Has anyone yet made an app that lets you wave your phone around a vinyl record and capture macro video and then play the music through the phone's speaker?

Years ago I read an article on Slashdot where someone did that with a flatbed scanner. (This was before everyone had a smartphone, and before digital cameras were common.)

Audio quality was poor.

The real issue is emergency powers. Trump defines an emergency as something congress doesn't agree with him on. There has not been any use of emergency powers in recent years that is remotely appropriate.

I used to root for Elon/Tesla to succeed until I realized that Elon has zero respect for democracy and zero respect for accountability. This is a rich guy on a power trip gone way out of control, and we can see in the nearly weekly outbursts and emotional escapades that any success his companies have had has been in spite of Elon rather than because of him.

There is also something that strikes me as off about the "richest guy in the world" (and former? illegal immigrant) attacking immigrants, refugees, and the most helpless people in the world.

His is not an engineer's mind at work. It's a rich kid who knows he's failed in meritocracy being protected by tariffs from competition having a slow internal and external meltdown.

Fair point but I would be more worried about the US government doing this kind of thing to act against US citizens than the Chinese government doing it.

I think we're in a brief period of relative freedom where deep engineering topics can be discussed with AI agents even though they have potential uses in weapons systems. Imagine asking chat gpt how to build a fertilizer bomb, but apply the same censorship to anything related to computer vision, lasers, drone coordination, etc.

who are we (the US)? People who wantonly murder people on fishing boats, etc.

I’m not saying our cartel is any better…

Your use of "our" makes me wonder if the people of Mexico see the drug cartels as "theirs".

Merely pointing out that the US administration is operating like a cartel now a days.

I doubt Mexicans see the Mexican cartels as “theirs” in the same way. Cartels have only been interested in paying off politicians and (as far as I’m aware) weren’t interested in being politicians. However, our politicians here… would LOVE to be Cartel members and make millions it seems. Because they definitely don’t give a shit about law and order.

Absolutely. I suppose my question was really more interested in the perceived legitimacy (or lack thereof).

There was research last year [0] finding significant security issues with the Chinese-made Unitree robots, apparently being pre-configured to make it easy to exfiltrate data via wi-fi or BLE. I know it's not the same situation, but at this stage, I wouldn't blame anyone for "absurd threat porn fantasy" - the threats are real, and present-day agentic AI is getting really good at autonomously exploiting vulnerabilities, whether it's an external attacker using it, or whether "the call is coming from inside the house".

[0] https://spectrum.ieee.org/unitree-robot-exploit

I could say that about Cisco and I would not be wrong.

isn't it a bit of a leap to assume it was intended as an exploitable vulnerability?

I replied to the comment who doubted me in a more polite manner.

I think the moat depends on how long it takes for an agent to ingest the entire commit history and product documentation into context on the fly. At the rate models are improving, seeing the reasoning chain of an outdated model that led to a commit that warrants post-hoc review (likely becuase of a bug) would mainly be useful for root cause analysis more than for insight into what to do next... but chances are the newer model would have been able to infer it from local context anyway.

It also creates a challenge with respect with the embedding model chosen and how future proof it turns out to be.

Looks interesting! Not sure why someone downvoted your comment below.

are fully aware of the importance of investment decisions.realize that the whole life cycle of investment decisions deserves to be managed uniformly, and we hope to go public as soon as possible.

I thought it was going to be about making the powdered iron at home. Fun article nonetheless.

You can, but the results will be messy and sub-optimal compared to industrially produced cores.

I've done it for an inductor for which there wasn't a ready made core. It left me with something that sort-of worked but the grade was much lower than even the poorest commercial grade. To improve on that I would have had to invest a lot of money.

Here is an overview of the steps in commercial ferrite core production:

https://www.powerelectronicstalks.com/2018/11/ferrite-core-m...

Edit: Oh, and the way I did it: take a thermally resistant resin with low shrinkage on curing and load it with as much iron powder as it will take before it starts clumping, pour into mold, let it set and then press it out of the mold.

That was an interesting read. However it doesn't look like small scale DIY at a high quality level would be particularly expensive in terms of tooling? Only in terms of time and personal experience.

Ball mills are trivial to DIY - electric motor, belt drive, couple pieces of copper tubing, drill some holes in a wooden frame, use large metal coffee cans, throw some ball bearings in.

Calcination is also easy. 1000 C is not a difficult temperature to deal with. You can hit that using plain old nichrome wire. You will need to purchase a few ceramic bricks of course.

The only slightly tricky step I'm seeing is sintering. The nickle-zinc option mentioned in the article will be substantially easier (lower temperature, oxygen atmosphere) but the required temperature still pushes up against the limits of nichrome wire. Given that propane can get you to the vicinity of 1900 C and tanks of that are sold at the grocery store (at least where I live) I'm going to say this step is also cheap and easy to DIY.

The real issue is that you can't do this at home if you live in high density housing. You will need a shop or a small back yard.

I've done worse than that in my garage but I also know that if I burn it down (and the neighbors garage with it) that the insurance company will not look at me kindly.

Regardless it is not a process that you're going to make work on your kitchen sink :)

I wonder if you can do that in a microwave...

Hehe, well played.

> However it doesn't look like small scale DIY at a high quality level would be particularly expensive in terms of tooling?

Ahh, the lure of a DIY project that makes you go “How hard could it be?”

It’s an all too familiar feeling for me.