Until around 2000-2004 there have even been 2 Antennas. The whole surrounding forest is a military training ground, obviously used by German Bundeswehr and US forces. There are German and US barracks on opposite ends of the area. Within the vicinity there are an UXO clearance service, K9 school, CQB training village, shooting ranges, lots of bunkers and who knows what.
Street View nearby reveals this sign at the edge of the Street View area: "Forstarbeiter und Militär Frei," which means "Forestry Workers and Military [are free to enter]". The red circle around the sign implies that everyone else is forbidden to enter. So, it's some kind of military installation.
- I have a HP 16C, mainly for doing number conversions (DEC-HEX-BIN) and binary arithmetic.
- I have a HP 15C to take with me all the time (due to its small form factor).
- I have a HP 48 GX as main calculator, it is most feature complete and has a clock and alarms. I use it a lot for time calculations.
- I have a HP 48 SX, but did not use it much any more after acquiring the 48 GX.
- I have a HP 10bII+, which was a gift of my brother in law when he saw my obsession with HP calculators. I do not use it much, as I am not in financial stuff.
- I have a HP 41 CV, which is less capable as my 48 GX, but I somehow love it so much, that it resides on my desktop and is used a lot.
- I have a Casio Classpad fx-CP400, which I use when I tutor my nephew - it is the best fit for high school requirements (in Germany).
- I have a bunch of TI nspire and voyagers and a TI 83 plus, that I never use.
- I have a TI-92 plus which I used a lot in the past, but I do not like it anymore.
- I have a Casio FX-730P, which I like to write little programs for.
Do you have advice on how to use those calculators with modern tooling? For example I remember there were cross-compilers for the hp48 [0], do you use any of that (and how do you transfer data to/from the calculators)?
No, I do not get that deep. I used to exchange data on the Ti-92 plus and the Classpad. Connecting those devices is either rather outdated (serial port with USB converter) and/or comes with vendor subscriptions, which I am not willing to pay.
I carry a side rule. About two years ago, someone at work remarked that I probably don't have a slide rule. A quick trip to the car and back and he was very impressed.
My Bomar MX100 calculator and my HP 12C. Love them!
The 16C is amazing, I wish I had one as I'm doing a lot of embedded stuff. But I've always found RPN very annoying. Though I guess with binary/hex stuff I would use it mostly for conversion anyway.
The XX is acting in an increasingly restrictive manner, sanctioning journalists and citizens deemed pro-XX or anti-XX. Some of those targeted are reportedly unable to open bank accounts or travel. Some of them are called "stupid" or "pigs". This suggests a growing conviction within the XX that certain viewpoints are acceptable, while others are effectively prohibited and carry tangible consequences. How should this trend be described? Is it a form of totalitarianism, or something else?
Logic! If the described properties define totalitarianism, then they do so for any value that can truthfully be substituted for XX. I suggest checking this for all ~195 possible values.
No you did not. The XX substitution is a clever rhetorical move, but it misses what’s actually being debated. This isn’t about whether a logical predicate can be made to fit many countries; it’s about whether certain state practices are becoming acceptable.
What’s concerning here isn’t “wrong opinions being criticized,” it’s administrative punishment without criminal process: loss of banking access, travel bans, and professional exclusion imposed by executive designation, justified after the fact as “they must be criminals anyway.” That logic works for any XX, and that’s exactly the problem.
This doesn’t make the EU “totalitarian,” but it does point to an illiberal drift where due process is treated as optional if the target is politically unsympathetic. The precedent matters more than the headcount. Once viewpoint + security assessment is enough to trigger real penalties, the boundary between law enforcement and political enforcement starts to blur, regardless of which XX you plug in.
My original intent was to show up a paradoxon: A group of 5 European NGO activists has been put under a travel ban by the US yesterday. Two of them are german members of an organisation called "HateAid", which provides psychological and legal support for victims of hate speech. They are blamed for supporting Internet censorship (= terrorism in US perception) and are therefore denied entry to the US.
Or, in other words:
"We (US) censor them (EU) for supporting censorship."
BTW: I did some research about EU journalists or citizens losing bank access or being put under travel restrictions by administration. I couldn't find an example. Would be great if you could provide some background!
The essay does not deal very much with technical aspects, like "Do I want to remember this and that banality?". In the story, those questions are already solved as an AI will manage access to the desired "flashbacks".
The essay focusses more on the question, how "remodeling" our memory over time might be an important aspect of social interaction, self perception and self development.
I read this recently, and about halfway through I thought "wow, the HN crowd would eat up this anti-surveillance story!" But without spoiling the story, I was thinking just about the opposite of that by the time I got to the end. It really didn't go where I thought it was going to go, which is something I love about Chiang's stories.
Self-hosted GitLab for proprietary customer projects that I don’t want in the cloud. I don’t trust GitHub’s privacy promises — if only because of the risk of my own misconfiguration. The GitLab server runs on Ubuntu Server on a NUC and is accessed via Tailscale by our very small team. No need to make it visible to the outside world.
Around 1980, in the age of 14, I took part in an US-/German student exchange programme of my school. As a German at that time, I received a supposedly lifelong US-Visum in my passport.
Some years later, as a grown-up, I started to visit the US a couple of times, for business (visiting trade shows, conferences and customers), and as a tourist.
Around the 10th trip, the immigration officer unexpectedly crossed out my visum in the passport upon entry. I was stunned. He explained to me, very friendly, "that the policies had changed, the visum type was not existant anymore and thus cancelled, in the future I would just have to fill a paper in the airplane, welcome to the United States".
Next trip I received the questionnaire in the airplane, with one of the questions being "has there ever been an US visum cancelled for you?". That seemed a difficult question to answer. Would I say "no", that seemed like lying, because a visum had - as a matter of fact - been cancelled for me. Would I say "yes", I probably could just keep sitting in the plane seat for an immediate return. I decided to clear this up with the friendly immigration officer.
Who turned out not to be friendly, at all. Before I could even open my mouth, he noticed the unanswered question on the form, yelled at me like crazy, made me get back to the end of the line (I had spent already almost an hour in the line), told me to better not come back with unanswered questions on the form (I chose "no" on the second attempt) and then kept me interrogating for 20 minutes, all the time giving me the feeling that I would go right home. I was finally allowed to enter and spent another hour with customs.
Didn't feel the urge to ever come back to the US. That was long before ESTA. And long before I started to collect exotic stamps in my passport, some of them showing arabic typefaces. And long before Europe became an enemy of the US.
I have been to African countries (which the current POTUS would describe as shithole countries), whose administrations were less erratic and unpredictable than the US currently are.
"[...]And most, if not all, nuclear power disasters were due to human error.[...]"
And the remaining nuclear power disasters were due to unpredictable natural disasters.
So at what time exactly did we eliminate human error and unpredictable natural disasters, so that we don't have to worry about the dangers of nuclear power anymore? It seems, I somehow missed this two super important historic events...
You are right. As I have come to understand, there is a difference in astronomic longitudes and geographic longitudes as they are used for navigation.
The extra parameter is a good idea. As I am implementing in Rust, I will follow the strong type system and provide two different types that can cast themselves into the other.
Thanks for the hints. I ordered two promising books in German language:
"Astronomie" by Pearson and "Astronomie in Theorie und Praxis" (3 volumes) by Erik Wischnewski. Thats some 2000 pages of stuff to read, so let's see where this takes me.
