Blood in the stool, at age 41. Benign but a VERY large polyp so I have a followup soon. If you have an instinct to get tested, especially if you have any evidence, do it. My doc fought me to NOT get tested but I persisted. The embarrassment factor is a thing, but we have to get over it!
Somehow I was recommended the /r/longlines subreddit, so I subscribed. I now get pretty much a daily picture of a Long Lines abandoned tower somewhere in the country with upvotes and discussion. It is fascinating the hobbies people have.
This was a great article and put some context around it. It's interesting that many of these stations are basically apocalypse bunkers to keep equipment shielded for military use. There are many sites with the equipment still just sitting there untouched, slowly aging away.
How to keep something working and resilient 24/7/365 is extremely fascinating to me, and a lot of the old Long Lines stuff was built with the idea of attempting to survive a possible nuclear war. Even the reason why locations were chosen were part of that.
The Idea Factory is a worthwhile read. One of the concepts that AT&T operated on during monopoly times seemed to be focused on providing a “gold-plated” premium service.
My understanding was that MCI rolled in and set up dollar-store version of Long Lines, with sound quality to match. They used that as the basis to challenge AT&Ts monopoly to steamroll shitty service everywhere.
The cream-skimming that happened with profit-first MCI resulted in the loss of a resilience mindset and long-term planning for a national network.
I've gotten sucked into 1950s/60s/70s Pan Am (the defacto U.S. flag carrier of the era) advertising videos and the concept is similar to AT&T: premium service, basically a monopoly.
Problem is: prices were REALLY high.
Competition worked out in Part 121 airlines and telco, in the long run.
Fun fact for the young: Sprint (long before being bought by T-Mobile) was primarily a long-distance company, and they advertised that the sound quality was "so good you could hear a pin drop". Many ads featured this bouncing pin (e.g., https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z-cbzf9amfo from 1986).
The logo they used until just before the buyout was a stylized image of a pin falling down.
You don’t have to contribute something significant. I don’t think it’s about how much one contributes, or now important it is. If you have an opinion - give it. If you have a question - ask it. If you have a criticism - tell it (respectfully). I often get the most out of HN when I’m asking questions. The best part about this place is that people answer them. Or gives you the background context that wasn’t in an article.
I've been doing it since 1998 in my bedroom with a dual T1 (and on to real DCs later). While I've had some outages for sure it makes me feel better I am not that divergent in uptime in the long run vs big clouds.
Not OP, but I use Codex for back-end, scripting, and SQL. Claude Code for most front-end. I have found that when one faces a challenge, the other often can punch through and solve the problem. I even have them work together (moving thoughts and markdown plans back and fourth) and that works wonders.
My progression: Cursor in '24, Roo code mid '25, Claude Code in Q2 '25, Codex CLI in Q3 `25.
Northern California services use P25 but with encryption turned off. They also have analogue repeaters. Presumably because that way they can still use old radios and don't have to worry about key rotation.
The audio quality on the analogue signal is a lot better than the P25 version, which is often harder to understand.
The P25 audio is digital, so it degrades worse than analog audio when signal quality is bad. You more quickly get to a point where it's not understandable at all, particularly if it's the signal coming from a handheld radio that's some distance away from the receiver.
The analog repeater is likely getting a high quality feed from the digital system, and then that's being broadcast at decent power from a tall antenna. It's starting with the best audio the system has to offer, has advantages in how it's broadcast, and degrades more gracefully.
I capture a lot of the P25 traffic in my area and there are times I can understand the dispatcher side of a conversation fine but the other end is too far away / too weak a signal and is unintelligible. The dispatcher's signal is coming from a fixed tower transmitting at higher power than a portable radio can manage.
Not like there’s not enough problems with P25… until the day they can deploy LLE (link-layer encryption) across all P25 systems, there will always be a way to gather some kind of intelligence about the system and its radio traffic.
(And the fact that it’s taking so long to implement link layer authorization, barely a scratch in the security dent…)
Thank you! This just saved me after closing laptop and losing a chat in VS Code. Cool feature and always a place where Clause Code UX was behind chat - being able to see history. "/continue" saved me ~15 minutes of re-establishing the planning for a new feature.
Also loving the shift + tab (twice) to enter plan mode. Just adding here in case it helps anyone else.
Claude code should really document this stuff in some kind of tutorial. There’s too much about code that I need to learn from random messages on the internet.
