AI - The god we made

I highly recommend the feature essay in the latest Quarterly Essay titled "The God we made - the threat and promise of artificial intelligence" by Anna Goldsworthy.

My newsagent's penchant for placing their price stickers over the title makes this look like "Arterly Essay" which is somewhat appropriate as Anna is a music academic but is impressively well read in the AI realm including the amazing Dwarkesh podcasts. 

She talks about the impact on writing, music, art, education and work "the bottom rungs of the career ladder have been knocked out".

On education she observes something that I've also thought, that the current crisis in students using AI to answer their assessments is not to be blamed on AI but rather the mass production of assessment.

Apart from her alarm at the high chance that we'll all be wiped out by artificial super intelligence in its quest to make paperclips, she celebrates the capability of AI to help us all educate ourselves.

Spelling checkers didn't make us good spellers. Grammar checkers don't improve our grammar. Will AI Chatbots dumb down our thinking or raise us up to a higher level of enquiry?

Postscript

After reading this I re-watched Spike Jonze 2013 Movie "Her". If Apple ever makes a folding phone he will have been correct in pretty much everything.

Updates to FreeDV Neo

Work continues on my little FreeDV RADE V1 native app for macOS. Feedback from some users bemoaned the lack of fancy visualisations so I've addressed that. The latest version also improves the operation of the Reporter window quite a bit and adds a filter by my frequency option.

More information and a download link is here.

It's great to see all the third party FreeDV RADE apps starting to appear. We have a list of known ones on the FreeDV site here. Let me know of others that I've missed.

Tech talk on ABC Radio - AI is costing us in more ways than one

This week on ABC Nightlife we discussed new data from a study by the University of Newcastle, published in the British Medical Journal, that concludes that more than 80% of teens under 16 are still accessing social media sites banned in Australia. The government has moved to increase penalties but our teens are technically pretty advanced it seems. 

Social media is currently awash with AI generated content designed to encourage division and presumably promote far right politics. 

Finally, Apple has increased prices due to shortages and price rises of components used to build out AI server farms. Other manufacturers have signalled significant price rises as well. AI is costing us all in ways we never expected. Listen here: https://www.abc.net.au/listen/programs/nightlife/ai-is-about-to-cost-us-more-than-we-anticipated/106862726 

Mems microphone to USB Audio

A PDM (Pulse Density Microphone) and a Raspberry Pi Pico. It appears on the computer as an audio input (I changed the name from the original).

All credit for this project to Sandeep Mistry here. 

A recording of how it sounds (pretty good) is here. There's a bit of mic popping - perhaps a pop filter would help.

Applications of this technology are swirling in my mind...

Strain relief for RG58U coax - 3D print

I've been a bit slack with my dipoles here in the bush, the coax just hangs from the PL259. It's been fine until kangaroos catch the coax and rip the coax out. The repair isn't too hard but I thought I'd look for a way to relieve the strain on the connection and ended up with my own design for 3D printing.

It has a channel that the coax fits in to and two cable ties to grip it.

3mm cord lifts the coax slightly so that there's no weight on the PL259. 

I designed it in Tinkercad and you're free to grab it for printing for further modification here. It will be interesting to see what breaks when a Kangaroo goes through it next time.

FreeDV Sunday net - moved to 7.197

For a few weeks we've run in to analog traffic when using 7.177 so today we moved to 7.197 and the frequency was clear so I think we might stay here in future. Most stations figured out that we'd moved so we had a good rollup and an interesting discussion about the proposal to report centre frequency rather than dial frequency in future.

It was noted that Icom radios have an option to tune to the centre but most of us have turned that off.

FreeDV reporter was a little unstable today.

Stations on the net included VK2AWN, VK2BLQ (combination digital voice and valve audio with 6AU6 and 6AQ5), VK2KNC, VK3FC, VK3GTP, VK3JCO, VK3KEZ, VK3ZTR, VK5AG, VK5ABE, VK5FD, VK5JPL, VK5RA and me, VK3TPM.

iPhone mount for monitor top - 3D print

In a video call with a friend recently I noticed that the video was noticably clearer than normal. They were using an iPhone as the camera rather than the camera in the monitor. 

It didn't take long to use TinkerCad to design a simple mount for my monitor. I've made it public here. 

The phone sits nicely with the camera used in this mode just above the monitor's build-in camera.

Here's the device. After the first prototype I went back and angled the phone forward a few degrees.

I use two of these but you can get by with one. My monitor is about 18mm thick so you might need to adjust the hook part for your monitor.

3D printers are such a useful thing in the world.

PicoRX SDR software for a Raspberry Pi PICO

Amazing work by Jon Dawson at 101 Things and others to bring a very capable SDR to the RaspberryPi PICO.

I've forked the project here and had claude write some very useful documentation on the user interface operation.

It sounds great:

You might notice that my display is offset two pixels to the left. The solution is to select the OLED type of SH1106 instead of the default SSD1306. (It seems they are frequently substituted).

Jon's blog post here is very good reading.

If you're interested in building one of these, I'm not aware of anyone selling these boards - you might try contacting the Manly Warringah Radio Society or it's pretty easy and low cost to upload the gerbers from VK2ARH (he designed this board) git repository and get them made.

I've recently ordered Jon Dawson's board from JLCPCB and the price for 5 was US$5 + shipping. (Shipping costs significantly more than boards).

Sunday FreeDV net - diversity of software

A terrific net this morning on 40m here in VK3. We had stations in VK2, VK3, VK5 and VK7. Stations were using not just FreeDV 2.3.1 but also the macOS FreeDVNeo and the Thetis SDR software. One was listening on an SDR that decodes RADE at the Nepean Men's Shed.

There was some SSB partly overlapping our normal frequency of 7.177 so I moved up 2kHz to 7.179. Most people realised but at least one didn't and when they transmitted interfered. In future I'll be careful to move at least 3kHz away. Lesson learned.

Here's some of the stations on the net, if you haven't heard RADEV1 this will give you a good idea of how it typically sounds.

Stations on the net included: VK2AWN, VK2BLQ, VK2DWG, VK3FAR, VK3FC, VK2KNC, VK3GTP, VK3JCO, VK3JF, VK3KEZ, VK3ZTR, VK5ABE, VK5FD, VK5RA, VK7HOB and me, VK3TPM.

Thanks to Stephen, VK2BLQ, for sending this clip of his reception of me in Sydney (about 1000km away).

Tech Talk on ABC Radio - Apple's developer announcements

This week on Nightlife Tech we discus the announcements at Apple's Worldwide Developer Conference. iOS 27, macOS 27 and the others will ship to users in a few months. The Siri features Apple showed two years ago seem to be real this time and the overreach in the Liquid Glass user interface design is being dialled back to be more usable.

In other AI news, after the success of the SpaceX IPO, based largely on future profit from their AI component, the other AI companies - OpenAI and Anthropic - are also planning their own IPOs. One model, "Fable 5", from Anthropic was released and then withdrawn for non-US citizens and this highlights a risk to Australians who rely on AI cloud services not controlled by us. Listen here: https://www.abc.net.au/listen/programs/nightlife/nightlife-tech-talk-with-peter-marks/106805414