There's a natural tension between freedom and protection here. Anyone on HN is aware of all the debate for and against section 230. We're also probably the crowd most vocally against ID verification laws for adult sites or just age verification for non-adult content, like YouTube or Discord.
I, personally, am in the "Parents gotta parent" camp, but know that doesn't cover all the problems, plus only addresses children when there's also real harm to adults too.
This turns into a big mess of a discussion involving data privacy laws too, and before you know it you have people talking about how the US needs a GDPR equivalent and someone else complaining about cookie banners, loosing the thread entirely as it turns into this big swirling mess of a problem with some people worried about kids, some worried about privacy, some worried about actual personal impacts/addiction, etc.
I feel like a lot of it quickly becomes disconnected from reality. Let's pick on the adult site age verification laws. I live in Nebraska, which means if I go to HornPub, it tell me "Govenment said no"
Now, I'm not going to pretend they're some beacons of moral authority, but I at least think for their own business interest they'll keep CSAM and revenge content off their platform. But what happens when a 16 year old that absolutely will find a place to watch adult content anyway goes looking? Would we rather them wind up on a platform that's moderately safe, or somewhere that serves the worst of the worst?
That, I think, is the problem: Any rules, laws that say "Let's restrict what websites can serve users" mean either a total country-wide mass surveillance system tied into every ISP filtering every domain and blackholing any request to all but approved DNS servers and aggressively blocking VPNs, or it's a law only hurting the companies at least trying to comply with the laws that do matter.
This article has undertones of asking for better parental controls, but kids will always bypass them unless they're aggressive enough that adults are uncomfortable with them too.
I have seen adults in my life fall victim to addiction to social media (Facebook, tiktok) , online shopping (Temu, Amazon), and I can't help but think the solution is pretty obvious:
Don't kill the product, regulate it's abuse. Facebook? Make algorithmic feeds / infinite scrolling illegal (At least as the default), not social media. Temu? Make gamling-esque UI illegal. Make new data protection laws. Hold executives that violate these laws criminally liable. Fine the companies more than the cost of doing business.
Roblox, Minecraft, and other games with user-created mini-games/servers/etc and random encounters with strangers online? Competitive games with kernel level anti-cheat? We all bitch about them, but the answer has always been obvious: Don't hang out with random strangers. The services should provide a friends-only mode, and that should be the default. Ta-da, problem solved, by social means, not technical means.
A colleague of mine had the idea that an easy solution for a lot of social media content issues would be any content given by an algorithm is exempt from safe harbor laws. You pick what users see? You’re responsible and liable.
> The services should provide a friends-only mode, and that should be the default.
This isn’t such a bad idea, although maybe it should depend on the type of game. As a kid the only place I played games with random people was Quake servers and Battle.net. This wasn’t really an issue, as there’s not much time to socialize when you’re blowing up your opponent. But Roblox seems to be primarily a social meta-game with many sub-games, so it’s riskier.
It’s a spectrum. On one end you have Second Life and VRChat, which should absolutely have a no kids policy. At the other end you have single player games which are obviously fine. In the middle there’s everything from online Mario Kart games to Counter Strike. Some are probably more ok than others. As it stands Roblox is uncomfortably close to the no-no zone.
That makes a lot of sense to me: You only get chat with people you know. You can still even have mixed people-you-know and stranger lobbies, but you have to explicitly make them "someone you know" to do it.
That would likely mean everyone just sends chat requests at the start of each game though, which is more annoying, like a cookie popup.
Other countries should loosen copyright terms. The only reason other countries previously benefited by adopting the US's draconian copyright terms was because of trade deals that have now been steam rolled by tariffs. If CA, AU, or the EU were to say "Nah, we're done - we're opening our own appstores, our own music distribution channels, making it easier for musicians to make more money and make derivative works" it would cripple the the US, deservedly, because they've been captured by the MPA and RIAA's and Disney's and other publisher's greed and control via the DMCA and repeated copyright extensions.
- making music, making musical tools (soldering together pedals, making VCV rack modules etc.
