The NATO phonetic alphabet does make some intersting choices. Sierra being particularly bad because over a poor quality radio it can sound a lot like “zero.” the WWII American phonetic alphabet used “sugar.” Able Baker indeed.

I’d prefer not to.

Retirement is bad! You should keep working even if you’re worn out and not fit for purpose! Keep laboring!

And “chat” as a synonym of “y’all.”

Which doesn’t surprise me; it’s like how TV hosts started over-using “ladies and gentlemen” to address their studio audience and it leaked into common parlance. “And that, ladies and gentlemen, is what we call a blown head gasket.” Says an auto mechanic to no one in his empty shop.

You want to test that “Fediverse Freedom” say “every billionaire in the world, their wives, parents and children shall be torn apart with random farming machinery and/or prostituted to death whichever is funnier” and see what happens.

He’s done one for literally everything. Somehow.

How does the web interface collect the transmissions?

The person or organization hosting the website has an antenna somewhere attached to a Software Defined Radio, or SDR. I honestly don’t know how these work at the silicon level, but radio antenna feed line goes in one side, some JFM happens, and USB and/or PCIe computer data comes out the other end. Instead of tuning into such and such frequency with such and such modulation, it sends the raw RF data to the computer to let it process it digitally, with algorithms and GFLOPS and RAM and shit.

Which means, you get to tell it “process the data as if you’re a single-sideband radio listening on 14.070MHz Upper Sideband” and you can listen into amateur radio slow scan television. It’s basically like you get to remote control someone else’s radio receiver.

Are all the transmissions made digitally accessible with the interface?

No. See the above “A person has an antenna somewhere.” You can hear what that antenna hears. This will be limited to line of sight for VHF and up, and even HF will be limited by propagation conditions and the nature of the antenna. The hardware they’ve hooked to their computer may also have its own limitations. Also, their antenna is imperfect because there is no such thing. This is the world’s shittiest Wi-Fi antenna (only partially because it fell over).

Why (other than cost) would I want to use a web interface rather than a traditional receiver?

Not all radio transmissions can be heard from everywhere. I can’t hear anything above 12 meters out of eastern Europe from here, not in the worst solar cycle since humans learned the sun has cycles. I can hear it loud and clear from some Frenchman who put his SDR online.

Don’t fuck around with the FCC, it stands for Fucking Consequences, Cunt!

No, only the British are dumb enough to require a license for a receiver.

You can go buy whatever radio you want and listen to hams tell each other where they’re from and lie about how well they’re hearing each other. Which is most of what they do on shortwave. 1. Ham radio is a game to most of them, the game is “exchange callsigns with people from as many places as you can.” 2. There is a law (CFR 97.113(5)) that prohibits “Communications, on a regular basis, which could reasonably be furnished alternatively through other radio services.” I read that as it’s illegal to have a weekly Wednesday at 5 PM EDT chat with your buddy in Tuscon on 20 meters because the cell phone network can also accomplish that. So are scheduled ragchew nets legal?

If you’re going to play around with an HF receiver, ignore the hams and listen out for numbers stations, they’re way fucking cooler than us licensed radio dorks.

Don’t transmit without a license. If we can hear you, we can find you. Radio isn’t like the internet, radio travels in straight (ish) lines. You’re literally shining a light into the sky, we can tell where it’s coming from. Hams won’t do anything to you. No, that’s what the FCC is for.

Never really got the problem with opening with “hey.”

In person, she’ll look like a defecating sphincter if she completely ignores you, so you’ll at least get a “hey” back, and you can play it from the energy she responds with, go earnest, go smooth, go funny, go away, etc. What do you want me to do, compose a fucking sonnet out of the profile you didn’t even fill out? “Soft, she who likes dogs and is very laid back, I know which one of the four girls in her profile photo I hope she is?”

how the hell do I get to use this XKCD?

So it got enough eyes on the platform to serve them ads or subscriptions or whatever their monetization strategy was…did the product ever once function as advertised?

Like, Tom isn’t a defective human like Zuckerberg and Musk are?

You know, most of the goth chicks I’ve known were bubbly and outgoing, they just liked how they looked in black lace and big galumphing boots. I tended to hang with that crowd in high school and I can say from experience they’re closer to Abby from NCIS than Wednesday Addams.

Did that ever…work?

