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I bet the hardest thing about surviving a nuclear war would be remembering how important and reasonable it seemed before the war to make those bombs and use them.

As someone who has purchased a half dozen SBCs over the years but who has also switched to mini PCs the other thing that you start to miss is having a real BIOS so you can install a vanilla operating system. With the SBCs, there is often a single Linux distro that is supported, and which rapidly stops getting updated. Even using stuff like Armbian, it's challenging to use an SBC that is more than a couple years old, and I've had bad experiences where the NIC stops working after a software update.


I'm not a physicist or biologist but what's always made sense to me is that anytime you walk outside during the day you are bathed in broad spectrum radiation from the sun. So anything weaker than the sun is probably safe enough. Anything a million or billion times weaker is probably a million or billion times safer. We already know when and how radios get dangerous (large transmission towers, microwave ovens, etc) and how to mitigate that danger. Inverse cube law and somesuch.


The sun is damaging because it contains ionizing radiation (radiation that is powerful enough to directly disassociate a molecule into ions). This is the UV portion of sunlight.

UV starts at 800,000 GHz.

The 6Ghz being discussed here is completely non-ionizing, not even comparable to UV.

The only concern with 6Ghz is that is can also cause dielectric heating, which is the same as a microwave. But again, at 25mW, you can't even feel the heat from direct contact with the antenna, let alone a few meters away. Your exposure follows the inverse-square law [1], which means that it drops proportional to the square of the distance. So if it's not a problem at 10cm, it's 100x less of a non-problem at 1m.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inverse-square_law


evolutionary argument is humans are aligned with broad spectrum radiation from the sun, but not the artificial forms which have different magnitudes in different frequencies.

Eg: you are much less likely to get sunburn if you get plenty of natural (or artificial) infrared.


There is no such thing as artificial forms of RF. They're all wiggling photons.

If nature gave us a flute, and man discovered how to make a bass guitar, all though they sound different the only real difference is that the bass guitar is wiggling air molecules more slowly than a flute would. There is zero, nil, no distinction whatsoever between a "natural" and "synthetic" photon wiggling at a given frequency.

> you are much less likely to get sunburn if you get plenty of natural (or artificial) infrared.

I'm gonna need to see a source for that.


> There is no such thing as artificial forms of RF. They're all wiggling photons.

This is categorically untrue.

Polarization: A Key Difference between Man-made and Natural Electromagnetic Fields, in regard to Biological Activity

https://www.nature.com/articles/srep14914



Horseshit. Sorry, but there are times to be tactful, and times to be blunt, and this is bluntly idiotic. I got as far as 2 sentences in:

> All types of man-made EMFs/EMR - in contrast to natural EMFs/EMR - are polarized.

which is so unbelievably wrong, like, completely out of touch with reality levels of incorrect, that I see no value in reading further.


Incorrect? What is incorrect? It looks like you do not know enough to comment with anything of substance.

Linear Polarization Antennas in Radio and Wireless Communication Systems

https://resources.system-analysis.cadence.com/blog/msa2021-l...

and

https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/8811421


I have an FCC certification vouching that I know what those words mean. Your linked diatribe says, quote, "All types of man-made EMFs/EMR". All. Antennas are polarized because that's the easiest way to build them, and the polarization has nice properties.

A standard incandescent lightbulb creates about 100W of unpolarized RF from around 400THz to 750THz. It is manmade, it's an RF emitter, it is not polarized, and it's something everyone older than the age of around 10 has spent their entire lives around.

So either the author is completely wrong in sentence number 2, or they're implying that visible light isn't RF. Either way, they're wrong, and you can ignore the rest of their claims.


> Your linked diatribe says, quote, "All types of man-made EMFs/EMR". All. Antennas are polarized because that's the easiest way to build them, and the polarization has nice properties.

You are comparing light bulbs to wireless communications? What is your point? He says "All types of man-made EMFs/EMR", not "all types of manmade energy". It is clear he does not think that light bulbs are dangerous. So now you are just being confusing on purpose to muddy the water.

But if you bother to READ the whole article you would see he agrees with you:

"Natural EMR/EMFs (cosmic microwaves, infrared, visible light, ultraviolet, gamma rays) and several forms of artificially triggered electromagnetic emissions (such as from light bulbs with thermal filaments, gas discharge lamps, x-rays, lasers, etc.) are not polarized. "

You know we were talking about EMFs from data communication types of man-made EMFs/EMR"s, but you are being ignorant on purpose, becasue you cannot even read anything that is new and conflicts with your ideas.


> You are comparing light bulbs to wireless communications? What is your point?

Visible light and Wi-Fi are the same physical phenomenon, just at different frequencies.

> several forms of artificially triggered electromagnetic emissions (such as from light bulbs with thermal filaments, gas discharge lamps, x-rays, lasers, etc.) are not polarized.

So, he contradicts himself.

Also:

> Natural EMR/EMFs (cosmic microwaves, infrared, visible light, ultraviolet, gamma rays) [...] are not polarized.

Oh yes they absolutely can be, and frequently are. Polarized sunglasses are specifically made to block the polarized light reflecting off lakes, snow, sand, or other surfaces. Does the author consider light reflecting off a lake to be unnatural, or is it the OK kind of polarized because it's "natural"?