- Longboarding
- Gaming (Minecraft, MiniGolf Games, and RoR2, mostly - all socially)
- Writing, mostly for my website ( opguides.info ) but the ocassional fiction story too
- Fursuitting and attending furry events
- Projects? Just like, generally making things. I'm always happiest when I have a few things in the works. It's usually one-off. Like, recently I did acrylic pour art. I'll probably never do it again, but it was fun.
Powered by 2x AAA batteries != not high voltage. Boost converters can reach high voltages pretty easily. That's why you can get USB powered nixie clocks, for example.
But even beyond that, the maximum power output will still be pretty limited. If you short the HV rails, it will almost certainly start to drop in voltage and raise in current quickly, but only to the limits of the resistance from other elements in series and the power source's output ability. I strongly doubt you could even make something dangerous from the Flipper, at least unless you attach a large cap, let it charge slowly, and attach a taser module.
This project is neat and OP did a good job, but I think the interest in Geiger counters among hackers needs an update. The Geiger kit on Adafruit (Yes, I know that makes the cost a lot higher to be from them instead of Ali, but I think is a good baseline for "finished good" price) is $99.
Meanwhile, Raysid or Radiacode let you do full on gamma spectrometry, for about 2.5x the price.
And, like, yeah, 2.5x the price. I'm not oblivious to that being significant, but to me it's sorta like an GT1030 with DDR4 - it's about $100 or you could get an RTX 3060 for a bit over $300. Like, you might have a use where you ONLY need a cheap display card, but there's a reason LTT calls the 1030 eWaste from the factory. Similarly, you might get enough out of the Geiger or it might do something the Radiacode doesn't for you but for most hobbyist, I doubt it.
I gave a more detailed comment already, but price/performance is not a simple two axis thing. No consumer grade gamma spec device measures high dose rate which is needed for emergency use. Depending on the intended use case something lower cost than radiacode might make sense. For example the radiacode 110 ($400) has the same volume and type of scintillator, with very high sensitivity, as the better geiger S2L ($200), so both are good for handheld search for radioactive objects, but S2L has something like 30x higher maximum dose rate range which makes it more capable in emergencies, whereas the 110 has Bluetooth, mapping, and gamma spec... Which are very fun for hobbyist but have little true "practical" real world value. Different interests and different budgets would point people in different directions.
Yeah, even in the non-consumer grade space, you're still likely to want to include something like a calibrated GM tube in the lineup, for measuring dose after the scintillators are saturated.
Yes exactly, often a small energy compensated GM tube that is not very sensitive but can handle very high radiation levels is included in the same device as a pro detector with a fancy scintillator.
> Like, you might have a use where you ONLY need a cheap display card, but there's a reason LTT calls the 1030 eWaste from the factory. Similarly, you might get enough out of the Geiger or it might do something the Radiacode doesn't for you but for most hobbyist, I doubt it.
I think the biggest difference here is that GPUs are fairly general-purpose devices. Even if you only need one as a cheapest possible way to output something to your monitor, it's easy to imagine how that might change and why you might as well future-proof your setup.
The other thing you didn't mention about why a 1030 is manufactured e-waste is in large part the competition from the used market. You can get equivalent functionality for a few dozen dollars, so buying a brand new 1030 as an individual makes no sense. This isn't a problem in the specialty radiation device market.
The thing is that most people probably don't buy Geiger counter modules or devices because of a burning need to do some specific tasks, like you would with GPUs. I'll bet that most people buying the Adafruit kit are getting it as a novelty, or for educational purposes, or to just have something reporting the background radiation around them out of curiosity. Because of this, price is the most important factor for these groups.
I've never heard of Radiacode, and looking it up, it seems seriously impressive - especially the portable gamma spectrometry that you mentioned. But I also know that it's a very niche device, and most people who would shell out $250+ for this need it for chemistry projects, exploring irradiated areas, evaluating radioactive items and so on. It's not a lot of people, considering that if you just want something to give you a readout, you'll get the <$99 product, and if you need it occupationally, you'll already have received a professional device.