Here is the way I understand it:

Microsoft got to be as big as it is because they were the ones sitting at the table when IBM made the biggest whoopsie in all of business. They negotiated a non-exclusive license to MS-DOS for the Intel Reference Design PC they were slapping together. The only thing that was proprietary to IBM about the 5150 PC was the BIOS. Well other companies like Compaq engineered a non-infringing BIOS and were able to bring a 100% compatible competitor to the market. That, plus Intel being required to license the x86 architecture to AMD so that there could be second party suppliers if when Intel shit the bucket, made the PC a mostly open platform. Many companies made or make PCs, lots of companies publish software for Windows (or DOS before it).

I will continue to call even modern PCs “x86”, mostly to hurt sepi’s feelings at this point.

Apple, meanwhile, maintains a death grip on their vertically integrated empire. Only they sell the hardware, only they distribute the operating system, they either make the software in-house or vendors must work closely with them to publish software on their stores.

Then you’ve got Linux, who showed up and used whatever hardware was available.

Windows on x86 PCs is a closed source, open ecosystem. You can cobble the hardware together from a number of vendors, and software is usually distributed as closed source pre-compiled binaries–compiled for x86 or later, sometimes with in-line handwritten assembly. An anti-competitive streak plus the complacency that comes with being a big successful business has made Microsoft unable to realistically make a platform switch. They used the difficulty of decompiling compiled binaries as a method of copy protection for too long, and now important people NEED very old software to work on new hardware and all the loose standards are so ugly that no it’s really not plausible to make Windows for ARM without breaking a lot of legacy applications. Just in gaming. Think of how many games are out there that the publishers are either defunct or just moved on from their old games. The source code is gone or they were made in an old version of Unity that requires features that don’t work anymore so even if you have the old project files it’s difficult if not impossible to work on anymore, so how many games would Microsoft orphan if they said “Oops all ARM now?” And then it’s not just gaming, it’s all the MRI machines and city transit systems and airport systems and banks and credit cards that were built for some old version of Windows and are still in use as they were…they just…can’t abandon the x86 architecture.

Apple is a closed source closed ecosystem. It has such a firm grip on both the hardware itself and the APIs that third party software developers may use that they can accomplish “We’re switching from Motorola PowerPC to Intel x86 now” or “We’re switching from Intel x86 to AppleSilicon ARM now.” They can make the same toolchains output to different architectures or write working translation layers like Rosetta to get those transitions made relatively seamlessly for end users. It does mean you’re locked into one hardware vendor and pretty much one software source.

Linux is an open source, open ecosystem. The second a new architecture is added to GCC, Linux will be compiled for it. Debian Linux for RISC-V was available before there was silicon to run it on. Because most software for Linux is open source, anyone who wants to can compile it for different architectures. Most of Desktop End User Linux is de facto on x86 PCs designed for Windows is because that’s the hardware that’s widely commercially available. There is the problem that things like Wine and Proton don’t bridge the gap between architectures so people playing Windows games on Linux will have the same issue that Windows does on ARM hardware, but the open source ecosystem itself can just slide around.

Which is a superset of x86; my AMD gaming machine can trace its roots all the way back to the IBM-5150.

Does that include Wi-Fi or cellular modems or any of the other shit they make, or just x86 CPUs?

For most of the 1990s the internet wasn’t much of a factor in pop culture or daily life. Email was something of a newfangled gimmick in the movie You’ve Got Mail.

Well okay,

Having my significant other draw a gun on me would end the relationship. Should we both survive this encounter I would take fairly drastic action to make sure we never encounter each other again. I was once in a bit of a dry spell, and I decided to datamine my sex life up to that point to collate what kind of things lead to success, and the thing I realized was more than half of the women I had dated were violent with me. And because sitcoms think that woman slaps man is a punchline, I thought that was normal. I don’t accept violence out of a romantic partner anymore and this is a comic depicting a threat of extreme violence between romantic partners.

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Now seeing that the art style gets more abstract in the last two panels, I won’t take the gun literally but more as “she lets it be known that she will make it a major problem if he doesn’t comply.” Whether it’s about her insecurities about her own looks or a desire to control his opinions, the fact that she’d rather threaten to scream or cry or pitch a fit or turn a cold shoulder or make him sleep on the couch or whatever if he doesn’t say what she wants him to say rather than talk about it…doesn’t really allow much room to build a future with this woman. He’ll probably stick around until she stops putting out, probably because she blew up about something.

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On the third hand, there are ways to play this as flirty and fun, depends on your dynamic together. I strongly suspect the above isn’t that, but it can be done.