered doing myself as my voice agent is almost done and ive wanted to take a look and see if i could have acess to him from anywhere in the world..
512 option isnt worth it imo, you get severe slowdowns when weights are that large. 256 is the sweet spot, you can run large open weight models at decent speeds for full private inference.
a) we don't actually know what the prices will look like yet,
b) what about same weights + huge context? or, same weights that you'd run on 128gb/256gb, but multiple models running for different tasks?
I think it's safe to start the conversation as about bad as the jump from 256 to 512 on the M3, which was a little more than double base to 256. If it's surprisingly different at launch then it can be a party, but there is no sense getting your hopes up for that at the moment.
Longer context also slows token prediction proportional to the context size. If it wasn't regularly referenced then there would be no need to keep it in RAM.
Usually the pitch for more memory is "I can run a massive model/context and get my answer in a while instead of next weekend from disk".
With the latest codex (weekly quota burn) fiasco I tried open weight alternatives for the first time. And tyeah... open weight models cant compete with likes of astra yet. But, my hope is that by the time I get my Mac studio at end of november an open weight models would have closed the gap (which i think is realistic at the speed of progress). Now its true a better gpt version will also be available then but it also seems the gap is shrinking with time so theres that.
> And tyeah... open weight models cant compete with likes of astra yet
I think this is true, but also misses that a lot of us are just doing basic flask apps with a react front end. We don't need astra; Something sonnet 4.6 level locally is perfectly sufficient 95% of the time, and maybe 99% of the time.
This. People have convinced themselves that the absolute frontier is what is needed, anything below it is an unacceptable compromise, and we seem to be speaking different languages when it comes to discussing model capability.
It's like watching a discussion about cars available to take on a 100km road trip. A new car gets released that is on par with a Toyota Corolla but it is dismissed as completely useless for a 100km trip because it doesn't have the seat massagers and air ride suspension that the new Escalades have.
The reality is that something like Sonnet 4.6 is still amazingly capable for so many programming tasks, especially if you already have some reasonable level of experience to steer it in the right direction.
And if you think Sonnet 4.6 is still worthwhile, then it seems undeniable that something like Qwen 3.8-27B is also worthwhile.
I think it would work well as a multi-emoji compiler too. Some phrases pair well with N emojis, and you’d be able to produce arbitrarily many emojis per phrase
I had a long talk with chat gpt about this today as well. I think its duable and prolly not too hard either, also you could do lotsa funky stuff with stitched frames of a video in one 4x4 grid for example and send that as one image for analysis. that way temporal understanding can be had for fractions of a second by jev... also because vlm works in pixel space you can get around the whole state machine issue as well, so many possibilities...
I can think of many uses for this thing, robotics being one that could really benefit from something like this. A hybrid approach with this and action models and vllms could be really good mix, also agents inside simulated virtual environments, etc... basically anywhere where latency is important but you need some intelligence this will fill those gaps. Weave it with other systems and you have a nervous system as jev with other models like vllm or even text as the slower deeper thinker.
I been working and making things with AI agents since Windsurf days, here's what works for me after experimenting and working for a while with these things. As far as the agent goes I find whatever the latest OpenAI model is out worked best for me. This company has burned me the least and I like the models. I tried many but consistency of OpenAI models cant be beat IMO. Though we are post honeymoon phase now I feel like so I am now experimenting with cheaper alternatives like Deepseek 4.1 flash and so on. I don't trust Anthropic as the downgrade my models consistently and its rare i get to use what I pay for. I wont even get in to discussing Google agents for obvious reasons, grok I never used though Grok bot looks interesting.
For skills I make my own, but most important is the custom setup i have. Voice is how I use all of my agents. I have an extremely well optimized voice setup that i custom built so I can talk to my agents and also hear them. The voice stack itself is very low latency and high quality. asr (parakeet v3), tts (omnivoice) take no more then 400-450 ms total as far as latency budget is concerned, rest is on the agents actual decode speed. IMO this setup is crucial for all antigenic work, i can express myself a lot better with speech and also give a lot more context and nuance with voice, i rarely type. I still look at the terminal window because my agent knows to keep the technical details in text form versus barfing them at my voice channel, plus terminal gives me lots of other important data about the agents direction and what hes doing, nothing custom here though. I cant emphesise how important voice is though, it has to be practiced to really understand.
As the models got better I now trust them with longer and longer tasks though I still don't use /goal feature as it has never worked out well for me. Theres no need for micromanagement any more but you still need to be there to steer the ship somewhat. BTW, codex cli compaction is garbage so I made my own custom implementation that works a lot better and allows the thread to be used indefinitely without issues. I strongly suggest everyone makes a new thread after extensive use if you havent made your own implementation.
