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The FCC is about to ban 21% of its test labs today. I mapped them all

markready.io

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Re: The FCC is about to ban 21% of its test labs today. I mapped them all

#51

Post by JumpCrisscross »

alnwlsn wrote: post #49
FrustratedMonky wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've noticed a trend of calling every single article "This is AI or LLM, I can't stand it". And really, you can't tell. Nobody can tell. Humans write badly and blandly also. It's just a trope at this point. No, you're comment is an LLM.

No human* would waste the time to write a piece that is both highly polished while being so long that any useful information is spread so thinly it is essentially empty. This is how people "can tell" if it is written by AI. Not a dig at this author by the way or saying it applies to this post, just in general. *or if they did anyway, the result is the same: bad writing.

> a piece that is both long and highly polished while being devoid of useful information

Idk, I learned a little bit about our regulatory system, that a lot of these labs are in China and that those are now banned (and that the ones in India may be next).

The style is admittedly annoying. But I'm glad the author put in the work to highlight something they, and now I through them, found interesting.

Re: The FCC is about to ban 21% of its test labs today. I mapped them all

#52

Post by chambertime »

JumpCrisscross wrote: post #33
chambertime wrote: post #2

I've been building a certification intelligence tool for hardware teams (markready.io) and needed a good test lab directory. The FCC publishes accreditation data through a Socrata API but it's pretty bare - names, addresses, designation numbers, and expiration dates that are often years stale. No websites, no capabilities, nothing to tell you whether a lab is a two-person shop or an Intertek subsidiary. The first thi…

> Today's an interesting day to launch this because the FCC is voting to ban all 126 test labs in China and Hong Kong Does this increase or decrease demand for your tool? Less fragmentation would be expected to decrease demand from insiders. But more regulatory scrutiny would raise the stakes for outsiders getting it wrong.

I think this increases the relevancy for these tools and information. Gone will be the days of just sending your design to manufacturer in China and having it get fully certified and built through just one contact.

Re: The FCC is about to ban 21% of its test labs today. I mapped them all

#53

Post by 2ndorderthought »

chambertime wrote: post #45
Night_Thastus wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

LLMs often have a distinct writing style. It's not guaranteed, you can get false positives and false negatives, but if you start paying attention it becomes obvious in many cases.

My poor Reddit has been taken over by bots :(

Reddit is extra cooked soon.

Re: The FCC is about to ban 21% of its test labs today. I mapped them all

#54

Post by ramon156 »

FrustratedMonky wrote: post #34
Aurornis wrote: post #16

This article is excessively LLM written to the point that there’s barely any real information in between all of the unnecessary pie charts and repeated points. This move is being executed too broadly, in my opinion, but the “bad labs” problem especially in China is widely known in the industry. If you spend any time in the electronics industry at smaller companies you will encounter people who know Chinese labs that…

I've noticed a trend of calling every single article "This is AI or LLM, I can't stand it". And really, you can't tell. Nobody can tell. Humans write badly and blandly also. It's just a trope at this point. No, you're comment is an LLM.

Haha, good one Altman!

Re: The FCC is about to ban 21% of its test labs today. I mapped them all

#55

Post by ajsnigrutin »

iamnothere wrote: post #18
ajsnigrutin wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> What the FCC does is important, but there needs to be a sense of proportionality. I am a ham radio user but I am not particularly bothered if my $30 DVD player has a few spurious emissions, as long as they aren’t egregious. I also don’t mind imperfect but cheap radios like Baofengs if they help get people into the hobby. It’s good to have a box of these to hand out in emergency situations! Can’t do that with Yaesus…

You don’t actually need a license to use the ham bands in a true emergency. Where I’m at a Baofeng can hit the local repeaters just fine. I handed them out to my family when we had a major multiday communication outage (cellular and internet were down) and set them up to listen to the repeater. I told them if there’s a life threatening emergency they can transmit. It made everyone feel a little safer. While I persona…

(assuming you're american)

Legally you do, that exception only applies to amateur station, not unlicenced users.

Why not get a gmrs licence instead, and give them gmrs type-accepted radios that they can use and try out and get experienced with even when not in an emergency? It's like buying cheap cars to give to people to drive for the first time in an active emergency... dangerous both to them and to others.

Re: The FCC is about to ban 21% of its test labs today. I mapped them all

#56

Post by zahlman »

FrustratedMonky wrote: post #44
Night_Thastus wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

LLMs often have a distinct writing style. It's not guaranteed, you can get false positives and false negatives, but if you start paying attention it becomes obvious in many cases.