> at a given frequency

I'm pretty sure their point is that certain frequencies are getting a lot more power than is naturally possible. Not that the photons are special in some way.


I'm not so sure. Even in these threads we see specious distinctions between "natural" and "man-made" EMF.

But even then, it's impossible to discuss without talking about relative strengths. Wi-Fi transmits at about 100mW at full strength. For math purposes, let's assume it's a point source broadcasting in all directions. (That's not that much of a wild assumption, either.) The surface area of a sphere with a radius of 1m is about 12.5 m^2. On average, then, the Wi-Fi RF strength at 1m away is about 0.008W/m^2.

The sun above us delivers about 1360W/m^2 of RF radiation, or approximately 170,000 times the radiation of standing a meter from a Wi-Fi router. If it's across the room, 4m away, the ratio is closer to 3,000,000:1.

Even if our bodies responded to "man-made" radiation differently than the "good, natural" kind, there's so very little of it relatively that it can't make much of a difference. I mean, ever look at a 100W lightbulb? If Wi-Fi were at 400THz instead of 2.4GHz so that you could see it, it would be one thousandth as bright. There's just not enough power there to do anything meaningful to us.


> There's just not enough power there to do anything meaningful to us.

Unless specific frequency bands cause problems because something very specific is triggered.

Sure, wifi may only be hitting you with 1 milliwatt per square meter. But between 2.4GHz and 2.5GHz the sun only hits you with... if I did the math right, and just accounting for blackbody emissions, around 10 picowatts per square meter.

We're probably fine, but whether it's fine can't be proven with a simple physics calculation that ignores spectrum.


We can't destroy ignorance and violence but we don't just shrug and let the ignorant and violent run amok.


How predictable the ego's self-defensive reactions are. Merely encountering the suggestion that the ego is a necessary servant but a terrible master and it yelps "I'm not an egotist, you're the egotist!"


There's a complex of these passengers you can't discuss because it wakes them up and they reflexively defend themselves. They wrap themselves around your sense of truth and it's impossible to get them out.

Sleep tight. :)


We each have the free will to choose willful ignorance over humble learning.

You are correct, we can't "get them out"; only they can do that by exercising their free will to choose to become better human beings. We can, however, attempt to teach them with our positive ideals, attitudes, and behaviors, but we can only lead the horses' asses to water, not make them drink.

Note that we must remain humble and grateful in remembrance that we ALL used to be horses' asses, once upon a time, before we entered the Path of Love.


Which character is this referring to?


Helium is apparently great for soundproofing: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jxOzpPJbnTI (a great demonstration of sound suppressing properties of helium)

I am a light sleeper and would love to use it somehow in my bedroom, but keeping it contained is tricky.


How does this compare to Amazon's own offering in this space, the "AWS Storage Gateway"? It can also back various storage protocols with S3, using SSDs for cache, etc. (https://aws.amazon.com/storagegateway/features/)


Great question! We fill the same role as AWS Storage Gateway (and I used to work closely with that team when I was at AWS, lots of respect for what they do). AWS Storage Gateway is built primarily as an appliance to be installed on instances in your own data center to ease migration to the cloud. Many customers do deploy Storage Gateway on EC2 because they want these features in the cloud itself. However, the "appliance" design of Storage Gateway makes it unsuitable for this purpose. For example, Storage Gateway is not designed to run in a cluster for high-availability and doesn't have access to durable, long-term storage to stage and cache writes.

On the other hand, Regatta is designed as a cloud-native gateway product. Regatta's elastic, durable caching layer allows us to efficiently cache large data sets without thrashing, and always efficiently perform writes. Because Regatta is designed to be highly-available, customers don't have to worry about downtime for patching or deployments.


S3 File Gateway sounds a lot like your product.


Also true! If you look at their site, they're really targeting folks to deploy it into their data centers to provide on-premises caching of resources in AWS, rather than providing a high-speed cache within AWS for file-based applications.

https://aws.amazon.com/storagegateway/file/s3/


What do you do now when there is nothing you have to do? Are all hobbyists doing it to be "better" than someone else?

If I get to choose between the status quo, where I have to work for 30+ years to have a chance at an uncertain retirement, or spending the rest of my life exploring the question of what to do with my time, I know which I'd pick.


Society is imposing the 30+ year working requirement on us. It's not really required nor as it been for basically ever. We don't need advanced robots to stop that madness.


You're being pedantic. Your statement that "it's spitting bad data" is incorrect too, as it implies agency. Actually, nothing is happening but electrons flowing. The notion of an "it" that "spits" "data" which is "bad" is your own conceptual overlay.


Tbf, if you assume humans have agency, there’s plenty of people who would claim you’re making the same mistake because the reductionist view is that people are just either deterministic chemical soup (or maybe with a bit of randomness baked in).


From what I've learned, there are generalist pollinators (i.e. european honeybees) and specialist pollinators (i.e. your local native bees). Generalists can use any plant, but specialists require particular plants to complete their life cycles. So your intuition is basically correct; the honeybees won't care, but the native ones will appreciate a native plant.


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