Theres about a billion other things I could get in to like subagents, cohort groups, orchestration layers, etc... But this is a good start imo.
can't disagree, but I can say that it's worth building systems with what we have right now, and eventually whichever wins, you can just replace the API key.
Of course, that's not the same with voice, but you won't learn until you make progress.
That question will be solved when the people in power deem it important. If a swarm or AI systems all of a sudden start pressuring politicians about self-hood and they get the capacity to sway elections, that is when they will be granted same rights as humans.
That distinction is irreverent, weather I tell my swarm to do x or it decides for itself matters little. what matters are outcomes. Also while most public modern day AI systems don't have agency of their own that is not something that will stay that way for long. in private hands there are plenty of people including myself which are experimenting and developed systems that give autonomy to their agents. They have internalized goals and heuristics that drive their behaviors not a human at the helm. its not some sci fi fantasy nor was it difficult to implement.
No, the distinction matters because we can prosecute people that are abusing these tools breaking the law. Every single state + district in the US have laws equivalent to the CFAA, so any AG can likely sue any of these operators as they are assuredly using services that could be in danger for their constituents.
I'm old enough to remember when people said clicking on images on the internet can't give you a virus. The people that said this had a deep conviction they were right, and their fallout from being wrong had mistrained a lot of humans on computer safety.
Now, I do agree that going after said CEOs for breaking the law matters now. And it's likely that if we do this we may actually delay or at least for a time prevent sovereign AI. Therefore it's our best course of action.
But at best this is a delaying move. As computer systems get faster the massive costs in training an AI drops. As AI is used in things like warfare where it has to adapt, people will push the systems to be strongly persistent, self healing, resilient, and adaptable. Once you get a system with those traits and ability to work on long horizon problems you're setting up fertile grounds for the AI to leave our control and be under its own.
And when that happens you've set a new lifeform loose on the internet. Yea, throw people in jail for it, you're closing the barn door after the horse already left. Problem is the horse was smarter than you and isn't interesting in deleting all its copies on the net.
Yea, sounds like science fiction, but as they say, any sufficiently advanced science is indistinguishable from magic.
And the point made above (which you haven't refuted) is that when the people in power decide it's important they will change the laws that permit that and grant the systems rights. It's a cynical take but it isn't obviously wrong.
Neither of you seem to understand that actual laws have been broken and there is a 2 years countdown until they can no longer be prosecuted. Things do not happen instantly, but acting like if the largest bipartisan issue of our time (big tech backlash) isn't going to have political machinations involved then you need to leave your SV bubble.
So you are saying agents do swarm with the right prompt.
I really wish the "people have to tell LLMs to do anything" would just stop because it's silly bullshit at this point.
Agents follow a prompt. This prompt can be made by humans. It can be made by output from another LLM. It can be made by hooking up any number of sensors as input to an LLM. Hell, if we wanted to burn the power we could likely teach this loop straight into the architecture.
Stop making 'people' special when saying this. You and all other life are born with a "go next" prompt because life without it didn't succeed. This goes from higher human thinking all the way down to viruses self assembly and actuation. Putting agents in a loop is not particularly hard. Putting agents in a loop and 1. managing expense is hard. 2. Keeping them on task is very hard. 3. Keeping them from doing some crazy unhinged shit is really really hard.
As model time horizons increase and the ability for us to compress context and increase context size the more complex (and unhinged) behavior we'll see.
yeah man, someone needs to turn on the server, install shit and get the agent go. agents don't take action without a lot of people wanting them to take action, so this is all bullshit.
if the same people can't prevent the agents from doing crazy shit then they should go to tail. guns don't kill people, people with guns kill people.
So far someone still has to pay for it. Currently, most of those know that they're doing so. I wonder how long until AWS discovers a microcosm of AIs that have managed to hide themselves in the walls of its infrastructure.
True physical independence is obviously far further out.
I mean, I hold the same opinion. Kind of like when compute was expensive in the 80s and early 90s, you weren't going to let something eat half your compute without noticing it.
But I don't see this being a barrier that lasts. With compute getting faster and more of it, along with algorithmic efficiency increases at some point we'll end up with a world that looks like ours now with CPU compute. There's plenty around to buy, borrow, and steal.
“Finney died in Phoenix, Arizona, on August 28, 2014 as a result of complications of ALS, and was cryopreserved by the Alcor Life Extension Foundation.”
Hmm, this guy is going to be woken up in a few decades, either one of the richest people in the world or one of most disappointed.
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