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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   5635 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for March 12, 2023

Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?

This is your opportunity to ask questions. No question too simple or too silly.

Culture war topics are accepted, and proposals for a better intro post are appreciated.

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So, what are you reading?

I'm picking up Gibson's Count Zero, the second in the Sprawl Trilogy. I haven't heard much about this one, but Neuromancer was great.

Stuff I've been reading this week

  • When Money Dies, by Adam Ferguson. A book on the economics and politics of Weimar Germany. It had been sitting in my "to read" pile for a while and seemed topical.

  • Titanicus, by Dan Abnett. A pulp sci-fi story about giant robot pilots in the WH40k universe that I've been re-reading with my 9 year-old because Giant Robots.

  • A fairly meaty academic paper on RF Encryption written by a colleague that I agreed to review before I realized just what I was volunteering for.

RF, radio frequency? I’d be interested in hearing more about the field. Kind of relevant to my industry.

I'm not sure how much I can actually talk about, but a younger guy I've been kind of mentoring is doing a whole project on the on the design considerations/trade-offs of trying to implement secure wireless comms in contested environments and he asked me to go through and critique his work.

There's an ocean of Federal money for exactly this.

Unfortunately, doing it under the constraints of Federal development is close to impossible.

I am well aware.

Understood. There’s at least one guy who left my company for a related startup this year. It’s a growing field.

For better or for worse I seem to have picked up a reputation within the company (wholly undeserved IMO) as the "telemetry and datalink guy".

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