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A joke domain purchase turned in geopolitical warfare

sprocketfox.io

41–50 of 194 posts

Re: A joke domain purchase turned in geopolitical warfare

#41
post #39
post #34

[flagged]

What makes you think they are being absolutist when saying fuck Russia? You can disapprove of an unprovoked invasion from many, many ethical perspectives without going near absolutism.

I don't really see them saying fuck the US, even though they've bombed girls schools in Iran. Or saying fuck Israel because of their super well documented ongoing genocide.

"You can disapprove of ... from many, many ethical perspectives without going near absolutism."

Re: A joke domain purchase turned in geopolitical warfare

#42
post #33
post #21

It's fun to see habhub in an article. ~10 years ago a group of friends and I launched 2 weather balloons for fun with a GPS logger, APRS transmitter, and a few sensors, and then retrieved it afterwards. I have a bunch of memorable experiences from it, including: 1. Under inflating the first balloon because our helium provider was closed, and instead buying lower pressure "party" balloon containers (and not realizing…

I had this idea before of sending ballons to "the space" with a collectible object and then retrieve them, saying "I have this specific object that was in space too". Is it possible or am I dreaming too much?

People do that routinely-ish.

https://www.youtube.com/live/Let4NxZRnMA

Re: A joke domain purchase turned in geopolitical warfare

#44
post #41
post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What makes you think they are being absolutist when saying fuck Russia? You can disapprove of an unprovoked invasion from many, many ethical perspectives without going near absolutism.

I don't really see them saying fuck the US, even though they've bombed girls schools in Iran. Or saying fuck Israel because of their super well documented ongoing genocide. "You can disapprove of ... from many, many ethical perspectives without going near absolutism."

Did they find evidence of their service being used to bomb schools in Iran, like they found for Russia tracking launch sites in Ukraine?

If not, then why would they go on such a tangent? Do you expect them to list every one of their personal geopolitical stances, regardless of the relevance to the article?

Re: A joke domain purchase turned in geopolitical warfare

#46

Slightly unrelated but I have no idea how wind speed predictions are made up high in the altitudes, is it just interpolation of data that are get from various radiosonoids across various timestamps and finding a regular or seasonal pattern?

Not just wind speed, but all kinds of weather data can be extracted from radiosonde recordings. The data output is called a Skew-T Log-P graph. Some examples of how to interpret them at https://www.weather.gov/source/zhu/ZHU_Training_Page/convect...

There are of course several different global weather models that predict the behavior of the atmosphere, and it is a lot more complicated than just interpolating past data. But they all do rely on radiosonde data for daily calibration of actual atmospheric conditions.

Re: A joke domain purchase turned in geopolitical warfare

#47
post #21

It's fun to see habhub in an article. ~10 years ago a group of friends and I launched 2 weather balloons for fun with a GPS logger, APRS transmitter, and a few sensors, and then retrieved it afterwards. I have a bunch of memorable experiences from it, including: 1. Under inflating the first balloon because our helium provider was closed, and instead buying lower pressure "party" balloon containers (and not realizing…

We did a similar thing, only we intentionally made it more difficult on ourselves by launching at sunset because we were hoping to grab the view of city lights at night with the GoPros. Also, we did not have any licensed radio operators in our group, so no fun equipment like that. We instead depended on a consumer GPS tracker that updated once ever 5 minutes. We also had an Arduino with various sensors attached, but that was for me as the main purpose was the video footage.

Some of the memorable experiences from it:

1) Purchasing equipment to do a Hydrogen launch because this was during a Helium shortage and the cost difference was significant. Arrived at store to pick up our Hydrogen tank where the guy working took a look at us knuckleheads and had serious reservations about selling us inexperienced dorks Hydrogen. Took pity on us and swapped out all of our fittings (hydrogen fittings are specific to prevent accidental use of hydrogen) and sold us the tank of Helium for a much cheaper price than what we were originally told.

2) Printing up stickers to attach to the payload box with "If Found" contact instructions only to realize one second after letting go of the payload that you forgot to attach said stickers.

3) The terror of realizing that when the balloon took off that it immediately headed west when the flight predictions you had been running for the previous days before all showed the balloon landed east.

4) Having to contact ATC to report the launch of the balloon, only to be told they needed further updates at every 10,000' feet.

5) The terror setting in deeper when the consumer GPS unit stopped responding after 30,000' altitude and then having ATC scold how unprofessional we were for using cheap devices. At least they told us they were still tracking it.

6) The shenanigans a group of knuckleheads got up to waiting the ~3 hours for the balloon to land.

7) The relief when the consumer GPS unit started pinging updates again on the way down and the laugh (with us not at us) from ATC that we could start reporting back again.

8) Using mobile Google Maps to attempt to find the GPS location. Wandering around fields in the middle of the night to find a strange circular pattern of out of place plants to realize it was from a deer feeder's throw. Then searching for the nearby camera trap to wave to leave some hunter with serious WTF.

9) Nearly giving up on the search until deciding to use the hotspot to look up the GPS coordinates not on a mobile device to see that the balloon was less than 300' from where we parked making the hours spent wandering really dumb.

Re: A joke domain purchase turned in geopolitical warfare

#48
post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Were you able to find the balloon? Your last point has me wondering what happened. Did someone else get to it first?

Yup. We were able to find it both times. First time it "floated" and traveled further than we expected (at one point habhub predicted it to land in Africa). This is the one we called a gas station about, and we did end up getting it back. Second time was cleaner, and we drove up someone's driveway, and asked if we could retrieve it.

We had to move our launch site from where we originally wanted as 3 out of 3 predictions showed our landing site to be on an Air Force base. While I was willing to climb a barbed wire fence way out in the middle of nowhere, a fence around a base was not something I could see myself doing. I also didn't want to end up in a news story for causing military alerts. It was surprising just how far we had to go outside of the city to have it land in a spot that we'd be able to retrieve it.

Re: A joke domain purchase turned in geopolitical warfare

#49
I've only read the first few paragraphs but I've noticed a narrative issue. I might be the only person to have this peeve, but when introducing a story to non technical and even technical readers, it's always clearer to introduce which website is not theirs and which website is theirs. It's written in a 3rd person perspective that doesn't take ownership of the websites.

"Only Melbourne and Adelaide radiosondes (the transmitter on weather balloons) were being tracked on a website called Habhub - high altitude ballooning hub."

Ok, I can infer that habhub probably isn't the speaker's website.

"A query parameter could be added to the URL to remove the filter and on 12th of May 2018 sondehub.org registered with a single purpose - a URL redirect to Habhub with a radiosonde specific filter."

Ok, I can infer sondehub was set up by a jokey duo or group of weather balloon hobbyists.

But it's really annoying reading and doubting this because I'm not 100% sure that the speaker is actually the domain creator of sondehub.

You can say "we registered sondehub" or "I registered sondehub.org." Poor journalists use this passive voice sometimes. "Something happened. A source said..." Unless you're protecting a source, you can say who said what, and what caused something to happen.

So I stopped reading, and wrote this comment.

Re: A joke domain purchase turned in geopolitical warfare

#50
This was fascinating, thank you. I expected to read about legal threats against the folks collecting this data and am glad that those didn't materialize.

Also I only realized after finishing the article what a breath of fresh air it was to read something that came straight from another human's brain without LLM intermediation. Thank you to the author for that too.

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