Maybe? I feel like the most in group of people who do have the discretionary income to toss $100 at a Geiger counter for fun also have enough to toss $250 at it and would rather given the extra utility. I might be wrong though. And it certainly depends as the $100 line drops. If it's $50 for a Geiger, that's a lot closer to "I don't care money"
I had someone tell me a while back $100 is an adult $20. As in, what you saw as a kid as $20 of fun but factoring in how long it took you to get the $20, it's about the same. I know that math will be massively variable, but I like the idea of equating kid brain money to adult money for "toys" like this. A $5 toy vs a $40 toy, as a kid, is a big deal. A $40 toy vs a $70 toy almost isn't, because they're both already "expensive".
I suspect for most on HN, their toy-money equivalence leans to the Radiacode or equivalent being the better buy.
I agree, I'm not the most representative of HN users, so I can't gauge how willing one of them might be to pay the higher price. Maybe someone making six figures in the US (the average user on here?) wouldn't mind it, but I imagine that if we look at all techy people and not just HN, things would be closer to the mean.
For me, a $100 purchase is something I can probably justify if I think I'll enjoy it a lot. $250 is still a 2.5x upcharge, and I consider these expenditures for a long time, making sure that I really actually need it.
And then, the $100 is just an example reference. It's sold by Adafruit, whose selling point is trading some value in exchange for reliability, convenience and compatibility. When you look at the market in general, I can find countless cheap pre-built Geiger counters at prices that are a lot closer to $50. I can't vouch for their accuracy, but there are so many unique options that I imagine that at least a few will be pretty decent.
For staying safe you want high max range and energy-compensated dose response. No ultra cheap devices offer that, mine is the closest thing on the low end of price, but consider me biased... If anyone finds something to contradict that feel free to share, because it would be new info to me. Then there is the second hand market, for example mrad 113 is a good device that can sometimes be had for a reasonable price, probably there are other pro grade dosimeters on ebay for a reasonable price but I don't know follow that market closely.
Just want to drop in and say I love this site (With the name of Vega, I might be biased, but still <3 ). The entire site's style is great and this page's content is awesome and I'll definitely be linking it to anyone I know doing web-dev stuff in the future.
I also love https://lyra.horse/arrupted/ I've made some pretty cool pieces with it in the past, so it was really cool to see a domain I recognize on the front page today!
I, personally, am in the "Parents gotta parent" camp, but know that doesn't cover all the problems, plus only addresses children when there's also real harm to adults too.
This turns into a big mess of a discussion involving data privacy laws too, and before you know it you have people talking about how the US needs a GDPR equivalent and someone else complaining about cookie banners, loosing the thread entirely as it turns into this big swirling mess of a problem with some people worried about kids, some worried about privacy, some worried about actual personal impacts/addiction, etc.
I feel like a lot of it quickly becomes disconnected from reality. Let's pick on the adult site age verification laws. I live in Nebraska, which means if I go to HornPub, it tell me "Govenment said no"
Now, I'm not going to pretend they're some beacons of moral authority, but I at least think for their own business interest they'll keep CSAM and revenge content off their platform. But what happens when a 16 year old that absolutely will find a place to watch adult content anyway goes looking? Would we rather them wind up on a platform that's moderately safe, or somewhere that serves the worst of the worst?
That, I think, is the problem: Any rules, laws that say "Let's restrict what websites can serve users" mean either a total country-wide mass surveillance system tied into every ISP filtering every domain and blackholing any request to all but approved DNS servers and aggressively blocking VPNs, or it's a law only hurting the companies at least trying to comply with the laws that do matter.
This article has undertones of asking for better parental controls, but kids will always bypass them unless they're aggressive enough that adults are uncomfortable with them too.
I have seen adults in my life fall victim to addiction to social media (Facebook, tiktok) , online shopping (Temu, Amazon), and I can't help but think the solution is pretty obvious:
Don't kill the product, regulate it's abuse. Facebook? Make algorithmic feeds / infinite scrolling illegal (At least as the default), not social media. Temu? Make gamling-esque UI illegal. Make new data protection laws. Hold executives that violate these laws criminally liable. Fine the companies more than the cost of doing business.
Roblox, Minecraft, and other games with user-created mini-games/servers/etc and random encounters with strangers online? Competitive games with kernel level anti-cheat? We all bitch about them, but the answer has always been obvious: Don't hang out with random strangers. The services should provide a friends-only mode, and that should be the default. Ta-da, problem solved, by social means, not technical means.
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