Yes, if you are using a generic LLM. But you can tell it to use different styles. To be formal or in-formal, to insert colloquialisms or to remove. People are depending on their own 'gut-sense' a lot, and not realizing they are really not correct. If you think all it takes is paying attention, then you are missing it. It's both more widely used than assumed, and also now obscuring what is non-AI.

> But you can tell it to use different styles. To be formal or in-formal, to insert colloquialisms or to remove.

And when you get it right, the result doesn't get called AI generated.

> People are depending on their own 'gut-sense' a lot, and not realizing they are really not correct.

TFA is very obvious about it.

A human who writes like this should be ashamed to do so, and should endeavour to understand why the writing comes across as "generic LLM"-like and fix it.

We have reached a point where people can end up training their writing on generic LLM output. This is a bad thing, because it's bad output.

Even beyond any clues from writing style, the general presentation is bad. It presents far too many facts and figures without giving anyone a good reason to care about most of them. And then it ends with a section on a separate topic (how to choose a lab, rather than how they're distributed across the world).

Most importantly, though, the submission is presented with a different title that implies a different purpose to the article that is not elaborated in the article. I would have expected personal insight a) on why people should care about the FCC's action (there is no mention of that action at all); b) on what the process was like of collecting this data. And I would have expected, you know, mapping of the lab locations rather than bar charts giving geographic breakdowns.

Re: The FCC is about to ban 21% of its test labs today. I mapped them all

#57

Post by ajsnigrutin »

mothballed wrote: post #19
ajsnigrutin wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> What the FCC does is important, but there needs to be a sense of proportionality. I am a ham radio user but I am not particularly bothered if my $30 DVD player has a few spurious emissions, as long as they aren’t egregious. I also don’t mind imperfect but cheap radios like Baofengs if they help get people into the hobby. It’s good to have a box of these to hand out in emergency situations! Can’t do that with Yaesus…

I'd wager Baofeng is the most common emergency radio. Baofeng or something equivalent is what people in the 3rd world have largely been able to actually afford and there in the rough that's actually what's being used. I recall Baofengish radios being the most commonly spotted ones in the Syrian Civil War.

But it's not an emergency radio, it's a cheap chinese radio that's... well. cheap. That's like buying a $60 android smartphone from aliexpress... and yes, many people in 3rd world countries buy those too.

The frontend is horrible, the filtering is horrible, they get easily overloaded, and they're still not emergency radios. People will die because they will rely on them instead of getting a proper radio for emergencies. Garmin inreach will actually get you help when stuck in the middle of nowhere (because no one will be in simplex range then), and a starlink setup is much better for anything at home, becuase you can actually reach someone who can help that way. Baofengs are just something that earns percentages to youtube "preppers" (many of them not licenced hams either... it's like taking car advice from someone who doesn't even have a drivers licence).

Re: The FCC is about to ban 21% of its test labs today. I mapped them all

#58

Post by chambertime »

JumpCrisscross wrote: post #47
chambertime wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

https://gist.github.com/karpathy/442a6bf555914893e9891c11519...

Could you share the tools you used to do this? I'd love to organise my esoteric research side quests like this.

Git + claude code in yolo mode. In the first prompt, I passed it Kaparthy's gist, and had it put together a high level plan of all of the sections that needed to be written to complete a vision I provided. Essentially put together a complete wiki on everything for getting global hardware certification.

I then had it loop once an hour. It would pick the next wiki to write, research it, gather raw sources, and then synthesize the wiki for me and push. I could nudge it in between hours if I wanted.

Re: The FCC is about to ban 21% of its test labs today. I mapped them all

#59

Post by gchamonlive »

daemonologist wrote: post #4
gchamonlive wrote: post #3

Why is OPs comment on his own work that hit first page flagged and dead? Is it repeating info from the article?

Probably because it appears to have been written by an LLM (the post too, but I assume comments are more easily killed by flags (?)). (To be clear I did not flag it myself.)

It's unflagged and undead now, so probably not because of that but a mistake? And the comment is coming for our brains too

Re: The FCC is about to ban 21% of its test labs today. I mapped them all

#60

Post by JumpCrisscross »

chambertime wrote: post #58
JumpCrisscross wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Could you share the tools you used to do this? I'd love to organise my esoteric research side quests like this.

Git + claude code in yolo mode. In the first prompt, I passed it Kaparthy's gist, and had it put together a high level plan of all of the sections that needed to be written to complete a vision I provided. Essentially put together a complete wiki on everything for getting global hardware certification. I then had it loop once an hour. It would pick the next wiki to write, research it, gather raw sources, and then syn…

Do you add this as a skill or permanent prompt, making it always maintain wikis in the background? Or do you direct it to make these only when you're in the project?
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